A 49 year old man who has lived for years in an East Nashville park is now among the first people in Tennessee to be charged with a felony simply for camping outside, a case drawing new attention to the state’s strict anti-camping law and the wider debate over how cities should handle homelessness.
Joseph Lamont Williams was arrested on June 28 near South Inglewood Park after officers told him they had a warrant for his arrest. According to charging documents, Williams ran when they approached and was tased before being taken into custody. He was booked on two felony counts of camping on public property and one misdemeanor count of evading arrest.
Tennessee is the only state in the country that treats public camping as a felony, a distinction advocates for the unhoused say has rarely been enforced this aggressively since the law passed in 2022. Williams spent nine days in jail before prosecutors agreed to drop the felony charges in exchange for a guilty plea on the misdemeanor. He was released with a sentence of time served on July 6.
Within hours of walking out of jail, Williams asked a longtime friend to drive him straight back to the park.
Growing up nearby, staying close to home
Williams was born and raised in East Nashville, in what used to be public housing just up the hill from where he now sleeps. He said he doesn’t think of the park as a place he lives, just somewhere he stays because he doesn’t feel he has anywhere else to go. He has turned down offers of shelter beds over the years, saying he doesn’t trust the organizations offering them and doesn’t want to leave the only neighborhood he’s ever called home.
That neighborhood has changed dramatically around him. East Nashville, historically a Black community, has gentrified rapidly over the past two decades, pushing out many of the families Williams grew up alongside.
John Lozier, a retired social worker who met Williams years ago while walking his dog through the park, picked him up the day he was released from jail. Lozier has stayed close to Williams since, checking in regularly and joining him for breakfast at a neighborhood diner.
Part of a national trend
Williams’s arrest fits into a broader pattern playing out across the country. Eleven states have passed bans on homeless camping in the last four years, and more than 300 cities have followed suit since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled two years ago that municipalities can legally bar people from sleeping in public spaces.
Much of that legislative momentum has been credited to the Cicero Institute, a conservative think tank founded by Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale. The group has pushed for laws that use the threat of arrest to steer homeless residents toward shelters, treatment programs and state-run campsites, arguing the long-favored Housing First model, which prioritizes stable housing before addressing other needs, has failed to solve the crisis.
Homelessness advocates in Nashville see it differently. Lindsey Krinks, co-founder of Open Table Nashville, said the city has spent years steadily pushing unhoused residents out of public view, from clearing the decades-old Old Tent City encampment along the Cumberland River to installing more surveillance cameras and removing benches downtown. She said punishing people and using police to address homelessness only makes the crisis worse, and prolongs the very problem officials say they’re trying to solve.
Devon Kurtz, who leads homelessness policy work at Cicero, defended the outcome in Williams’s case, arguing that clearing his encampment made the park safer even though Williams returned to it almost immediately.
A neighbor’s complaint
The case traces back to a newer resident on the block. Alex Bilbrey moved into a house across from the park about three months ago and said he didn’t mind the man living under the pavilion at first. But he said he began noticing cars coming and going late at night, people having sex in the open and drug paraphernalia near the playground. Bilbrey said he reached out to his city council member and later called police, though Open Table Nashville said it has no record of being contacted about the situation before Williams’s arrest.
Williams’s court-appointed attorney, Alissa Heydari, said the arrest made an already difficult situation harder for her client. Bilbrey said little has changed in the weeks since, with the same nighttime activity continuing in the park.
Nashville’s homeless population has grown sharply, with the city’s Homelessness Planning Council estimating roughly 4,300 people were unhoused as of December, an increase of more than 30 percent in less than a year. Nationally, overall homelessness has ticked down slightly since peaking in 2024, but federal data shows chronic homelessness, like Williams’s situation, continues to climb.
For now, Williams has settled back into his routine under the park pavilion, taking long walks, making up songs and meeting Lozier for breakfast, still choosing to stay in the only neighborhood he’s ever known. This is a developing story and 615Nav will continue to follow it.