Tulsa selects site for low-barrier shelter/residential care center for the homeless

Now that’s about to happen — but they’re not calling it a low-barrier shelter.

“Because that implies for people, in people’s minds, every time they think, a line of people out the door waiting to get in; they think about people milling about outside,” said Blake Ewing, the mayor’s chief of staff. “This is designed to be a higher level of care, in some ways. The potential for respite care for people coming out of the hospital with medical needs will be able to receive care in this space.

“So we’re kind of generically calling it a residential care center.”

The facility will be located west of Mohawk Park Golf Course in what was once a nursing home and rehabilitation center. The city plans to lease the structure and expects to spend approximately $2.5 million annually to operate it.

The center will accommodate 50 to 75 households, which could mean an individual, a couple or a family. Each household will have its own unit with beds, a kitchen and a shower. Wrap-around services including case management and mental health, substance abuse and respite care will be available onsite. The city hopes to have the facility open in November.

City Lights, which will operate the facility, and other service providers will transport residents to the facility and assist with transportation for shopping and purchasing food. Food will also be available onsite.

The center is specifically designed to serve unsheltered homeless people who are on a waiting list for permanent housing but aren’t yet ready to make the leap.

Registered sex offenders and people convicted of a violent felony will not be allowed. The facility will have staffing and security 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Everyone in the facility will have been referred by a service provider; no walk-ins will be allowed.

“The goal would be that somebody would come into this particular facility and within 120 days would be able to find whatever that next step is,” said Travis Hulse, the city’s housing policy director. “We hope to hit that all the time. We know that we won’t, but that’s the goal.”

The residential care center is in City Council District 1, home to several of the city’s homeless shelters and service providers along Archer Street, as well as the nearby Tulsa County jail.

City officials say they looked at more than 50 potential sites and chose the one they did because it was the only property that met all the criteria they had established for a residential care center. Those criteria include cost, single story, common entry, individual housing units and a property owner who was willing to maintain the facility.

“Least of all of those considerations is the geographic one,” Ewing said, adding that being in District 1 where other homeless services were already located actually worked against the selected site because “we were trying to avoid a political controversy as much as possible.”

Mayor G.T. Bynum said the facility is needed to get the resources individuals experiencing homelessness need to find permanent housing.

“This location makes the most sense in terms of the space and reconfiguration needed, and we are eager to get it operational later this year,” Bynum said.

Sarah Grounds, founder and executive director of the City Lights Foundation of Oklahoma, said the reality is that the city needs residential care centers for the homeless in every City Council district.

“This is not going to solve all of the problems, but for the people that it does impact, it is going to solve a big problem for them, and they’re going to get support and things that they need to move towards housing,” Grounds said. “But there is something to be said about moving away from some of those ties that keep pulling you back into a lifestyle that you feel stuck in.”

District 1 City Councilor Vanessa Hall-Harper said she would have opposed the site if it had been a traditional shelter where people could just walk in and there were no individual rooms.

“A shelter is something that you can walk up to, anyone can walk up to at any time,” Hall-Harper said. “That’s not what this is, because if it was, I wouldn’t support it for my district.”

She said she plans to hold public meetings with constituents on the city’s plan.

“I’m still very much wanting to engage with the neighbors so that they can understand what it is and what it isn’t,” Hall-Harper said. “What is a low-barrier shelter and what this is. And so we need to have those conversations at the end of the day.”

Before the city can move forward with its plan, it will have to go before the Board of Adjustment to seek approval for a special exception to the zoning code.

The property is zoned residential multi-family, which allows for apartments by right but does not expressly allow for the use the city is proposing.

Low-barrier shelters are typically described as facilities that serve individuals who for one reason or another — mental health problems, physical challenges, behavioral issues or a pet — aren’t able to access a traditional shelter.

The city used similar language when it sent out two requests for proposals seeking an operator for its “non-congregate low barrier shelter and case management program.”

In hindsight, Ewing acknowledged that that may not have been the best choice of words.

“If there’s a semantics question, we should have stopped calling it that when we put the (request for proposal) together, if for no other reason that when you say it, people envision a thing,” Ewing said. “But then you have to say to everyone, ‘It’s not what you’re imagining.’”

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