The city has launched a new website Thursday allowing for the public to track its progress on ending homelessness, a goal of Mayor Monroe Nichols' "Safe Move" program.
The site's launch coincided with the announcement of two additional homeless encampments being decommissioned, with its unhoused residents being moved into some kind of supportive housing program.
"Safe Move Tulsa is proving that when you focus your resources around a common goal and put your investments where your needs are - great things can happen," Nichols said via a press release.
The website features live tickers indicating how many people have been moved into housing programs, how many encampments have been removed and how much garbage in those encampments has been tossed.
As of Monday morning, that number was 68 people moved into programs, five encampments closed and over 61 tons of trash removed.
The site also features an interactive map of decommissioned encampments, as seen here:
"People who have heard about Safe Move Tulsa, who are seeing things in the news about an encampment closure and have more questions, they have a place to go," said Emily Hall, the mayor's senior advisor on homelessness.
"Safe Move Tulsa" was officially launched in November with a plan to end street homelessness in the city by 2030, a focus Nichols regularly championed during his mayoral campaign and throughout the beginning of his term.
The initiative, which grew out of the city council's Housing, Homelessness & Mental Health Task Force, otherwise known as the "3H" task force, have evolved into a public-private partnership, partially due to uncertainty about future public funding for such programs.
"We can't do this work along," Hall said. "It takes our services providers, it takes non-profits, it takes our business leaders all coming to the table around one common goal to really move this work forward."
The first phase of the city's efforts has a goal of moving 300 unhoused people into supportive programs. While phase one has been funded by a combination of city dollars and philanthropic donations, totaling $11 million, phases two and three have yet to be funded. The city said those phases will require an additional $20 million in one-time funding and then $30 million annually to keep the program going.
Nichols' vision for a more involved solution to homelessness has faced resistance from the state, especially Governor Kevin Stitt, who launched his own short-lived push in September to close homeless encampments by utilizing the Oklahoma Highway Patrol, a move that drew swift condemnation from local officials.
