In February, a broad-based coalition of housing advocates in Tennessee comprising on-the-ground tenant organizers, non-profit organizations, faith-based communities, and other housing advocates launched the “Housing for All Tennessee” coalition. The coalition is focused on upholding and furthering affordable housing initiatives, securing and advancing tenants’ rights, and ending homelessness in the state, with a centralized commitment to promoting the values of dignified housing, power building, integrity, equity, and interconnectedness. Leading the coalition are the Greater Memphis Housing Justice Project, the Memphis Tenants Union, Open Table Nashville, Statewide Organizing for Community eMpowerment (SOCM), and Tennessee Renters United, with the opportunity for outside organizations to join as “solidarity organizations” supporting the coalition’s mission. Learn more about the new coalition here!
“For too long, we’ve allowed corporate interests and their lobbyists to have the upper hand on housing legislation that increases their profits while taking away the rights of tenants and people who are unhoused,” says Austin Sauerbri, Executive Director of Statewide Organizing for Community eMpowerment (SOCM) and founding member of Housing for All TN. “We’ve seen what policy tools are working in other communities and we’re building power across the state in order to bring about tangible change for all Tennesseans.”
Renters in the state of Tennessee continue to contend with ongoing threats to their housing stability in 2025 including a lack of sufficient affordable housing for renters with extremely low incomes, underscoring the need for state and local actions to protect tenants against the threat of eviction and homelessness. In Tennessee, where renters comprise 33% of the housing market, the hourly wage needed to afford a modest housing unit is not consistent with workers’ wages across the state, leaving tenants with a significant lack of affordable housing options. According to NLIHC’s The Gap report for 2024, Tennessee has a shortage of 121,810 rental homes that are both affordable and available for extremely low-income renters. To contend with this shortage, renters have become cost-burdened– meaning they are paying more than 30% of their monthly income toward rental costs. In fact, 23% of middle-income renters are cost-burdened by their rents, while 85% of extremely low-income renters are cost-burdened by housing costs.
Rental costs that have outpaced workers’ wages have also impacted tenants’ access to affordable housing options. According to NLIHC’s Out of Reach report released in 2024, a renter receiving the state’s $7.25 minimum wage rate would need to work 115 hours a week to afford a modest 1-bedroom rental home at the state’s Fair Market Rental (FMR) rate, which totaled $1,080 in 2023. For renter households needing a 2-bedroom unit, the gap is far more pronounced, as renters would need to work 134 hours per week at a minimum wage rate to afford an FMR rate of $1,264.
Such circumstances can have profound consequences for a renter’s housing stability, leaving tenants at a greater risk of eviction, or in the worst cases, homelessness. In major Tennessee cities such as Nashville, the Eviction Lab at Princeton University reports that eviction filing rates have only increased since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, with eviction rates 4% higher than their historic average. As of January 2025, eviction filing rates in Nashville are 28% higher than their historic average, with 1,325 evictions filed in January alone. Evictions can have immediate, and in most cases, lasting consequences for renters. Not only can an eviction result in the immediate displacement of a tenant from their home, but the presence of an eviction filing on a tenant’s public record can create barriers to accessing safe, stable, and affordable housing opportunities well into the future. Indeed, the presence of an eviction on a prospective tenant’s credit report that appears when applying for housing can result in the denial of a tenant, even if the report includes inaccurate information about the tenant or does not accurately reflect the outcome of a tenant’s eviction case.
Evictions can also have lasting physical and mental health consequences. A report published by the National Institutes of Health in 2021 described that losing housing can result in depression, anxiety, worsening of chronic conditions, increased medication use, food insecurity, and lower birthweight of newborn babies. Evictions can even have detrimental effects for children, with eviction being tied to an increased risk of physical abuse and hospitalization.
With the formation of Tennessee’s housing coalition, member organizations will develop strategic policy goals and participate in local campaigns to ensure that tenants have the necessary safeguards to protect against eviction. Members of the Housing for All Tennessee Coalition are also members of NLIHC’s Southeastern Tenant Protections Cohort. The cohort was launched in December 2024 and is comprised of grantee teams from Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, and Tennessee working to ensure that state and local housing-focused organizations in the southeast have the necessary resources to advance, implement, and enforce tenant protections within their communities. The Tennessee cohort is comprised of members from the Memphis Tenants Union, Open Table Nashville, and SOCM and will work with NLIHC’s State and Local Innovation Project campaign through December 2025.
More information about Tennessee’s new housing coalition can be found here.
More information about NLIHC’s State and Local Innovation grantees in the southeast can be found here.