KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — Data from the East Tennessee REALTORS group showed that most people in the Knoxville area may need to pay around $1,500 per month in rent. It also showed around two-thirds of the area's residents don't make enough money to afford a home.
Churches in are working to help people struggling to make ends meet, setting up homes they can stay in. Tim Jackson leads Magnolia Avenue United Methodist Church and Vestal United Methodist Church. Both churches are transforming around 6,000 square feet of their spaces into transitional housing.
"Not only do we have a homelessness problem in the City of Knoxville, we also have a housing problem in the city of Knoxville," he said. "We want to be the church in our neighborhood on Monday, and on Tuesday, and on Wednesday and Thursday and Friday."
Jackson said that as a homeless teen, he knew he needed an education and a job to escape homelessness — two things that can be difficult to get for people without a safe place to live. So, the churches are working to provide rooms for people who have an income but can't afford a place of their own.
The ultimate goal is to give them more skills to help them improve their lives and careers, eventually helping them find a place to call their own.
"Our hope is to get those young men and women in education whether it be a GED, a high school diploma, job training," he said.
The Magnolia Avenue church hopes to house around 45 young and elderly men. The Vestal church hopes to house between 16 and 25 young women between 18 years-old to 24 years-old.
"They're sisters and they're older generations that are still living here in East Knoxville, and some of them are probably unable to get out," said Jackson.
Most of all, he said he hopes the church will be there when people need help the most. For two years, one of the churches was closed. And if it had closed a few weeks ago when a deadly winter storm swept through East Tennessee, he said more people may have perished.
"If Vestal and Magnolia had still been closed and condemned during our snowstorm a couple of weeks ago, a lot of people in our town may have frozen to death," he said.