Last Updated on October 29, 2023, 11:13 AM | Published: October 29, 2023
OKLAHOMA CITY — Despite recent initiatives and attempts to right an economy rocked by the COVID-19 pandemic, 2023’s Point in Time count showed the unhoused population of OKC still steadily growing in number as recently as in January of this year.
To combat this upward trend, city officials, outreach leaders, and law enforcement laid out a plan earlier this year intended to use a “housing first” approach to move unhoused city residents out of outdoor encampments and into housing or shelters before “decommissioning camps.”
“That’s gotten off to a bit of a slow start,” said Dan Straughan, executive director of Homeless Alliance in OKC. “But as it gears up, we’re all hopeful.”
Ward 2 Meetup
A Ward 2 Meetup on Homelessness, hosted by City Councilperson James Cooper, will take place Wednesday, November 1st at Tower Theatre beginning at 5:30 pm. It is a free event.
According to Cooper, while the upcoming event is largely intended to provide city residents with a better understanding of how homelessness in OKC can be addressed in coming years, much of the impetus for organizing the meetup came from wanting to get outreach leaders in a room with city officials.
“It’s the role of local government to bring these service providers to the table,” Cooper said. “Having served on Mayor Holt’s homelessness task force, we resolved to bring those service providers together and find a way for them to row together. And that is what they’ve been doing since, and that is good, but it’s new. And it’s important for everyone to know that.”
It’s a sentiment echoed by those service providers themselves, particularly Straughan, who will be on hand alongside others from Homeless Alliance to see how Cooper and city officials plan to address the issue.
“It’s really a first-time investment on the part of municipal government to address the issue of homelessness in a more coordinated fashion,” Straughan said. “For years, the fight against homelessness has been really led by the nonprofit and faith-based communities, but those communities are diverse and disparate. So the city is really trying to bring all those efforts kind of under one umbrella with better coordination, efficiency, and certainly more financial investment.”
New Winter Shelter
This event comes at a sadly important time for the city, as forecasts are predicting a likely wet, frigid winter, posing a potentially dire challenge for outreach workers helping to find homeless residents in the city and move them into shelter rather than risking freezing temperatures and even death.
To address this, in coming weeks, Homeless Alliance is finally opening their long-planned permanent winter shelter – the city’s first – where they hope to have enough beds and accommodations to cover any seeking refuge from the winter nights.
“It was supposed to open on November 1st, but supply chain issues caught us, so now it looks like November 10th,” Straughan said. “But it’ll be open every night from November through the end of March, and it’ll be essentially no-barrier and up to three hundred beds.”
This much-needed addition to the city’s available services was no easy – or cheap – feat.
“It cost $3 million,” Straughan said. “It was 1.6 million just to buy the warehouse at 501 N. Indiana near the Westtown campus and more than another million to rehab it into a shelter. And all privately funded.”
The Case for Funding
That reliance primarily on private funding and donations is a large part of what Cooper says he plans to address at the November 1st meetup, explaining that he’d like to see the future of city funds directed significantly more heavily toward homelessness solutions.
With the city’s next General Obligation bond set for 2025, Cooper plans to use this public event to lay out plans and recommendations for how homeless outreach and housing can be a more central focus of that bond’s funding.
“In the previous GO bond in 2017, we actually set aside about $2 million for what we call ‘workforce affordable housing,'” Cooper said. “What I would like to see in the next bond, quite frankly, is $100 million at a bare minimum for incentivizing developers to build infill housing all across the city.”
He plans to discuss data and recent studies showing that smaller infill housing throughout the city’s urban core can have a much greater benefit to the homeless population than the current focus on single-family home development in suburban areas.
“It’s called ‘transit-oriented development,'” he said. “As we’re repairing sidewalks and crosswalks and bike lanes and the new bus rapid transit, let’s build infill along those sidewalks and along those public transit routes.”
Come in from the Cold
For now, all outreach services and providers are focused on covering the next week, with temperatures and precipitation expected to cause an early, dangerously cold, freezing situation before the new winter shelter is available, and even before Cooper’s public event brings providers and officials together for an evening.
Until the winter shelter is officially up and running, it’ll be all hands on deck for the Homeless Alliance as they open the day shelter as a temporary nighttime solution for the cold.
“With the weather turning foul this weekend,” Straughan said, “we’ll open our day shelter Sunday morning, and then the day shelter will be open 24 hours a day until we get the winter shelter running.”
If you or anyone you know needs a place to shelter from the coming cold this week, visit the Westtown Shelter and Resource Campus of the Homeless Alliance at 1724 NW 4th Street, or visit homelessalliance.org for more information.
Brett Fieldcamp has been covering arts, entertainment, news, housing, and culture in Oklahoma for nearly 15 years, writing for several local and state publications. He’s also a musician and songwriter and holds a certification as Specialist of Spirits from The Society of Wine Educators.
