TENNESSEE FUNDING EQUITY ENGINE

PROBLEM STATEMENTS:

(a) The State of Tennessee has created a grave injustice in some communities to further perpetuate poverty, gentrification, economic disparities, housing disparities, environmental injustice, school inequities, gross mass incarceration, taxation without representation, and other atrocities placed on the necks of poor individuals in urban and rural communities.

(b) The State of Tennessee has given to the ultra-wealthy and starved the poor of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

(c) Numerous individuals have been displaced out of their traditional underserved neighborhoods to cater to the creative class, "live, work, and play."

(d) Justice must be served for the inequities of state and federal funding allocation.

(e) Funding disparities in Tennessee persist across K-12 public education, higher education, and resource allocation for low-income or marginalized student groups. [1, 2]

K-12 Public Education and TISA

• The Funding Formula & Poverty Undercount: Reports from EdTrust-Tennessee show that Tennessee undercounts and underfunds low-income students by relying on narrow public assistance data (like SNAP and Medicaid) rather than a full spectrum of economic indicators.

• Per-Pupil Disparities: While the state's Tennessee Investment in Student Achievement (TISA) formula directs some additional revenue to high-poverty districts, districts serving high populations of English learners or students of color often receive less state revenue per student compared to peers.

• Private vs. Public Allocations: Critics argue that the expansion of private school vouchers and Education Freedom Scholarships capped at $7,295, fully state-funded, widens resource gaps while traditional public schools face staffing shortages and infrastructure needs.

Higher Education and TSU Underfunding

• Land-Grant Disparity: An investigation into historical funding found a $2.1 billion financial gap between what the state allocated to historically Black Tennessee State University (TSU) versus the predominantly white University of Tennessee (UT) system from 1957 to 2007.

• Lack of Matching Funds: State budget records highlighted that TSU did not receive equitable 1:1 land-grant matching funds for decades, impacting campus infrastructure and academic resources.

(f) Disparities in housing across Tennessee are driven by a severe shortage of affordable supply, widening racial homeownership gaps, and high-cost burdens for low-income renters and vulnerable populations.

Racial and Homeownership Disparities

• Racial Gaps: White homeownership in Tennessee stands at 73.8%, whereas Black homeownership is significantly lower at 42.6%, and Hispanic homeownership is at 45.4%.

• Urban Disparities: In metro areas like Nashville, minority homeownership is 44.8% compared to 72.7% for white households, reflecting a gap wider than the national average.

• Discrimination: Urban centers like Memphis face persistent challenges with housing segregation and discrimination within rental assistance programs based on race, disability, and source of income.

Affordability and Cost Burdens

• Renter Struggles: Over 50% of renter households in Tennessee are cost-burdened, spending more than 30% of their income on housing, compared to roughly 19% of homeowners.

• Extremely Low Income (ELI): There is a pronounced shortage of affordable rental homes for ELI households, forcing many to spend over half their income on rent and sacrifice necessities like healthcare and food.

• Vulnerable Populations: Adults with disabilities, older adults on fixed incomes, and ALICE (Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed) households struggle deeply to bridge the gap between stagnant wages and soaring housing costs. According to a report by The Sycamore Institute, population influxes and surging demand since 2020 have driven up prices and pushed housing pressures into rural areas as well. Furthermore, data analyzed by the United Way of West Tennessee shows that 44% of households in the state struggle to afford basic daily needs.

(g) Studies have comparatively examined the differential house value outcomes in four Tennessee cities between African American homeowners and White American homeowners because of racial policies in the State of Tennessee and the United States. The racial composition of geographical space within the housing market impacts this significant form of wealth for most Americans.

(h) Tennessee’s housing crisis is severe, but it affects Black residents harder.

(i) The housing crisis, critical as it is, is not distributed equally among Tennessee’s population.

Impact of unaffordable housing on Black communities in the South: Southern cities in the US show a clear disparity in the impact that the housing crisis has had on communities from different demographics.

(j) There are large gaps in upward mobility across the income distribution. These disparities exist in virtually all regions and neighborhoods, with Black boys experiencing lower rates of upward mobility than white boys in 99 percent of census tracts in the United States.”

Southern cities suffer from severe racial and economic disparities in upward mobility, as Tennessee is right there amongst the pack. Many black underserved neighborhoods have been left to deteriorate for decades. This makes housing in these cities very unaffordable for residents who belong to minority communities.

(k) Take Tennessee, for example. Recent data from the National Low-Income Housing Coalition indicates that out of the 26% of tenants who come from extremely low-income households in the state, 24% are disabled, 21% are senior citizens, and 37% are in the labor force a ringing reminder of the intersectional nature of socioeconomic oppression.

(l) Tennessee features a stark economic contrast between ultra-wealthy individuals and the everyday small enterprises that form the foundation of its local economy.

Small Business Realities

• High Failure Rates: A study from Lending Tree highlights that Tennessee has the second-highest first-year business failure rate in the U.S., with 29.3% of small businesses closing within their first year.

• Long-Term Survival: More than 53% of small businesses in Tennessee close by their fifth year.

• Economic Footprint: Small businesses represent 99.5% of all businesses in Tennessee and employ roughly 41.5% (about 1.2 million) of the state's private-sector workforce.

• Pressures: Owners face severe constraints regarding access to capital, high inflation, operating costs, and hyper-competition driven by rapid state growth.

Billionaire Wealth and Corporate Alignment

• Concentration of Wealth: Tennessee is home to roughly a dozen billionaires, including prominent figures tied to healthcare (Thomas F. Frist Jr.), logistics (families tied to FedEx), and retail/trucking (the Haslam family) whose collective net worth surged by tens of billions of dollars.

• Tax and Policy Disparities: Critics and localized reports point out that while the state prides itself on a business-friendly, low-regulation environment with no personal income tax, the structure heavily benefits large multinational corporations and ultra-wealthy residents. State incentives have historically directed large subsidy packages toward massive corporate relocations or expansions rather than localized small business capital funds.

• Regressive Tax Burden: According to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP), Tennessee maintains one of the most regressive state and local tax systems in the nation, meaning lower-income and small business households shoulder a heavier comparative tax burden proportionally than ultra-wealthy residents.

Housing Justice and Disparities - "Housing is a Human Right"

All across the State of Tennessee, citizens are being gentrified or evicted out of their homes and apartments because of the loyalty to rich developers and slumlords that have not been governed by a Rental Commission. As the next Governor, I would have my fingers on the pulse of the communities across the State of Tennessee to ensure no Tennesseans are left behind due to their social or economic status. Providentially, I have a working rapport with homeless individuals across the State of Tennessee.

In 1991, Memphis Black homeownership beats the United States average. In 2022, Black individuals in Memphis are 63% rental. This housing atrocity is playing out across the State of Tennessee, where the original tenants in neighborhoods are being forced out of their familiar environment to high-cost rental housing, causing these struggling citizens to uproot from their families, communities, churches, and social networks.

The North Nashville community has experienced the same housing injustice where families have been displaced and small businesses forced out of existence.

This is systemic gentrification and intentional genocide of black, brown, and poor white communities who economically and legally cannot fight back due to living in poverty. Citizens are being displaced in Nashville, Chattanooga, Murfreesboro and Knoxville due to greedy rich investors and their ties to our governmental leaders.

This housing methodology is placing the “creative class” residents in these newly upscale development areas where they are allowed to live, work, and play in their staged environment. Consequently, the black, brown, and poor whites struggle to live, survive, and succumb to the detriments of discriminatory policies and practices to force these citizens further into poverty.

Ironically, middle-class families are slowly losing financial grounds and some have also succumbed to the devastation of homelessness. There are families across the State of Tennessee living in hotels and their cars, which the pandemic has added a level of coping in a poverty state. Sadly, there are a limited number of homeless shelters, and now this present administration has passed a law to criminalize the homeless from sleeping in public spaces, now deemed criminal.

As the next potential Governor, I have a proven record of serving the homeless for decades. Everyone deserves a place to call home. I am an advocate of homelessness-to-homeownership programs.

Tennesseans are challenged to find safe and habitable housing in their community because of creditworthiness, poverty status, and their criminal record. Underserved and marginalized individuals are either ineligible for or denied housing because of their own or a loved one’s criminal history.

As the potential next Governor of the State of Tennessee, I am interested in advocating and working with the legislative body to support a Housing as a Human Right Bill to ensure affordable housing for every citizen.

A Tennessee Rental Commission is greatly needed in the State of Tennessee to ensure fairness and equality for all Tennesseans. Apartments and houses are being sold from under families without a moment's notice. Sending people struggling to find somewhere to live, with the City of Memphis in need of 30,000 affordable homes, and this housing scheme is metastasizing all over the State of Tennessee. I pledge to build 150,00 affordable homes across the State of Tennessee.

In March of 2022, senior citizens were given short notice to move out of several high-rise apartments where they had lived for twenty years, only to find out that the Memphis Housing Authority had sold their familiar dwelling to an out-of-town investor. These seniors were uprooted from their friends and safety-net environment.

These housing atrocities are multi-layered and multi-dimensional. HUD (Housing and Urban Development) was originally implemented to assist low-income and severely low-income to ascertain affordable housing. With the shift in allocating the funds to rich developers and investors, these funds allocated for low-income families are now being routed through to developers to create luxury apartments, which will cause a lack of wealth transfers to black, brown, and poor white children for generations to come. This governmental funding shift will further exacerbate poverty and lack of generational wealth.

In Illinois, landlords can refuse to rent to prospective tenants solely based on a record of arrest, even if the tenant has never been convicted of a crime.

Criminal background checks often contain inaccurate or outdated information. For home seekers, inaccurate background checks can be devastating and can even result in homelessness. This impact extends to families of individuals with records, who also suffer the consequences of housing discrimination.

As a next potential Governor of the State of Tennessee, I am motivated to work with the legislative body to encourage an innovative way of promoting homeownership opportunity or apartment rental by implementing the Restoring Rights and Opportunities Coalition of Tennessee, which can lead to the passage of the largest expansion of sealing records in the State of Tennessee for qualified individuals who deserve the American dream of homeownership. Nevertheless, people will still be challenged to access housing even after going through the lengthy process of successfully petitioning the court to seal their record because of the baked-in systemic racism of our governmental practices and policies. Under the current Tennessee law, individuals have no recourse against bad information, including sealed records, appearing on a background check.

By implementing and working with the Tennessee legislative body, the proposed Tennessee Housing Human Rights Act will set standards that landlords cannot just use whatever they get on a background check as a reason for denial; they need to take a closer look for accuracy.

Housing as a Human Right creates a civil rights violation under this proposed Tennessee Housing Human Rights Act to refuse to sell, rent, or otherwise make housing unavailable to any buyer or renter based on:

1.   An arrest not leading to the finding of guilt.

2.   A juvenile record; or

3.   A criminal history record ordered expunged, sealed, or impounded.

The Tennessee Housing Human Rights Act would not be able to use these types of records in a housing decision.

People are more than their records. Everyone deserves the opportunity to be considered as an individual. People with records and their families, like everyone else, deserve a home to build a future.

Atwater's Goal and Strategies:

(a) As the next potential Governor of the State of Tennessee, I will change the economic narrative to address the sustainability of all Tennesseans, thus taxing the ultra-wealthy at a higher tax burden.

(b) On day one, I will address the regressive tax burden on lower-income and small business households.

(c) All data centers will be assessed a tax system to address high utilities and abusive water usage. No tax incentives will be given.

(d) Tax and Policy Disparities will be altered to benefit small business capital funds.

(e) With creative maneuvers and economic policies, concentration of wealth will be distributed across the State of Tennessee to benefit families who were locked into the poverty loop.

(d) Direct and create policies that give stakeholders in their communities more access and control of their own communities.

(e)Design Opportunity Zones, land trusts, and TIF for communities that have been left out of the wealth-building process.

(f) Create a new funding engine to reach neighborhoods that have been grossly gentrified or disinvested across the State of Tennessee.

(g) Bring ethics and accountability to how we do business in the State of Tennessee.

(h) Cease the insidious acts being placed upon citizens living in poverty as it relates to tax lien sales of their family homes, properties, or farms.

(i) Reassess the property redemption period to retrieve individuals' properties due to a change in legislative laws which has caused hardship on families across the State of Tennessee.