Blanca is a single mother in her early 30’s with four kids under the age of eight. Any given day, you can find her in the kitchen, making one of their favorite meals, like rice, beans and vegetables.
Cooking for her kids was not something Blanca was always able to do. For a year and a half starting in 2019, Blanca was homeless. She moved between shelters in Oklahoma City with her young children, two of whom were still unable to walk. KOSU isn’t using Blanca’s last name in this story to protect her privacy.
“It was very scary,” she said, “I just remember, you know, feeling like a failure, like what was I going to do, like they didn’t deserve to have a mom like me.”
Eventually, she turned to the nonprofit Homeless Alliance for support. An organization, like more and more in Oklahoma, that uses the Housing First model – which means you don’t have to be sober, in treatment or have a job before you can get help with housing.
Before becoming homeless, Blanca lived with her ex and the father of her kids as a stay at home mom. But she said she felt isolated from the world because of physical and emotional abuse in the relationship.
“I wasn’t used to asking for help,” Blanca said. “My family was far away. So pretty much it was just me and the kids, homeless, in a state I really didn’t know.”
Dan Straughan, who helped start the Homeless Alliance 20 years ago, said Blanca is not alone in her experiences. He said barriers to entry like employment or sobriety are too high for many people who need help.
“The Housing First model is housing without preconditions,” Straughan said. “We’ll put you in housing, and then we’ll work with you on all those barriers, whatever they may be – mental health, substance abuse, developmental issues, justice involvement – all of those things.”
An Oklahoma City initiative to fight homelessness
Last year, city-run and local nonprofit agencies banded together to address homelessness in a new joint effort called the Key to Home Partnership. Key to Home was born out of a task force set up by Mayor David Holt in 2019.
Erika Warren from the partnership said the community recognized they “needed to do things a little differently.” Including a new initiative targeted at rehousing 500 chronically unsheltered people by the end of 2025.
“We go into an encampment and start doing outreach and building that rapport, and the landlord engagement specialists simultaneously are out scouring across the community to find units,” Warren said. “To make sure if we've got 30 individuals in that encampment, then we need to have 30 units of housing available on the back end to quickly move those individuals into. So it's a multifaceted community approach [with] a lot of different providers playing a very unique role.”
Warren said the process of encampment rehousing is about getting someone directly into housing from the streets, instead of helping them into a temporary shelter first.
Encampment rehousing is typically much harder to orchestrate than in-shelter assistance, due primarily to the costs and lengthy timelines required to secure needed housing units. This, Warren said, is where the public-private partnership makes so much of a difference.
Key to Home is made up of 40 contributing organizations, which allows it to build trust with individuals experiencing homelessness through consistent, reliable outreach.
“We have, right now, a 91% acceptance rate for individuals accepting housing,” Warren said. “So it's really not the case in most cases that people don't want resources, and they don't want housing. They do. Often, it's just that the system has failed them, and they've lost confidence in it.”
Before OKC, Housing First was introduced to Tulsa
Before it was brought to Oklahoma City, the Housing First model was the norm in Tulsa. Organizations like the Mental Health Association were critical to implementing it in the city.
Amanda Pippin, the housing director for the Mental Health Association in Tulsa, said the statewide change came down to a matter of basic rights.
“It can be very difficult to be stable when you don't have a roof over your head,” she said. “So really, housing first is really critical because we can’t really address any other needs until we get that housing piece done because it’s a human right. It’s not a privilege, housing is a human right.”
Straughan from Oklahoma City’s Homeless Alliance said there are still misconceptions about what Housing First means for tenants.
“I think there's a misunderstanding that we’re just giving people housing and then walking away from them,” he said. “That is not the case, and if it was, we wouldn’t have the success we’re having.”
Pippin agrees. She said the only way the system works is if there’s enough affordable housing to support it.
“We don't have enough shelter space. We don't have enough units,” Pippin said. “And then, the city is starting an initiative in November where they can't hang out on sidewalks and things like that. And it's basically turning homelessness into a criminal offense when there's really nowhere else for them to go. They could go and sit in line and wait to get into the Salvation Army all day long, and still have the probability of not having room to get in there.”
Barriers like a low eviction filing fee that hasn’t been updated since 2003, an extremely short eviction timeline, high housing costs and restrictive zoning laws also contribute to a challenging landscape for success.
Still, Housing First is making a difference at the individual level for people like Blanca. With a roof over her head, she was able to get her GED. Now, when she’s not cooking for her kids who will eat “anything and everything,” Blanca takes college courses.
“I think one of the first things that happened was we were able to heal,” she said. “We were able to feel what it is to be a normal family, just having dinner all together, or just chilling [on] the couch with some throw blankets while watching TV and the kids going to the backyard without having to worry.”
The normalcy, Blanca said, is what allowed her the strength to get to where she is today. Eventually, she said, she plans to work in public service because she “owes the community so much.”
