The Tulsa Housing Authority recently sold its last batch of single-family rental homes, a move that will let the agency avoid the rising costs of maintenance at the scattered properties, officials said.
THA once owned more than 200 individual rental homes across the city but began selling the houses about two years ago, after federal regulators made it easier for local housing authorities to sell properties that had become “operational burdens,” officials said. The final 33 homes sold last week.
“We really took a hard look at our current scattered housing and whether or not it made sense fiscally for us to keep trying to manage 217 single-family homes that were spread out all over the city,” said Aaron Darden, the Housing Authority’s CEO.
“And after that analysis, the determination was made that it does not make financial sense.”
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The sale of the low-rent homes became final the day after Tulsa Mayor G.T. Bynum announced plans for an ambitious drive to raise $500 million to invest in affordable housing.
The initiative has a goal of $500 million in the next two years in total housing investment across the city.
To avoid making the housing shortage even worse, buyers had to agree to keep rents low, accept federal housing subsidies and allow current tenants to remain in place, Darden said.
“What we didn’t really want was a situation where someone comes in and purchases those homes, flips them and increases the purchase price,” he said. “We just didn’t want that to happen. So what we did was required they stay affordable.”
Darden declined to reveal sale prices, but tax records suggest that most of the houses sold last week were valued between roughly $40,000 and $65,000, well below the median Tulsa home value of $191,000.
All proceeds will go toward affordable housing initiatives, Darden said.
“This bucket of money will just really allow for us to look for opportunities to start expanding the number of affordable units in the city,” he said.
