As stakeholders in the City of Chattanooga began to assemble to address the gang problem, one question kept coming up: “Where’s Fred Houser?” Houser was in Nashville, Tenn., working as a case manager and counselor for Davidson County Juvenile Detention Center. His job daily put him in rooms with Crips, Bloods, Vice Lords and more. His compassion for the wayward young men kept him in those rooms.
“One day, I was talking with an Hispanic mother whose 14-year-old boy had become entrenched in the Sur 13, a Mexican gang, and she said she was afraid for his life. At 14, he has hits out on him. He had met with his lawyer and youth workers from his church, and their conversation with him hadn’t done much good.
“I sat down with him and shared examples of kids his age that had been sentenced to life for hideous crimes, and as he looked at me, I could see ice running through his veins,” Houser says.
One of the things Houser learned about the boy was that his mother had raised him in a Christian home. As a pastor, Houser saw this as an opportunity.
“I challenged his faith in a way that made him very uncomfortable. Later, I got a call from his attorney, who told me the boy had prayed that day for God to send someone to help him,” Houser says.
Houser is the assistant coordinator of Mayor Ron Littlefield’s recently announced gang task force. Boyd Patterson, a former prosecutor with the Chattanooga District Attorney’s office, is leading the program. Whereas Patterson will be focusing on putting unrepentant gang members behind bars, Houser will be working to rally every possible entity in the city and in Hamilton County to reach out to at-risk youth and cut off the pipeline of kids to gangs.
Houser brings decades of urban community work to his new job. A native of Chattanooga, he was educated in local public schools and studied human service management at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. His resume includes arranging U.S Department of Housing and Urban Development grants for the Chattanooga-Hamilton County Regional Planning Agency in the ’70s; serving as economic development director of the ML King Development Corporation in the ’80s; working as the manager of the Better Housing Commission under Littlefield, who was the commissioner of public works; and doing time as the community and government relations coordinator for Chattanooga Venture, also under Littlefield, who was the organization’s executive director.
These and other positions gave Houser extensive experience pulling together diverse community resources to bring about urban renewal. The Chattanooga Venture position also allowed him to use the network he’d built in the city to communicate with local citizens and the faith-based community about the grass-roots improvements the organization wanted to make.
About a decade ago, a personal matter took Houser to Tucson, Ariz., for a time, and when he and his family were able to return, they landed in Nashville, where Houser launched a career as a juvenile justice professional. He says the job allowed him to pursue his calling in life – helping to rebuild the shattered lives of youth.
“Our young people are at risk, and I’ve been concerned as I’ve read about what’s been going on in Chattanooga. I never thought I’d be in a position to help, though,” he says.
A cold call from Mayor Littlefield in April 2011 opened the door for Houser to come to Chattanooga and do what he thought he’d never be able to do.
“As the mayor and I were talking, he says, ‘By the way, we have a problem with youth violence and gangs in Chattanooga. Would you be interested in helping?’” Houser says.
Before Houser said yes, he wanted to know where the community stood on the initiative. Were the stakeholders splintered? Or were they moving toward cooperation? Houser had seen what people in Chattanooga could accomplish when they joined forces, and before jumping into the fray, he wanted to hear that the city was rallying together to address the gang problem.
“I was here in 1975, when our leaders realized our downtown area was in economic crisis. They mobilized all of their resources to turn the city around, and now we have one of the best mid-sized cities in the country. So it was important for me to hear the right answers to my questions,” House says.
Littlefield assured Houser that the focus of the gang task force would be cooperation between the many agencies and organizations that make up Chattanooga, including everything from law enforcement entities to churches, from schools to rec centers, and from major charities to small nonprofits.
“I said, ‘If what you’re putting together looks like what we assembled to rebuild our city, then I’m in. Let’s pull out all of the stops because one of our most precious resources is dying in the streets. Let’s make an investment in human capital,’” Houser says.
As assistant coordinator, Houser will be reaching out to people in the faith-based community (some of whom he knows from his days of pastoring local churches), charitable organizations such as the United Way, government agencies such as the Chattanooga Department of Recreation, and youth service providers. Although the details are sketchy at this point, Houser says he’s going to be working to unite everyone under the Comprehensive Gang Model Patterson has established as the framework for the gang task force.
“We don’t want to tell anyone how to run their organization. We want to make sure there’s a continuity to our message as we begin to identify and then target groups of kids with prevention and intervention programs,” House says.
Like Patterson, Houser says the gang problem is too big to fix overnight, and urges people to be patient.
“We’re not miracle workers. The violence is not going to go away overnight because we’re on the scene. We’re here to put an apparatus in place that allows us to start showing our kids there’s another way. But we can’t do this alone.”
While Houser believes the citizens of Chattanooga will get behind the gang task force, he also believes the at-risk youth in the city will respond to their efforts.
“We’re on a mission, and the timing of this mission is critical, not only in the life of the city but also in the lives of its young people. As tough as these kids are, they’re still human beings. Most of them are still babies. Everybody needs to pull together to save them. And by everybody, I mean everybody.”