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Led by mental health advocates, Tulsa targets end to chronic homelessness
In an effort spanning more than 20 years, concerned citizens and organizations in Tulsa, Oklahoma have combined careful planning, proactive leadership, and a generous element of public and private funding to build one of the nation’s leading housing and recovery programs. In doing so, Tulsans have struck powerful blows against the stigma associated with mental illness and disabilities, a stigma that can lead to discrimination in housing, services, and opportunities, according to Michael W. Brose, executive director of the Mental Health Association in Tulsa, during the 28th Rosalynn Carter Symposium on Mental Health Policy.
A major component of achieving the Mental Health Association in Tulsa’s mission is its nationally recognized Housing Services program, which offers safe, affordable housing to 875 Tulsans, many of whom are battling mental illnesses and overcoming homelessness.
Approximately 50% of the Association’s current 650 units of housing are dedicated to homeless or formerly homeless adult individuals and families. Debt-free ownership, along with its mixed-income, mixed-population model, enables the Association to promote integration into the community, provide a sustainable operating budget and gives it the means to purchase and develop new units of scattered-site housing.
In July, the 100,000 Homes Campaign ranked the Association No. 2 in the nation in the percentage of chronically homeless people moving into permanent housing each month. In addition, 93% of Association tenants who once lived on the streets did not return to homelessness in 2012.
Strategy: Move quietly at first
When Brose became executive director of the Association in 1993, board members were already focused on solving the problem of homelessness, thanks in part to a pair of board-commissioned studies. The first study, commissioned in the late 1980s, found that untreated mental illness was a “frequent ingredient” among the city’s homeless individuals. The second study explored housing options available to the Association and other local housing advocates, in light of the Fair Housing Amendments Act of 1988, which boosted penalties and enforcement capabilities to prevent discrimination against individuals in housing due to their disabilities.
“In Tulsa, we have made a real effort to address stigma through supportive housing,” Brose said at the Symposium, noting that many municipalities pursue “traditional” sources of housing, which include housing that is:
· owned by a local housing authority,
· paid for by housing vouchers,
· subsidized under Section 8,
· funded by tax credits offered to property developers, or
· financed using Section 811 supportive housing capitaladvanced by the U.S. Dept. of Housing and Urban Development, (HUD).
By 1990, the Association had pursued both Section 8 and developer-tax-credit-financed housing options, but a consultant suggested exploring private funding options as well. One key benefit of this approach—attractive to the Association’s board and local housing advocates—was that private funding would enable essential projects to move forward more quietly—out of the public eye—in their formative stages.
This low-key approach would minimize the risk that projects benefitting people coping with homelessness, mental illness, addictions, and disabilities could be killed or delayed in public hearings, where “running smack-dab into stigma and discrimination—and all of the fear that sometimes drives it,” is not uncommon, said Brose.
“What we did was think about braiding public and private money,” Brose said. “To start, we found a HUD demonstration grant. Then we leveraged private funds and looked at developing housing with a debt-free model. If we could own it debt-free, we could provide housing with the maximum affordability for the residents.”
Next, the group sought to create a 50/50 mix of residents in the housing that it developed. “The goal was to have half of the residents be individuals living with a mental illness or in some state of recovery, while the rest would be what we call ‘market-rate renters,’ ” Brose said. “In this type of mixed model, you can’t tell who is who and everybody integrates nicely into the community.”
“Out of the woodwork”
The Association’sfirst housing project was its Walker Hall Transitional Living Center, which opened in early 1991. Walker Hall is still in operation and has helped hundreds of Tulsans rebuild their lives.
“In the early ’90s,” Brose said, “we found that people had a hard time going from Walker Hall into traditional housing, so we found we needed more housing.”
With the help of another HUD grant, the Association purchased another apartment building, intending to renovate it and utilize the 50/50 model to create a mixed population of residents. But this time, the mixed model didn’t work.
“There were so many people,” Brose said. “There was an extreme level of demand among those that we were trying to serve.” The Association soon discovered that the community’s need for safe, affordable, and decent housing stretched far beyond the population of those homeless due to poorly treated mental illnesses.
As word of the project spread, Brose recalled, “People were coming out of the woodwork, coming from everywhere seeking housing — people with HIV/Aids, people being deinstitutionalized, people reentering society from incarceration, people with low incomes.” Faced with an enormous and demonstrated community need, the Association decided to launch a capital campaign in 2001.
“We went to local funders — without the benefit of a fancy concept drawing — and said, ‘Give us money, we’ll pool it, and then buy properties on the commercial market, carefully and at very competitive prices to meet this housing need.’ ”
In the first phase of the campaign, which was funded by Tulsa-area donors, the Association raised $5.25 million — enough todevelop 146 units of permanent supportive housing, mostly apartments. Because the funds were sourced from private donors, Brose said the Association was able to obtain the housing “quietly, without a lot of fuss.”
Suddenly, Brose recalled, “We were in the housing business and we learned that it is a complicated and fast-moving business, with a lot of regulations.”
New coalition, new goal: “end chronic homelessness”
Following the success of the Association’s 2001 Capital Campaign, Gail Richards and Judy Kishner of Tulsa’s Zarrow Family Foundations agreed to lead a new capital campaign, “Building Tulsa, Building Lives” (BTBL). The campaign aims to end chronic homelessness in Tulsa by raising $30 million to develop 511 units of additional housing, using both private and public funding, based on the Association’s mixed-income, mixed-population model of debt-free ownership.
Early on, the BTBL campaign leveraged the “street cred” gained by the donors and agencies involved in earlier housing successes to become something of a cause célèbre in the city, Brose said.
“We did a lot of housing tours, showing people — business leaders, donors, media — how we put the projects together, how we broke down the stigma of mental illness,” Brose said, “and we introduced them to our residents.”
To date, the BTBL campaign has helped develop 435 units of housing toward the goal of 511.Brose noted that “28.5 million is already in the bank,” a comment that inspired applause from the Symposium’s audience.
Overcoming NIMBY
Though strategies like those used in Tulsa to outflank stigma — and the “not in my backyard” or NIMBY fears that sometimes drive opposition to housing programs — can be successful, it's equally clear that past housing development successes do not predict future results.
In 2008, a partnership between BTBL, the Association and the Tulsa Housing Authoritysought to use private funds to leverage a multi-million dollar housing grant from state legislators. Their goal was to use the state funds to assist in construction of a multi-story apartment complex, Yale Avenue Apartments.
The $9.7 million apartment complex has 76 units — 66 efficiencies and 10 one-bedroom apartments.Fifty percent of the units are dedicated to adult individuals with mental illnesses who need or prefer long-term supportive or independent living housing in the community that has 24-hour security on-site. Once finished, the complex became home for, among many others, individuals being turned out of Tulsa’s aging downtown YMCA building.
The presence of state money, together with the need for a zoning decision on the property, made a public hearing on the project mandatory — if only so that the project’s neighbors could be informed of the local zoning board’s decision, which had already been made. United by their anger, opponents of the project formed a group called “Who Owns Tulsa,” and started making noise.
“The approach did bring out the NIMBYs, hot and heavy,” Brose said. Faced with the opposition, Brose turned to a tried-and-true approach: educating the community and media outlets about the benefits that the Yale Avenue Apartments would bring. The approach was simple: “I showed up at the Tulsa World newspaper with a van to take the entire editorial board on a tour of the project,” Brose said. The tour and a resulting piece on the paper’s editorial page“really turned things around,” he said.
Since then, a number of Yale Avenue Apartments tenants, notably veterans, have adopted a neighborhood park, where they often pick up trash. A number also help out at neighboring churches.
“They are truly integrated into this community,” Brose said. “Likewise, the neighbors are involved with activities that support the Yale tenants.”
Another high profile project — the rehab of a run-down apartment building that leveraged $1.5 million in state stimulus money, also stirred local resident controversy, but ultimately added to the Association’s housing effort. So far, the Association has 18 apartment complexes in 14 Tulsa neighborhoods.
Brose noted that after an initial period of concern, local residents generally adjust to the Association’s tenants and, in time, come to “love” the investments in their neighborhoods and community.
Housing creates employment
The Association’s apartment complexes are staffed and maintained by a diverse group of workers, many of whom live in Association housing and battle mental illness, addiction, significant physical health problems, and have histories of homelessness or felony offenses.
“We can’t hire everyone, but we can hold up the individuals who work for us and say, ‘Here’s our workforce — people like these make great employees, hire them!’ ”
Spreading the word on ‘housing first’
For three days last September, 800 people from 140 cities, 35 states, D.C. and three countries attended the 2012 National Zarrow Mental Health Symposium and Mental Health America Annual Conference in Tulsa. Co-presented by the Association, the conference allowed attendees to share ideas on how to provide affordable housing, along with much-needed support systems, for those battling mental illness.
To close the conference, Brose shared the power of providing housing for individuals with mental illness living on the streets: “Everybody is troubled by homelessness and everybody would love to find a solution, but they don’t know what to do,” he said to the audience of housing and recovery experts. “It is incumbent upon us to show them that we know how.”
