Cobb’s professional pitch seeks to help Knox homeless
“I’ve been doing work with housing development since 2010; doing it for a long time,” Cobb said during his roughly four-minute address during Mayors’ Leadership Summit on Homelessness” held recently in The Foundry in downtown Knoxville.
Praising the “collaboration that the city and county both had … we leveraged $2.5 million to break ground on 280 units here in the city at the end of last year,” he added about new, more affordable housing. “Those funds were instrumental.”
Cobb said he recently received information “that opened my eyes to some things about what you were just speaking on — the eviction process.”
Beyond downtown Knoxville, “we were releasing up a property out in the county that we’re really proud of,” Cobb said, adding that he learned, “‘Hey, there’s a lot of people out here … that have this need or are living in cars and what-not that have been (evicted) for some reason or another.’
“We’ve had several people live (at the county location) that have had evictions in their past,” he added.
He reported news from another local homeless housing official that “they had just taken on some rental systems from THDA to help people stay in affordable housing and work out payment plans with their landlord,” Cobb said.
“Just last week, we had several of our residents that were behind. Instead of trying to evict them and be the bad guy, we told them, ‘Hey, the county has these funds for rental assistance. Please go seek them, and we’ll work with you on these payment plans,’” he added. “We got a couple of checks just last week to help keep people in housing. I wouldn’t have known about this otherwise; so communication with both county and city government has been, I think, a real positive here.”
In fact, “I don’t think anyone else in Tennessee is doing it as well as Knox County and the city of Knoxville are,” Cobb said.
“Obviously, things are expensive — affordable housing has tons of barriers to entry,” he told the gathering. “There’s a long lead time to get projects from conception to funding to closing to construction to actually getting people in the housing. The prices keep going up, the interest rates keep going up. So we’ll take as much money as we can get to … build our housing. … It’s a very clearly need to help with these issues.
“But again, I think what our community here is doing is above and beyond anywhere else,” he added. “So kudos to both (Knox County) Mayor (Glenn) Jacobs and (Knoxville) Mayor (Indya) Kincannon for everything. … It’s really a help and I really appreciate it.”
