Downtown shelters are struggling to keep up with the rising number of homeless people using their services in Tulsa.
The city’s homeless population is a fluctuating number that’s edged upward in recent years, but John 3:16 Mission CEO Steve Whitaker said he’s noticed a real uptick at the mission since this summer.
“We’re at 110 percent capacity right now,” Whitaker said. “We haven’t been quantifying anything, but what I can tell you is we have a record number of meals served every single night, a record number of demand for shelters, and we have a record number of people that are in our recovery program.”
The John 3:16 Mission typically doesn’t see large crowds until the winter, when the building at Easton Street and Cheyenne Avenue fills up as people try to escape the cold.
But now the shelter is experiencing higher numbers this month than it usually sees in the colder month of December — a trend officials find concerning.
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“There are times when we would expect for us to have some surplus beds in the summer. The weather’s better. People are working,” Whitaker said. “Instead, the crowds we’re seeing are the same kinds of crowds you would expect in inclement weather.
“We’ve got a problem,” he added. “If we’re seeing these numbers now, then what’s it going to be during the depths of winter, when we’re going to see killer cold?”
Whitaker said he also thinks there are more homeless women in Tulsa than ever before. Part of the reason behind the rise, he speculated, is the rampancy of opiates in society.
He called opiates an “insidious” drug that drives people to do what they normally wouldn’t, such as steal from family and other members of their support group.
“We’ve got a problem in our community where people are being abandoned in the streets because of their addiction,” Whitaker said. “They use up all their family relationships, and they end up living on the streets. Sometimes people are proud and don’t want to ask for help. Some of the women we see don’t want to go live in a shelter because of the stigma.”
Whitaker hopes to double the total number of beds at John 3:16 from 150 to 300 in the next 24 months. Another goal is to add 12 beds for women before the end of the year. It’s not a lot, he said, but it’s something.
The Center of Hope, The Salvation Army’s downtown emergency shelter at 102 N. Denver Ave., averages 325 homeless individuals every night. Sixty of those are children.
The last time the shelter — the largest in Oklahoma and Arkansas — did not exceed capacity was a decade ago, said Capt. Ken Chapman, The Salvation Army’s area commander.
“We have people sleeping all over the floor on mats and sheets and pillows, especially in the wintertime,” Chapman said.
The Center of Hope provided nearly 357,300 meals in 2016, a 22 percent increase from 2015. It also recorded about 109,200 lodgings, a 26 percent increase.
Through September this year, about 229,500 meals and 65,600 lodgings have been provided there. Chapman said 2017 is on pace to at least match last year.
An annual one-night count of area homeless people showed just a slight increase from the 2016 survey and a modest decrease in the number of people staying in shelters.
However, Chapman said he never thought the counts were accurate because many people know how to avoid the surveyors.
He considers Tulsa’s growing homeless population a crisis and blames much of it on legislative cuts to mental health services. After the latest cuts announced this month, Chapman doesn’t see it getting better.
“Now with the Legislature cutting tens of millions of dollars out of the mental health area, we’re going to see an even larger increase in people who will probably be displaced from their housing,” he said. “We’re trying to get ready for that. At the same time, we’re trying to figure out how long we can operate at double our capacity. It’s a huge problem.”
The Salvation Army doesn’t plan to turn away people, but Chapman said it’s hard to think of solutions without assistance from the city or county.
For any kind of sustainable improvement, he said, it’s vital that the federal and state governments stop slashing funds “where it matters the most.”
Despite the deteriorating situation, Whitaker and Chapman agree that the numerous nonprofits and mental-health professionals working to help Tulsa’s homeless residents are among the finest in the country. But they’re not enough.
“With all of our efforts, we’ve still got a growing number of people who are homeless, so we need to double down on our work,” Whitaker said. “Tulsans have always been generous, and they’ve always taken care of their own, and I expect that they will during this crisis, as well.”
