Republican state House member Tricia Cotham is running a misleading TV commercial criticizing her Democratic opponent Nicole Sidman over her views about a homeless encampment that grew near uptown Charlotte during the coronavirus pandemic.
The commercial misrepresents Sidman’s actual statement on the camp. And in a further twist, Sidman’s actual views closely resemble what Tricia Cotham’s mother, longtime Mecklenburg Commissioner Pat Cotham, a Democrat, has said about the homeless community and the tent city.
The race for District 105 in southeast Mecklenburg is one of the most important in the state and could determine whether the GOP keeps its veto-proof supermajority in the General Assembly.
During the pandemic, a tent cluster grew along 12th and College Streets near uptown Charlotte.
In the winter of 2021, Mecklenburg County ordered the homeless residents to leave because the site was infested with rats. The people living in the encampment were provided temporary housing in hotels.
Tricia Cotham’s commercial focuses on the encampment.
“When a Charlotte homeless encampment was overrun with rats and disease, Sidman opposed a bipartisan plan to clear it,” the commercial says.
The ad references a blog post Sidman made a year later for Temple Beth El, where she works. It was titled “Helping Our Unhoused Neighbors.”
But Sidman never wrote that she opposed clearing the site.
She wrote: “For the first time, Charlotte’s homeless problem was gathered in one place and no one uptown could avoid it. Located in an area off Davidson Road, people called it Tent City —although only the lucky ones actually had tents.”
She continued: “The presence of so many unhoused people compelled community leaders to focus on the poverty and housing crisis that often goes unnoticed.”
She added that once "Tent City" was gone, the visibility the residents had was also gone — and with it went a lot of the concern people had shown for its residents.
Similar to Pat Cotham's views
What makes Cotham’s commercial a bit odd is not so much the stretching, or twisting, of what Sidman wrote.
It’s that Tricia Cotham’s mother, Pat Cotham, has said much the same thing, like this interview on WCNC’s Flashpoint about the tent city.
“That’s one good thing about this serious problem is that more people are aware of this,” Pat Cotham said. “More people are aware of encampments.”
She added: “And I have gone into camps since 2013, so they have been out there. And maybe this will shake the community and maybe (make) a better future for them.”
Pat Cotham is one of the homeless community’s biggest advocates. On election night, she often forgoes a victory party and instead gives food to the unhoused living uptown.
An Axios Charlotte article from 2020 about Tent City noted that Pat Cotham had donated tents to people living in there.
Pat Cotham echoed the theme of Sidman’s blog post in another interview with WCNC:
“We don’t have enough discussion about the intentionality of how did (the homeless community) get there?” she said. “And that’s always the first question I ask when I’m uptown is: What happened in your life that you are now here on the street?”
Sidman said she went back and read her blog post from 2022.
“I can’t imagine what’s in there (that would be controversial),” she said. “(Tricia Cotham) proclaims to be a person of faith, a person who cares about her community, who cares about her people. I think she’s attacking all those things.”
Tricia Cotham couldn’t be reached for comment on Wednesday.
Tricia Cotham was elected to her seat as a Democrat in 2022. The next year, she switched to the Republican Party — a move that gave the GOP a supermajority in the General Assembly and the ability to override Gov. Roy Cooper’s veto on things like new abortion restrictions.
A year later, Pat Cotham lost her bid for reelection to the Mecklenburg County Commission in the Democratic primary, as Democratic voters took out their anger at Tricia Cotham on her mother. She leaves the Commission in December after serving since 2012.
