OKLAHOMA CITY — Though the City of Oklahoma City is reporting clear progress in efforts to slow the increase of homelessness, some advocates and City officials are concerned about significant federal funding cuts and the slow movement of some potentially major local remedies.
According to 2025’s Point in Time Count – the annual “snapshot” of the state of homelessness numbers across OKC – the city’s homeless population grew by just 2.4%, a marked improvement from the 28% increase reported in the 2024 Point-in-Time Count.
But that progress could be short-lived as some long-anticipated housing boosters face repeated delays in City government and as the Trump administration’s proposed budget calls for a near-total cut of integral housing assistance funding.
“Homelessness is complex, it’s never just the result of one thing,” Homeless Alliance CEO Meghan Mueller told Free Press. “You have to have all the pieces of the puzzle to see the collective impact, and I think it’s a legitimate fear that while we’re making moves in the right direction with some of those pieces, the other pieces are really at risk.”
Rehousing success
Though the data shows a slight 2.4% increase in homelessness for OKC in early 2025, that’s a substantial drop from the 28% increase reported in 2024.
Advocates on all sides of homelessness outreach attribute that progress heavily to the City’s joint public-private Key to Home Partnership, and in particular to its Encampment Rehousing Initiative, coordinating city services to move people directly from the streets into housing.
“We’re careful not to point to any one specific thing,” said Key to Home Communications Manager Erika Warren. “But we do feel, specifically with the Encampment Rehousing Initiative, we’ve been able to make a really significant impact in that particular population that we’re targeting for support.”
Mueller agreed, pointing to the Encampment Rehousing Initiative as a driving factor in stemming the rising tide of homelessness, but expressing concerns about the city’s stubbornly low supply of housing.
“Affordable housing is the solution to homelessness, and so we just need more homes,” Mueller said. “We need truly affordable housing to alleviate the pressure on our housing gap in our community.”
Accessory Dwelling delays
One of the primary ways that officials and outreach providers believe that affordable housing can be quickly increased is by allowing Accessory Dwelling Units, or ADUs, in OKC’s zoning ordinance for the first time in decades, letting homeowners build and rent small, liveable accessory housing units on their lots.
Though that ordinance change was strongly recommended in the City’s Housing Affordability Study submitted all the way back in 2021, some resident pushback and logistical concern has rendered its passage and implementation slow.
On Tuesday, the expected final vote and potential passage of the new ordinance was once again delayed by City Council as opposed resident groups proposed an amendment requiring owners of ADUs to live in a lot’s primary dwelling as their main residence.
“The whole purpose of the ADU project was to increase the number of places for people to live without unnecessarily increasing the administrative or procedural burdens to do that,” Assistant City Planner Lisa Chronister told Free Press by phone on Wednesday.
Chronister has been one of the City’s primary movers of the new ADU ordinance and of its many revisions and reconsiderations following pushback from city residents about everything from neighborhood character to proliferation of short-term rentals like Airbnbs.
“Various people had mentioned an owner-occupied requirement during that process,” Chronister said. “But our feeling was that that is not a best practice in other communities that we’ve studied, and we thought it might be unnecessarily restrictive. It’s not inherently bad to have two rental units on the same property, you know?”
In addition to the hoped-for passage of the new ADU ordinance, Chronister is looking forward to finally addressing and implementing a number of other recommendations from the Housing Affordability Study going forward.
“It probably seems to people that ADUs are all we’ve been focused on, but it’s just one small part of the overall ordinance,” she said. “Later this year, we’ll finally be rolling out the whole rest of the new code and we’re excited that the greater flexibility and different housing options will further help the market provide more housing units.”
Federal funding concerns
But more units on the market can only help to reduce homelessness if people and programs have the money to pay for them.
With the Trump administration’s newly proposed budget effectively eliminating all funding for permanent housing assistance, outreach organizations in OKC could lose any ability to move homeless citizens into housing, no matter how affordable or plentiful units become.
“The Trump administration’s proposed budget does include quite a few HUD cuts, specifically permanent supportive housing, and that would significantly affect our work,” Warren said of the Key to Home Partnership. “However, I do think Key to Home is ahead of the curve with our private relationships in the community to make sure that we can raise those private dollars to offset the public funds and fill those gaps where public dollars just won’t cover or fall short.”
But Mueller isn’t so sure that any private investment could fill those gaps.
“I don’t think that hole is something that private investment or local philanthropy could step in to save,” she said. “Our system is already stretched beyond capacity. Shelter doesn’t end homelessness. Housing ends homelessness. And so the proposed cuts at the federal level are extremely concerning and would have absolutely catastrophic effects for our community.”
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.
