Mayor Monroe Nichols said Monday 50 people experiencing homelessness have been housed over the past three months.
Councilors and homeless advocates joined Nichols as he shared the latest update on Safe Move Tulsa — a $10 million initiative launched in November to rehouse 300 people in nine months.
The mayor credited the city’s outreach and public safety teams, which he said have been working diligently to help end street homelessness. Officials have recently focused on stopping street sleeping in downtown within the Inner Dispersal Loop, or IDL.
“(They) put their heads together to figure out what it would take to identify the people who are chronically sleeping in downtown and put them on a path to housing,” Nichols said. “They mapped out, they met with folks where they were and they put a plan in action together for each of them individually.”
Including Monday’s announcement, 118 people have been rehoused as part of Safe Move — a milestone Nichols said was achieved in “record time.”
The city now has four months to rehouse nearly 200 people to achieve the program’s goal.
“We still feel very confident about that promise,” Nichols said. “That’s because we got right to work with the strategy that is housing people, that is closing encampments and keeping them closed. That’s what Safe Move has always been about.”
It’s been a combined effort done in conjunction with the Tulsa Day Center, mental health organizations, Tulsa police and more.
The city currently has 544 permanent emergency homeless shelter beds for families and adults, and 145 beds for youth, veterans and domestic violence survivors.
A new low-barrier shelter is expected to open in December.
Safe Move is part of Nichols’ larger effort to achieve functional zero homelessness by 2030. So far, workers have also cleared six homeless encampments.
Ismael Lele is a Report for America corps member and writes about business in Tulsa for The Oklahoma Eagle. Your donation to match our Report for America grant helps keep him writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today by visiting this link.
