The vast majority of people using local homeless services have lived in the Hamilton County area for at least one year, according to data from the Chattanooga Regional Homeless Coalition.
Over the past three months, the coalition and its partners have asked 1,226 people if they have lived in the greater Chattanooga area for one year or more. Of those, 1,069 said yes.
“I’m sure this question has been asked for a long time, but it almost feels like this is kind of a new obsession for folks — this whole myth that we’re serving people who are not Chattanoogans,” Mackenzie Kelly, the interim executive director of the homeless coalition, said in a phone call.
Of the 13% of respondents who said they have lived in the Chattanooga area for less than a year, 38 reported living elsewhere in Tennessee before moving to Chattanooga, most commonly Nashville or Knoxville, according to the homeless coalition. Another 33 said they lived in Georgia before traveling to Chattanooga, with most of them originating in Atlanta. Sixteen people hailed from Florida, and the remaining 71 respondents came from a variety of other states, with no other state having more than eight people moving to Chattanooga.