OKLAHOMA CITY — The City’s Key to Home Partnership has housed 500 people who were previously unsheltered, completing a major goal of its two-year strategic plan to address homelessness through the Encampment Rehousing Initiative, or ERI.
The milestone, announced Tuesday, fulfills a 2023 goal to house 500 people using a new approach that emphasizes coordinated outreach, housing access and case management support.
“When I took office in 2018, city government had a limited role in addressing homelessness,” Mayor David Holt said. “Historically, the issue had largely been left to the nonprofit sector. But it was evident in 2018 that City Hall needed to provide a leadership role in order to keep us all on the same page and to ensure that our community efforts were focused on proven strategies.
“Task forces, strategic plans, staffing additions, and funding commitments have followed that original prioritization, and Key to Home is the ultimate reflection of this work,” Holt said. “Everyone has lots of ideas for addressing homelessness, and at the end of the day, we want to do what is legal and what has been proven to be effective. Key to Home was adopted because it emulates the best national practices that have been proven to lower the numbers of those experiencing homelessness.”
“So far, so good,” he added. “This milestone we have reached of getting 500 people off the street—and not just for a night but in a sustained way—shows that Key to Home works. And it’s a key contributor to the fact that the number of people experiencing unsheltered homelessness has declined four years in a row.”
The ERI program, launched in 2023, uses a collaborative model to transition people from encampments to permanent housing within four to six weeks. The process includes coordinated outreach, rental assistance, landlord engagement, case management, and long-term support.
According to the City, ERI has:
- Addressed 30 encampment sites.
- Reduced chronic unsheltered homelessness by 43 percent, based on the 2025 Point in Time count.
- Achieved a 90 percent rate of encampment residents accepting housing and support.
Once encampment residents are housed, sites are closed, cleaned and monitored to prevent repopulation.
ERI partner organizations include:
- Outreach and Engagement: Homeless Alliance, Mental Health Association of Oklahoma.
- Landlord Engagement and Housing: City Rescue Mission, Oklahoma City Housing Authority.
- Rental Assistance: Oklahoma City Housing Authority, Oklahoma Housing Finance Agency.
- Furniture and Move-In Kits: Focus on Home.
- Case Management Services: Catholic Charities, City Rescue Mission, Homeless Alliance.
- Site Cleanup and Enforcement: City of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma City Police Department’s Homeless Outreach Team, TEEM – SHINE, Oklahoma Department of Transportation.
“The achievement of this milestone is more than a box checked—it represents lives changed, public and private spaces reactivated, and a system reimagined,” said Jamie Caves, Homeless Strategy Implementation Manager for Key to Home. “We set out to collaborate in new ways to achieve something ambitious and transformative for our community, and thanks to the dedication of our service partners and support of our community, we were able to do it.”
Broader efforts
The Encampment Rehousing Initiative is one part of a broader homeless response system being developed through the Key to Home Partnership—a collaboration of more than 50 agencies, funders and government entities aligned around shared strategies and data.
In 2023, the partnership established four system-wide priorities to be met by 2025. According to the City, all four have already been achieved:
- Establish new leadership and governance.
- A new governance system was created, including an expanded board of directors with representatives from the business community and people with lived experience of homelessness.
- City staff were embedded to coordinate service delivery, and public-private partnerships were expanded to maximize federal and city funding.
- Strengthen foundational systems.
- The partnership standardized data quality and established performance benchmarks.
- Seventeen workgroups were launched to refine programs and create continuous improvement loops.
- A performance management plan was developed to track long-term system effectiveness.
- Develop youth-specific interventions.
- Using a Youth Homelessness Demonstration Project grant, youth service providers expanded access to housing, education, employment and transportation support.
- The original goal to house or divert 100 young people by 2025 was exceeded, with nearly 400 youth served over two years.
- Target long-term and unsheltered homelessness.
- The Encampment Rehousing Initiative was launched to serve those experiencing chronic unsheltered homelessness.
- As of this week, 502 people have been housed under the program.
Looking ahead, the Key to Home Partnership is setting new five-year goals. Future priorities will include continuing the ERI program and expanding prevention strategies to reduce the number of people entering homelessness in Oklahoma City.
“We’re thrilled with the progress we’ve made over the last two years, but we know the work isn’t done,” Caves said. “We’re going to continue to let data inform the strategy and keep driving toward a more balanced and effective homeless response system for OKC.”
Brett is the founder, and editor in chief of Oklahoma City Free Press. He continues to contribute reporting and photography to the efforts of the publication as well as leadership in developing support.
