After Operation SAFE cleared the Reed Avenue encampment for the second time this year, Mayor Stephen Tyler Holman published a long statement on homelessness in Norman. We are reproducing it here in full, unedited — and answering it.
This is a lengthy read, but this is a complex issue and it deserves a detailed response, so please bear with me.
In this statement, I will address:
I want to be very clear about something regarding Operation SAFE and what happened on Reed Avenue today: the State of Oklahoma has every right, and, frankly, a responsibility, to maintain its own property.
The property involved is state-owned property. It is not owned by the City of Norman, and the City of Norman is not responsible for maintaining it.
The State should maintain its property just as any private property owner would be expected to maintain theirs. In reality, they should never have allowed it to deteriorate to the condition it reached in the first place.
If the State of Oklahoma would like to give up its responsibility for the Griffin State Hospital property, we would be more than happy to have a real conversation about the City taking on that obligation. If the State has no use for the property and does not want to maintain it, transferring it to a local government that does have an adopted plan and a use for it would arguably be the more fiscally conservative option for the State.
It would allow Oklahoma to get out from under the ongoing maintenance and liability associated with a property it no longer wants, while allowing Norman to consider putting the property to productive local use for our community.
This issue is also a great example of why simply breaking up an encampment is not a solution to homelessness.
The Governor's Operation SAFE cleared this same exact area just a few months ago, and today they are back dealing with an encampment that has returned once again, and larger than before.
That should tell us something: if all we do is move people out, without addressing why they are there or what happens to them afterward, we have not solved the problem. We have simply moved it temporarily.
The City of Norman has been doing this same thing on City property and, where legally appropriate, on private property for years. We have repeatedly had to address encampments along the river, in various wooded areas, and in other locations throughout the community.
City crews and police officers have spent countless hours clearing these locations, only to see people move somewhere else and, eventually, encampments return. It has become a never-ending effort because we are addressing the physical location of the encampment without adequately addressing the underlying reasons why people are experiencing homelessness in the first place.
And there is an important distinction between enforcement and actually addressing homelessness.
Unlike operation SAFE, when the City does a large camp cleanup, it is a planned and coordinated effort with local service providers.
As mentioned before, the City of Norman does not own this property, and the Norman Police Department does not have legal jurisdiction to enforce the State's trespassing restrictions on this state-owned land.
The State has clear legal authority and responsibility over its own property, and depending on the circumstances, enforcement of state law on the property can involve state law enforcement and the Cleveland County Sheriff's Office. The City can and does help coordinate when asked, but we cannot simply take over enforcement of State property.
That makes it even more disappointing that today's operation occurred without notice to the City of Norman, the Norman Police Department, or local service providers who could have helped coordinate and assist the State with an appropriate response.
As I understand it, the people in the encampment were told they could no longer remain on State property. But they were not presented with a meaningful alternative to where they could go. That is the fundamental problem with a strategy that ends at enforcement.
There is also important context about the location itself. This encampment is not simply on an isolated piece of vacant land. It is on the campus of the 134-year-old Griffin State Hospital, and it is next door to Food & Shelter for Friends, a Norman nonprofit that has been serving our community since 1981. It is also adjacent to the Cleveland County Health Department, Red Rock Behavioral Services, and Central Oklahoma Community Mental Health Services.
Those resources are a major reason we chose to pursue the new voter-approved shelter and rehousing hub on former State hospital property we purchased nearby. Putting people experiencing homelessness close to existing healthcare, behavioral health, food, shelter and social service resources makes practical sense.
Norman also has a history of working with the State on issues like this, and I believe there is an opportunity to build on that history rather than working separately from one another.
And today is not just any day. It is over 100 degrees outside, with temperatures expected to remain dangerously hot for much of the next 10 days.
No rational person would choose to live in a tent in the middle of a vacant field in an Oklahoma summer if they had another viable option. When someone is willing to endure those conditions, it should tell us that we are dealing with people who are desperate, dealing with serious barriers to housing, struggling with addiction, suffering from mental illness, or some combination of those circumstances.
We also need to recognize who many of the people coming to our shelters actually are. They are not simply people who refuse to work or refuse to follow rules. Our shelter data includes significant numbers of elderly and physically disabled people, as well as women and others fleeing domestic violence.
Oklahoma ranks #1 in the nation for the prevalence of domestic violence, making the availability of safe shelter especially important for people fleeing abusive situations. And roughly 30% of the people staying at our emergency shelter are employed or have some form of income, but that income is not enough to afford housing or they are facing other barriers that prevent them from obtaining and maintaining stable housing.
This is an important reminder that homelessness is not always the result of someone simply refusing to work. Sometimes people are working, receiving disability or retirement income, or doing everything they can, but still cannot overcome the cost of housing or other barriers they face.
That doesn't mean there shouldn't be rules. It doesn't mean people shouldn't be held accountable for criminal behavior. It doesn't mean the rights and safety of neighboring residents and businesses don't matter. They absolutely do.
But accountability works best when there are actual alternatives available.
People often say, "They need treatment or they need jail." I agree that, depending on the individual circumstances, treatment or incarceration can absolutely be appropriate. But treatment doesn't work if there isn't an available treatment bed or an appropriate treatment program, and jail isn't a long-term homelessness strategy, particularly when county jails have limited capacity.
Oklahoma already has one of the highest incarceration rates in the nation, so simply incarcerating our way out of homelessness is not a serious long-term strategy.
And unless someone is being held on a more serious charge, a person arrested for ordinary trespassing is not simply going to disappear into the county jail indefinitely. Oklahoma law establishes relatively limited penalties for ordinary trespass, and the realities of jail capacity and state law mean that someone arrested for trespassing will generally be released in a short amount of time rather than permanently housed through the criminal justice system.
So what happens next?
If we are serious about reducing homelessness, Oklahoma has to address the root causes that are contributing to it: access to healthcare, mental healthcare, addiction treatment, affordable housing, education, job training, and gainful employment, among many other factors.
I believe the best way to reduce homelessness is to prevent people from becoming homeless in the first place.
That means identifying people who are at risk of losing their housing and intervening before they end up on the streets. Helping someone stay housed is almost always better for the individual, the community, and taxpayers than trying to help them recover after they have already become chronically homeless.
And we also need to be honest about who has been responsible for making policy at the State level.
Oklahoma has had a single-party supermajority in both chambers of the Legislature for nearly 20 years, and they have controlled the Governor's office and all statewide offices that long, too.
I don't say that as a partisan talking point. I say it from the experience of someone who has been registered as an Independent for the last 10 years, after previously being both a Democrat and a Republican. My perspective on this issue is not coming from a partisan party platform.
Norman is also a politically diverse and competitive community, with roughly even number of registered Republicans and Democrats, along with a large number of Independents. That is one of the reasons I believe our local conversations should be focused less on partisan labels and more on what actually works for our community.
I also say it because accountability matters.
We are living with the results of the policies our State government has chosen to pursue for more than a decade. If the State is going to tell cities that they need to do more about homelessness, then the State also needs to take responsibility for the systems it controls and the outcomes those policies have produced.
One recent example is the Governor's decision in 2023 to dissolve the Governor's Interagency Council on Homelessness, a statewide council that had existed for nearly 20 years and was specifically created to coordinate state efforts to prevent and end homelessness. The council had provided a forum for sharing information, identifying gaps in services, and coordinating the state's response. Dissolving that council did not make the problem go away.
The statewide numbers are worth looking at. According to HUD's Point-in-Time counts, Oklahoma has seen a nearly 40% increase in nightly homelessness in the last decade.
That doesn't mean every person experiencing homelessness is the result of a State policy, and PIT counts are only a one-night snapshot and have limitations.
HUD specifically cautions that changes in counting methodology can affect comparisons between reporting periods.
But the trend is still important: after more than a decade of one-party control of State government, Oklahoma has not seen homelessness disappear. It has increased substantially.
It is also important to put Oklahoma's situation in context. Oklahoma is among the states with the highest poverty rates in the country, with a current rate of about 14.9%, while our overall homelessness rate is much closer to the middle of the national rankings. We should be concerned about the substantial increase in homelessness Oklahoma has experienced, but we should also recognize that the underlying economic and social conditions contributing to homelessness are broader than homelessness itself.
I meet with mayors and other elected officials from across Oklahoma twice a month in Oklahoma City, and homelessness is consistently one of the top issues we discuss, from our largest cities to our smallest towns.
This is not just a Norman problem. It is a statewide problem that communities of all sizes are struggling to address.
Homelessness and housing were also major priorities for the U.S. Conference of Mayors, which is why the bipartisan 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act was one of the top federal priorities this past year. Congress ultimately passed the legislation with broad bipartisan support, and it became law without the President's signature after he declined to sign it.
I am thankful for the help and resources it aims to provide communities working to address our housing and homelessness challenges.
If we're going to have an honest conversation about homelessness, we need to stop pretending this is solely a problem created by cities and start asking whether the State-level systems for healthcare, behavioral health, addiction treatment, affordable housing, education, and employment are producing the outcomes Oklahoma needs.
This problem also goes far beyond Oklahoma. Homelessness has been a national issue since at least the 1980s, when homelessness grew dramatically and federal policy began shifting responsibility for mental health and social services more heavily toward the states.
The federal Mental Health Systems Act of 1980 was largely reversed the following year, reducing federal support for community mental health and shifting more responsibility to states. At the same time, the federal government reduced funding for affordable housing and other local assistance. These were national policy decisions whose effects have been felt for decades.
And this cannot be a City of Norman problem alone.
Norman has a responsibility, and we are doing our part. But Cleveland County and the State of Oklahoma also have responsibilities.
Over the last several years, Norman has;
The Norman Police Department is also doing its part through the PACE Team, which works proactively with City partners and service providers to address homelessness, crime and quality-of-life concerns while connecting people with appropriate resources.
We have also pursued permanent supportive housing through HOME-ARP funds and continued working with organizations including City Care, Food & Shelter, Mental Health Association Oklahoma, Central Oklahoma Community Mental Health Center, the Salvation Army, Mission Norman, McFarlin, First Presbyterian, and many others that provide shelter, food, treatment, transitional housing and other services.
Norman has worked with and approved expansions involving organizations such as the Salvation Army, Mission Norman, the Food & Shelter Share Center food pantry, McFarlin's food pantry and other community resources.
The City has also repeatedly stepped in to facilitate emergency and warming shelter operations and support nonprofit partners when additional capacity was needed. Norman is currently contracting with City Care to operate a low-barrier emergency shelter that keeps 50+ people off the streets per night, and voters approved an $8 million bond in April to construct a permanent homeless shelter and resource facility that will provide overnight shelter for up to 120 people and connect residents with services designed to help get them off the street and transition out of homelessness as fast as possible.
These are not theoretical plans. The Opportunity Knocks program is already operating, providing paid work and social services to people experiencing or at risk of homelessness, while the new Social Services Office is now focused specifically on outreach, coordination and connecting people with housing, healthcare, behavioral health and other resources.
None of that means Norman has solved homelessness. We haven't. There is no single city program that will.
But it does mean the assertion that Norman is simply doing nothing about homelessness is factually wrong.
What I would like to see now is the same level of urgency from the County and the State.
Where is the additional treatment capacity? Where are the mental health resources? Where are the housing solutions? Where are the employment and rehabilitation programs? Where is the coordinated plan for what happens to people after an encampment is cleared?
The State cannot simultaneously say that cities need to solve homelessness, take enforcement action on State property without coordinating with the local community, and then provide no meaningful alternative for the people displaced by that action.
If the goal is simply to make an encampment disappear for a week or two, Operation SAFE can accomplish that. If the goal is to actually reduce homelessness, improve public safety, and help people rebuild their lives, we need much more than a cleanup crew and a line of police cars.
We need enforcement when enforcement is appropriate. We need accountability when accountability is appropriate. We need treatment when treatment is appropriate. We need housing when housing is appropriate.
And above all, we need the City, the County, and the State working together on an actual long-term strategy instead of continuing to repeat policies that have already failed to solve the underlying problem.
That is how we make Norman, and Oklahoma safer, cleaner, and healthier, not simply by moving people from one field, sidewalk, or neighborhood to another.
Mayor Holman — most of this holds up, and I'll say so publicly. The State cleared that lot twice and left people with nowhere to go. Prevention does beat recovery. And the claim that Norman is doing nothing is wrong.
But there's a paragraph missing from this statement, and it's the one that's in your hands.
Norman/Cleveland County reached functional zero for veteran homelessness, and HUD, the VA and the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness confirmed it in February 2018. We went on the federal list as entry #60, and we are still the only community in Oklahoma on the VA's list today. This state does not collect many federally certified social-policy wins. That one is ours.
To be precise, because precision is the point: functional zero doesn't mean the number hit zero. It means the system housed every veteran it found faster than new ones appeared. That is a harder thing, and a better one.
And it did not happen because of a program. It happened because the whole community showed up. The VA, Thunderbird Clubhouse, Food & Shelter, the Salvation Army, Variety Care, Norman PD — meeting daily. Thirty-four veterans housed. What made it work was four things: a by-name list, working coordinated entry, a dedicated funding stream, and one table that was accountable for the outcome.
We built that system for veterans. We never built it for anybody else. Between 2015 and 2020, our overall count doubled — 133 to 266 — and it has stayed in that range ever since: 240 in 2024, 238 in 2025.
That one isn't the Governor's fault.
Most people reading this have never heard the term, so let me name it plainly. A Continuum of Care is the regional body HUD requires in order to plan, coordinate and compete for federal homelessness funding. Ours is the Norman/Cleveland County Continuum of Care — HUD number OK-504. It covers the entire county, not just Norman. Every federal homelessness dollar that comes to Cleveland County comes through it.
Here is its record.
That is not a poverty problem and it is not a State problem. It is an administration problem, and it is entirely local.
There is confusion in this town about this, so here it is straight:
The Salvation Army broke ground June 17 on a $2 million privately funded Phase One — a commercial kitchen, a dining hall, and space for social services, opening around early 2027. The beds are a later phase, going from 40 to 46. Their published intake rules: a current state photo ID or a police clearance letter from Norman PD, 14 consecutive nights (extendable if you're in case management with income for a housing plan), then 45 days before you can return.
The Reed Avenue shelter is $8 million in voter-approved bonds, 120 beds, low-barrier, city-owned. It's frozen at the Oklahoma Supreme Court, the Attorney General's office has indicated it won't issue the bond certificate while the appeal is pending, and construction runs about two years after that.
Those are not competitors. They serve different people. The Salvation Army's model works for someone who has an ID and is stabilizing. The low-barrier model is the only open door for the chronic cases the sweeps keep producing on Reed Avenue — the ones with no ID, no clean record, and nowhere to be at 4:30 p.m.
Support both. I do. And when Reed opens, it should be co-managed under contract with Food & Shelter — 43 years in this work, now at 201 Reed Avenue, literally next door to the site, already running the pantry, the day services and the housing case management. Not two operations running in parallel a hundred feet apart. One system, two front doors.
That $8 million buys a building. By law it cannot buy one hour of case management.
The part nobody says out loud is the roughly $930,000 a year it will take to operate it — every year, from the General Fund and City Care fundraising, with the split still to be negotiated. And there is no system behind that number. We are about to open 120 beds into the same coordination vacuum that let a cleared encampment come back bigger in ninety days.
Here's the part I want you to hear, because it's the opportunity, not the complaint:
That bond is the most valuable fundraising asset this city has, and nobody is using it. Every major federal program requires non-federal match before you can compete — HUD CoC requires 25% on everything but leasing, and ESG requires a full dollar for every federal dollar. Local public money is exactly what satisfies it. The bond is what makes Norman eligible. And to a foundation, a community that taxed itself for this has already answered the two questions funders ask first: will the community put its own money in, and is there anyone to operate it.
We're not asking donors to build the building. Voters did that. We're asking them to fund the thing the building can't fund itself. That is a fundable ask, and it has never been made.
Here is where this stops being abstract.
OK-504's Point-in-Time count — the one-night census HUD requires every January — was 240 in 2024 and 238 in 2025. This January it came in at 165. That's a 30.7% drop in one year.
It was not a drop. Two things happened.
The count ran January 23, the day before a winter storm. The CoC's own organizer told the OU Daily her team completed significantly fewer surveys than usual, and said plainly:
"I think that 238 number is way, way closer to what the actual number of unsheltered homelessness is in Norman."
A warming station opened during the storm the following night — one day too late to be counted.
And here is the part I'd ask you to check yourself, because it is on our own CoC's website right now. It says people at McKown Village were reclassified from Emergency Shelter to Transitional Housing, and that Transitional Housing is:
"still considered sheltered homelessness but is only counted on the Housing Inventory Count (HIC) and not the PIT Count."
That is not the rule, and HUD's own paperwork proves it. 24 CFR 578.3 defines the Point-in-Time count as a count of sheltered and unsheltered people. Transitional Housing is an explicit universe in System Performance Measure 3.2. And decisively — HUD's published OK-504 reports carry a Transitional Housing column inside the PIT table: 20 people in 2024, 1 in 2025. Moving people from one sheltered column to another sheltered column removes nobody from the count.
Now look at where the count happened. The CoC's own residency numbers this year: Norman 53%. All of Cleveland County 57%. So Noble, Lexington, Slaughterville, Little Axe, Etowah and the whole unincorporated south produced about 4% — roughly three people out of 73. Out of a non-Norman, non-Moore population of about 105,000 at the 2020 census, across 539 square miles of land, surveyed by 38 volunteers. That's one volunteer per fourteen square miles. Slaughterville alone is thirty-nine.
That is not a map of homelessness in Cleveland County. It's a map of where we sent people to look.
I want to be careful here, because the honest version matters more than the loud one: a low count does not cost us formula dollars. HUD allocates Pro Rata Need using the CDBG formula — census data, not homeless counts. What it costs us is worse. System Performance Measure 3.1 is the PIT count, so a methodology-driven drop enters our permanent federal record as a real reduction, and the next genuine improvement will read as a failure. Federal rule requires us to hand that number to Norman, Moore and the County for their Consolidated Plans — the documents that steer local money. And it was published in February, six weeks before people voted on a shelter.
ClevelandConnect.org is not a website. It's a network.
It is sixty-eight congregations across Cleveland County and the neighboring McClain County line — Norman, Moore, Noble, Lexington, Little Axe, Slaughterville, plus Newcastle and Purcell. Baptist, Methodist, Church of Christ, Nazarene, Assemblies of God, Catholic, Episcopal, Presbyterian, UCC, Unitarian, Latter-day Saint, Jewish, Muslim, Bahá'í, two Spanish-language congregations, eleven OU campus ministries. They sit alongside the wraparound providers in one searchable directory of food, shelter, medical, utilities, mental health, veterans, legal aid and crisis services. Built to work on a phone, offline, in a parking lot at nine at night.
Those churches are already in the towns the count doesn't reach. They already run the pantries and the meals. And HUD's PIT Count Methodology Guide names soup kitchens and food pantries as valid service-based count locations — to supplement the night-of count, within seven days, with deduplication.
HUD's own FY2026 CoC Application asks each Continuum to describe its methodology and data-quality changes, and names the examples: "adding a service-based count component" … "additional volunteers, and changes in providers contributing data for the count."
That is a description of what this network already does. It exists today. It cost the City nothing.
So here is a concrete offer, on the record: Cleveland Connect is ready to work with the Norman/Cleveland County Continuum of Care — OK-504 — on the January 2027 Point-in-Time count. The whole county. Not just Norman, Moore and Noble. Planning for a January count starts in the fall. That's now.
None of that is expensive. All of it is federally rewarded. Every one of those steps raises what OK-504 can bring home next year, and the year after that.
You and every member of Council were hand-delivered notebooks laying all of this out. Not one reply. Not a question, not a "who are you," nothing.
I'm not asking you to agree with me. I'm asking you to open it.
Every number above traces to one of these. Check them.