The City of Brentwood, Tennessee, has been writing citations against homeless people selling Nashville's "Contributor" Street Newspaper in public spaces.
The Contributor is a street newspaper that focuses on homelessness, and is sold by homeless people who keep the profits they earn by spending time in public spaces and selling it. It costs a dollar, and the vendors are never aggressive, never hard sell, and are always glad to sell a copy. I buy it whenever I see one of those guys and have a dollar.
Brentwood is a mostly white, very wealthy exurb of Nashville, filled to the brim with "traditional" families and new money. The old money, incidentally, is in Belle Meade. Brentwood is a kind of enclave of white flyers from Nashville proper, and its demographics are evidence of that. It is the biggest place in the wealthiest county in the state and it's called 'Brentwood,' which is kind of a dead giveaway as to what kind of place it is. People who live in Brentwood dreamed about living there before they moved there, and now they think everyone else dreams of living there.
Of course they have a law banning the selling of merchandise on any public street, and of course they used it against sellers of the Contributor. Any claim that the law is being applied equally and above board are likely bullshit, as the opportunities to apply it to anyone else are likely few are far between. There's no doubt in my mind that Brentwoodies have asked for this activity to be curtailed so that they don't have to look at homeless people - who likely don't live not in houses in Brentwood - and that the city is covering its ass in case someone gets crushed between an SUV and a median packed with pretty flowers.
However. It's likely that the attempted selling of the Contributor in Brentwood can be interpreted as an aggressive act of territorialism, as can the response. Additionally, one would have to ask the Contributor vendors what exactly they expected the reaction of rich-ass Brentwood would be to them showing up on their well-mown patch. It seems likely that this whole thing might have been a publicity stunt from the get-go, with the idea of shining a light on homelessness. If so - good on the Contributor. Way to go.
Now the ACLU is involved, though, looking to see if the vendors of the Contributor have had their rights to free speech curtailed. Have they? I'm not sure that they have. If it can be proved that they broke a pre-existing and fairly enforced law, then they're S.O.L. in my opinion, and should have known that Brentwood would drop this particular cashmere hammer on them. Like most people, however, I'm hoping the Contributor gets to be made available in Brentwood, where I'm certain that no one buys it.
But now you know about it, and so does everyone else.