About a month ago, Tulsa Mayor G.T. Bynum pledged that the city would begin taking a more active role in addressing the community’s homelessness crisis.
During his State of the City address on Tuesday, Bynum laid out his plan — an ambitious drive to raise $500 million in housing investments over the next two years.
The funding would not be targeted solely for housing the homeless, but would also be used to boost the city’s stock of affordable, transitional, supportive and market-rate housing — all of which are in short supply.
The Tulsa Housing Challenge, Bynum said, “will include direct investment in housing, incentives for private sector investors and anything else that expedites the closure of these housing gaps that exist in Tulsa today.”
The mayor hopes to convene interested parties within the next couple of months to begin formalizing an action plan on how the city would reach the $500 million investment goal.
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“We hope that our faith, philanthropic, health care and business communities will help achieve this. And we expect our partners in tribal governments, Tulsa County and the state of Oklahoma to play an important part, too.”
Bynum also used his speech to announce a major public safety initiative, saying that beginning Tuesday all graduates of the Tulsa Police Academy will receive a $15,000 bonus.
That’s up from the $3,000 incentive approved by the City Council last year. Bynum said the toxic dialogue around policing nationwide has made it more difficult to recruit officers and that the city is losing officers faster than it can hire them.
“The greatest public safety challenge facing Tulsa is Police Department staffing,” he said.
The Tulsa Police Department has an authorized strength of 943, including management positions, and is 126 officers shy of that number, according to the city.
Speaking to reporters after the speech, Bynum said the city has identified more than $30 million in federal funding that potentially could go toward the housing challenge and that the city is evaluating other alternatives.
That includes possible general fund expenditures.
“Everything is on the table,” Bynum said. “We are going to evaluate all options that we have as a city government, and we will see where it goes from there.”
The Tulsa Housing Challenge was one of three initiatives the mayor announced Tuesday to address the city’s homelessness problem. The others include opening a low-barrier shelter in 2023 and working with the faith community to certify religious facilities to serve as emergency shelters during extreme weather.
Bynum said Tulsa is one of the few large cities in the country without a low-barrier shelter.
A low-barrier shelter removes obstacles to entry and allows such things as pets and partners. It is intended to meet people where they are in life.
“A significant percentage of the people you see on the streets today are there because they don’t have anywhere else to go,” Bynum said. “We will change that by opening a low-barrier shelter,” which means those barriers to entry are eliminated.
Bynum walked the audience of more than 1,000 people at the Cox Business Convention Center through the intricacies of the city’s housing struggles, noting that the city is lacking in four of five housing categories — transitional, supportive, affordable and market-rate housing.
When it comes to emergency short-term shelters, Bynum said, “in Tulsa we are actually doing pretty well except in instances of extreme weather.”
January’s national Point-In-Time Count recorded 1,063 homeless people in Tulsa County at that time. Figures compiled by A Way Home for Tulsa, a consortium of local private and public entities working to make homelessness rare and nonrecurring, show that 2,296 people countywide accessed services for the homeless in September.
Officials estimate that 400 to 500 supportive housing units for the chronically homeless are needed in Tulsa and that overall the city needs 4,000 to 6,000 more units of affordable housing.
So the mayor’s announcement came as welcome news to Melanie Stewart, A Way Home for Tulsa’s Leadership Council chairwoman.
“It’s incredibly exciting for A Way Home for Tulsa’s many partner agencies to have citywide leadership step up and take on the affordable housing crisis in our community,” Stewart said in a prepared statement. “Lack of housing is the number one challenge to reducing homelessness in Tulsa and in every major city across the nation.
“Mayor Bynum’s call to action will go a long way to ensure Tulsans experiencing homelessness or approaching homelessness will have a safe place to call home.”
Bynum also pledged Tuesday to work with the City Council to secure $1 million in American Rescue Plan Act funding for the county’s first “mental health urgent recovery center” dedicated entirely to serving children and families in crisis 24/7.
The model, called YES Tulsa, for Youth Evaluation Services, will be a one-stop triage center for families in immediate mental health crisis, he said.
The city will partner with Tulsa County and the state of Oklahoma to build it, and the state will join the federal government in paying for its ongoing operations, he said.
Zack Stoycoff, executive director of the Healthy Minds Policy Initiative, lauded the mayor’s commitment to the project.
“This is just one example of a growing number of data-driven partnerships that are building a more robust mental health system in Tulsa,” Stoycoff said. “We are seeing that this community is truly rolling up its sleeves to address our most difficult mental health treatment challenges, and we expect more exciting announcements in the months to come.”
Michael Dekker contributed to this story.
kevin.canfield@tulsaworld.com
“We hope that our faith, philanthropic, health care and business communities will help achieve this. And we expect our partners in tribal governments, Tulsa County and the state of Oklahoma to play an important part too.”
— Tulsa Mayor G.T. Bynum
