This editorial has been updated to reflect that one of the two legal actions filed over the Budgetel matter has been dismissed after the disabled veteran was allowed to obtain his belongings. The federal lawsuit was voluntarily dismissed by the plaintiff after the editorial was written.
Somewhere around 700 people were made homeless in the week before Thanksgiving when East Ridge police, armed with a Hamilton County court order, closed the Budgetel on Mack Smith Road based on criminal and nuisance complaints.
The court order, sought by Hamilton County District Attorney Coty Wamp and granted by Criminal Court Judge Boyd Patterson, detailed some of the more than 1,400 calls to East Ridge police in three year's time. Wamp justified her action, saying there were dozens of children living there and four known sex offenders.
Pardon us, but isn't putting all 700 residents out on the streets with under a day's notice -- children included -- a bit like throwing the baby out with the bath water?
We're protecting what Hamilton County Schools estimated was some 75 children (the Chattanooga Regional Homeless Coalition put the number at 170) by ordering their families out of the hotel instead of just requiring four known sex-offenders to find new homes?
And we're assuming everyone who lived there, including seven people on hospice care and at least one disabled Vietnam veteran, was a criminal? Why not instead just evict only those people who were charged with something during one of those 1,400 calls to police in three years? Already two legal actions have been filed: one in state courts and the other in federal court, raising the questions of due process and constitutional rights. The case in federal court has since been voluntarily dismissed.
Meanwhile, the usual help groups, like the Chattanooga Regional Homeless Coalition and Community Kitchen, are doing what they can. Spoiler alert: Not from a lack of trying, but what they can do is just not that much.
On Monday, Homeless Coalition Director Mike Smith told the Times Free Press the agency had placed 62 children and 92 adults in other hotel rooms as temporary housing. Let us do the math for you: 62 children and 92 adults is 154 -- 22% of the 700 people suddenly made homeless by a poorly thought-out and horribly executed complaint and closure.
The money for those rooms came from a $50,000 emergency grant from the Tennessee Housing Development Agency, which the coalition will have to reimburse, and more than $37,000 from individual donations to a coalition fundraiser since the Wednesday before, the morning of the evictions. And EPB, which is spearheading help for Chattanooga, also raised another $6,000.
Aside from the cash, however, housing and rooms for these homeless people is hard to come by. Smith said the coalition already was trying to find housing for 1,000 even before the Budgetel was abruptly closed.
This editor's repeated calls to the coalition were answered by a recording: "... [I]f you are experiencing homelessness and would like to the check the availability of our referral specialist or enrollment, press 9."
When 9 answers, the message is this: Hello. You have reached the Chattanooga Regional Homeless Coalition. Due to ongoing staff shortages, we are not taking any new calls at this time as we continue to assist current households in need. ... Please go the Community Kitchen ..."
We called the Community Kitchen, too. More than once. Again we were sent to recordings.
But CEO Baron King told a TFP reporter during a phone interview Monday that the organization's case management team had been "inundated with calls" from displaced residents looking for housing.
"The lack of time and warning on this, I think, caught everybody by surprise and made it really hard on the families and really hard on the system," King told the reporter.
What an understatement. In a time and place when homelessness in 2021 increased 177% and probably by at least that much over the past year, this needed better consideration.
But understatement is the most anyone we've talked to has been willing to say on the record.
No one, it seems, wants to voice out loud any gripe with the county's newest Criminal Court judge or the county's new district attorney.
And no one wants to complain about the city officials of East Ridge who've been chronicling police calls clearly for three years on a hotel property that lies on one of the fastest-growing land parcels at the busiest and recently widened intersection of Interstate 75 and Interstate 24. A land parcel adjacent to a new soccer stadium with new houses, condos, businesses and trendy things also in the works.
No one, it seems, wants question why 700 people -- certainly not all of them criminals -- were ordered out into the cold from the rooms of a hotel that was just renovated, rebuilt and reopened in 2017 by new owners after previously being condemned for rot and an unsafe structure.
No one wants to talk about the escalating property value of the hotel, built first in 1973, and the land it sits on in the 2014 Border Region Retail Tourism Development District -- designed to entice businesses to locate in East Ridge.
In 1999, the first year we can find tax bills online, the hotel and its land were assessed at $740,000 and taxed at just over $34,920.
By 2016, the year it sold to its current owner for $1.4 million, it was assessed at just over $1.2 million and taxed at just over $50,334.
According to its 2022 tax bill, the hotel was assessed at $1.83 million and taxed at $64,644.
No one wants to talk about it. But someone needs to -- especially now that 700 new homeless folks are looking for more than just few days' reprieve of a temporary roof over their heads.