This page exists because nobody else has put these figures in one place. It is for the citizens of Cleveland County, for the people they elect, and for anyone who wants to check a claim rather than take it on faith. Every number below comes from HUD, from our own Continuum of Care, from SAMHSA, or from the City — and every one is linked at the bottom.
Every January, HUD requires each Continuum of Care to count everyone sleeping in shelter and everyone sleeping outside on a single night. It is the number that drives local budgets, city plans, and the federal record. Here is ours.
| January | Sheltered | Unsheltered | Total |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2023 | 139 | 74 | 213 |
| 2024 | 149 | 91 | 240 |
| 2025 | 121 | 117 | 238 |
| 2026 (preliminary) | 92 | 73 | 165 |
For longer context: the Norman/Cleveland County Gaps Analysis records the count doubling between 2015 and 2020 — from 133 to 266. It has stayed in that range ever since.
A 30.7% one-year drop would be extraordinary news. It isn't news. Two things happened, and neither of them was fewer people.
One: the weather. The count ran on 23 January, 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.
Two: a reclassification made on a rule that does not exist. The CoC's own Point-in-Time page states that people staying at McKown Village were moved 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. 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 HUD's own published reports for OK-504 carry a Transitional Housing column inside the PIT table:
| HUD's published OK-504 PIT report | Emergency Shelter | Transitional Housing | Sheltered total |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2023 | 125 | 14 | 139 |
| 2024 | 129 | 20 | 149 |
| 2025 | 120 | 1 | 121 |
Moving people from one sheltered column into another sheltered column removes nobody from the count.
A low count does not cut our formula funding — HUD allocates Pro Rata Need using the CDBG formula, which is census-based. What it does instead 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 then requires us to hand that number to Norman, Moore and the County for their Consolidated Plans, the documents that steer local money.
OK-504 covers all of Cleveland County. The count does not.
The gap between those first two figures is the whole story. Norman accounts for 53%. All of Cleveland County accounts for 57%. Which means Noble, Lexington, Slaughterville, Little Axe, Etowah and the entire unincorporated south of the county produced roughly four percent of the count — about three people.
The non-Norman, non-Moore population of Cleveland County was about 105,000 at the 2020 census. The county is 539 square miles of land. Thirty-eight volunteers works out to one per fourteen square miles. Slaughterville alone is thirty-nine.
That is not a map of homelessness in Cleveland County. It is a map of where we sent people to look.
HUD's PIT standards require a CoC either to cover its geography or to document a determination that nobody is out there. Neither a coverage map nor an exclusion record is published for OK-504.
Every federal homelessness dollar that reaches Cleveland County comes through OK-504. Here is how our draw compares with the two other metropolitan Continuums in Oklahoma.
The more revealing comparison is the planning grant — the money HUD provides purely to run the Continuum: to keep the data clean, run the count, coordinate agencies, and write the applications. It is the closest thing to a measure of whether anyone's full-time job is the system.
This is the part that has nothing to do with poverty, politics, or the State of Oklahoma. These are amounts HUD has already set aside for a Continuum our size, published in HUD's own reports, that Cleveland County simply does not request.
SOAR is how a disability claim becomes approved income and Medicaid for someone living in a shelter. It is not a grant. There is no competition and no match. Lawton has four trained leads. Cleveland County has none.
The planning grant has been frozen at $13,173 since FY2022. Before that, when the City of Norman was the Collaborative Applicant, it was $13,375. The role passed to a nonprofit in April 2022 and the number went down two hundred dollars. Over four years, that is roughly $147,000 of federal money nobody asked for.
Federal regulation 24 CFR 578.7 sets out what every Continuum of Care must maintain. Here is the checklist, and where OK-504 stands as of today.
None of this requires money. It requires somebody whose job it is.
None of this is a claim that Cleveland County can't do it. We have done it — once, completely, and the federal government certified it.
It worked because of four things, none of them expensive: a by-name list, working coordinated entry, a dedicated funding stream, and one table accountable for the outcome. The VA, Thunderbird Clubhouse, Food & Shelter, the Salvation Army, Variety Care and Norman Police met daily.
We built that system for veterans and never built it for anybody else. Every number on this page is what happened next.
Every figure above. Check them.