BY NATHAN POPPE FOR CURBSIDE CHRONICLE

Black Americans make up 15 percent of Oklahoma City’s population, but they are 26 percent of the homeless population. Roughly 11,000 OKC residents experience homelessness annually, according to the Homeless Management Information System.

This racial trend isn’t unique to our city. It’s a national disparity. Four out of every 10 Americans experiencing homelessness are Black, despite comprising only 13 percent of the U.S. population, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Throughout the country, a third of Black households experience severe rent burden. That means half or more of their income is dedicated to covering rent. In OKC, Black households experiencing severe rent burden are at 25 percent. It’s been stuck this way for more than a decade, according to Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies.

There is no single cause, or convenient fix, for homelessness. And the issue isn’t color blind. The odds are against Black Oklahomans.

Meghan Mueller works as the director of community capacity building at the Homeless Alliance and identifies individual circumstances, systemic failures and structural factors as the root of homelessness. She said it’s oversimplifying to attribute homelessness to substance abuse or domestic violence because most individual factors don’t impact everyone equally.

Same goes for systemic failures which occur when safety nets fail — think aging out of foster care or someone getting discharged from jail with nowhere to live. Structural factors are large-scale societal issues like the cost of living, healthcare or racism.

Homelessness doesn’t happen in a vacuum, Meghan said. It’s dozens of different systems interacting and ultimately failing people. In 2019, Homeless Alliance and partner agencies housed 854 people — more than 300 were Black.

“Black Americans are disproportionately impacted by a myriad of social issues because of generations of trauma and oppression,” Meghan said. “You can’t look at individual homelessness without considering the entire picture.

“I think it is certainly a major concern for us as homeless service providers. When you look at the disparities in housing and health outcomes across the board, I think it is a crisis. These disparities will not go away without major reforms in a variety of system

Although Oklahoma was still a young state in the aftermath of the Great Depression, the seeds of housing discrimination had been planted in the Sooner State. The evidence of inequality was painted on redlining maps.

In an attempt to gauge the riskiness of housing mortgages in the late 1930s, the U.S. government — through its own Home Owners’ Loan Corporation — created color-coded maps. The term redlining was born from neighborhoods with non-White residents, commonly marked in red. For Oklahoma City, much of the east and south residential portions of the city were red and also labeled “hazardous.”

“Neighborhoods where Black people lived … were usually considered ineligible for FHA backing,” he wrote. “Black people were viewed as a contagion. Redlining went beyond FHA-backed loans and spread to the entire mortgage industry, which was already rife with racism, excluding Black people from most legitimate means of obtaining a mortgage.”

Camille Landry is a community activist and owner of Nappy Roots Books, which is known for both retail and being a community center for northeast OKC residents. She has felt the impact of redlining for as long as she can remember. It’s obvious to anyone who’s lived it, she said.

Camille said. “It (redlining) removes the financial clout from my community that would enable the people who work hard, have business knowledge and are careful with their money. It’s not that they have any less money than the person who is a real estate developer, but they have the wrong skin tone to be able to go to a major bank and ask to develop a shopping center. Therefore, there still isn’t a grocery store in my neighborhood.”

We’re living in a reality where 4 in 100 Black Oklahomans are housed in prisons and jails. The incarceration rate is five times higher for Black Oklahomans than for White, according to the Oklahoma Policy Institute.

Incarceration not only creates debt and destroys wealth but also causes numerous collateral consequences impacting housing, voting and future employment, according to Prison Policy Initiative.

Oklahoma City Police Chief Wade Gourley was pressed on the topic during a June press conference, and he dismissed the existence of systemic issues in his department.

“I just don’t want folks making the assumption there are systemic problems here because there are not,” Gourley said.

Ward 2 City Councilmember James Cooper challenged that idea with six proposals pushing to change policing. The effort aims to expand crisis intervention training to the entire department as well as increase homeless outreach. The department currently has two officers dedicated to homeless outreach. The proposals passed unanimously on June 16.

“This is the start,” Cooper told The Frontier. “For decades, too many levels of government didn’t address mental health, domestic violence, generational poverty and cyclical violence. So, these proposals are just the start of the conversation about how we right those wrongs.”