Heather Warlick, Oklahoma Watch

In April, Anthony Goulding, died in flames as sheriff’s deputies attempted to enforce an eviction order against him and his wife from the Oklahoma City home they had occupied for decades.

Charles Henderson Jr. died alone in a tent the first week of January. He’d been homeless since October due to an eviction.

In December 2023, Eviction Lab released a study showing a direct link between eviction and death.

This month, Oklahoma City’s The Curbside Chronicle is dedicated to the 74 people experiencing homelessness who died in Oklahoma City in 2024. According to 2024 Point-in-Time surveys, evictions and housing instability were the top precursors to becoming homeless in Oklahoma.

While evictions aren’t always an onramp to homelessness, for many of Oklahoma’s poorest and most vulnerable residents, losing a home can have mortal consequences.

Both Henderson and Goulding shared their eviction stories with Oklahoma Watch before they died.

Nowhere to Go

Goulding, 82, was evicted from the home he’d shared with his wife for 20 years. The eviction was filed by his stepson, who bought the home from Goulding’s wife. Goulding resisted moving out after a judge ordered him to vacate.

He told Oklahoma Watch after his eviction hearing that he and his wife had nowhere to go. He was desperate to stay in his home and said he had no hope for the future.

“I guess we’ll have to go out to the streets,” Goulding said.

When two Oklahoma County sheriff’s deputies arrived to remove the elderly couple forcibly, Goulding doused a hallway and bedroom with gasoline and set the home on fire.

Deputies dragged Goulding’s wife out of the inferno, but Goulding died, engulfed in the blaze.

Henderson met his premature end in a tent on an empty plot of urban land in Oklahoma City.

He became homeless after his mother was forced to choose between her own housing security and allowing her vulnerable son to stay with her.

Henderson, 36, lived with his mother, Sheila Gaddy, for about two years after he was released from prison. She resided at the Moore Santa Fe Estates mobile home park for 20 years.

Theirs was a symbiotic living arrangement. Gaddy needed Henderson’s help recovering from a broken leg and Henderson needed a place he could live within a green zone, an area more than 500 feet from schools, daycares and parks.

Henderson served six years in prison and was required to maintain registration as a sex offender in Oklahoma. He needed an address.

But Henderson wasn’t on Gaddy’s lease as an approved resident. After rejecting his lease application, the mobile home park filed for eviction against Gaddy for having an unapproved resident.

Charles Henderson lived in a tent in a field before he died on Jan. 3. He had been evicted and became homeless before his death. (Courtesy photo)

At the eviction hearing, Henderson promised to move out if Gaddy could stay. A month later, a judge decided the agreement had been broken and upheld the eviction, forcing Henderson to the streets and Gaddy to stay with another adult son.

Henderson’s family was alarmed when they didn’t hear from him all day on Jan. 2. Henderson had stayed in contact while living in his tent, sending regular text messages expressing gratitude and regret, yet hope for a positive future.

A Map Toward Mortality

Eviction can be a step into homelessness, especially in Oklahoma, which is the tenth poorest state in the nation.

“Most of my clients are so low-income, their savings are non-existent, they're lucky if they're coming out at zero at the end of the month, rather than in debt,” Legal Aid Services housing attorney Justin Neal said.

Neal assisted Henderson and his mother during her eviction hearing.

Neal said that after an eviction, people may be locked out of their homes and lose everything, from their mail to any local support network they may have built. Moving costs can be impossible. For some of Oklahoma’s poorest residents, an eviction is a virtual death sentence.

Henderson was working with a social worker to clean up his traffic record. He got his driver’s license back and completed a job-readiness program at Diversion Hub, a nonprofit that works to keep people with criminal pasts from recidivism.

He even had a job interview set for the day after he died.

But he didn’t take the best care of himself, Gaddy said. He had health care through a tribal clinic, but diabetes requires ongoing attention and he wasn’t faithful with his insulin.

A staph infection might have killed Henderson, his brother said. But Henderson was young and likely could have fought the infection with proper medical attention.

“I don't think anybody deserves to be found dead in a tent,” Neal said.

Housing is Health Care

Premature death is a constant threat to the estimated 4,000 homeless Oklahomans, especially during winter when too few shelter beds mean hundreds of people sleeping outdoors in freezing temperatures.

“Having a roof over your head is kind of step one in being able to maintain health, whether that's physical health, mental health,” said Meghan Mueller, CEO of The Homeless Alliance in Oklahoma City. “Having the stability of a place to call home is health care. When you don't have that, outcomes are bad.”

It's been a bad season for deaths among people experiencing homelessness, Mueller said. During the past few weeks, she has received several calls about deaths in the homeless community.

“You know, we as a community have done really good work around getting people off the streets and into permanent housing, but as evictions continue to remain really high, the inflow into our system, it's a faucet that we just haven't been able to turn off,” Mueller said.

This article originally appeared in Oklahoma Watch, a nonprofit news organization that produces in-depth and investigative journalism as a public service.

Punishing people experiencing homelessness for sleeping outdoors is not cruel and unusual punishment, even if too few shelter beds are available, the United States Supreme Court said Friday after reviewing City of Grants Pass v. Johnson et al.

The much-anticipated decision came after Oklahoma passed a law this year criminalizing unauthorized camping on public rights-of-way and state-owned land.

Oklahoma’s law will add obstacles to survival for Oklahoma’s estimated 3,800 people experiencing homelessness, especially since the state’s largest cities, Oklahoma City and Tulsa only have enough shelter beds to accommodate about two-thirds of their homeless populations.

In Tulsa, 37% of the 1,427 people documented in the city’s Point-in-Time Count sleep unsheltered on any given night. In Oklahoma City, 26% of the city’s 1,838 population sleep under the stars. Oklahoma’s night shelters are full nearly every night and many cities have no services for people experiencing homelessness.

Previously, The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals determined in the Grants Pass case that fining and/or imprisoning homeless people when shelters are full amounts to cruel and unusual punishment under the Constitution’s Eighth Amendment.

The Supreme Court decision in the case reverses the Ninth Circuit decision, allowing local control and ordinances in the dozens of American cities and a handful of states that have camping bans.

According to the syllabus attached to the Grants Pass Supreme Court ruling, the Cruel and Unusual Punishment Clause was adopted to ensure the nation would never resort to formerly tolerated punishments now considered cruel. Cruel punishments were those that brought terror, pain, or disgrace to the recipient.

Punishments are considered unusual when they have, since the writing of the clause, fallen out of use.

The Cruel and Unusual Punishment Clause focuses on methods of punishment, not whether a city or state may impose punishment for certain behaviors in the first place.

“The Supreme Court's decision will make life even more dangerous for our neighbors who don't have homes,” said Sen. Julia Kirt, D-Oklahoma City. “And the likely increase in law enforcement encounters may derail the real progress we are making to build trust and connect people with the resources they need to rebuild a thriving life.”

Plaintiffs in Grants Pass v. Johnson et. al. (Gloria Johnson and John Logan who began the class action suit) also pointed to a prior case, Robinson v. California, in which the court held that a person’s status, such as being addicted to a drug, is different from conduct, such as buying that drug. In the Robinson case, the Court determined that the state couldn’t criminalize status but upheld the broad power to prohibit illegal behaviors.

The syllabus states that in Grants Pass, camping bans in unauthorized areas do not criminalize status. Instead, the bans prohibit actions taken by individuals regardless of status.

“It’s really a disappointing outcome,” said Josh Sanders, director of outreach at the Tulsa Day Center. “But I can’t say I didn’t see it coming.”

Sanders referred to the direction the conservative Supreme Court took in its questioning, which veered toward extreme examples, such as whether allowing camping included allowing people to defecate in public.

“We can piece it apart all day but we have to find a solution that works,” Sanders said.

Justice Neil Gorsuch conceded in the 6-3 opinion that some believe camping bans create a revolving door, circulating people experiencing homelessness from the street to the criminal justice system and back to the street.

Gorsuch lists in the opinion some of the problems associated with homeless encampments on public property, including increases in crimes by and against homeless individuals, sexual assaults, coercion to sex work, drug distribution, diseases, and hazardous waste.

Ultimately, Gorsuch wrote, people will disagree over policy approaches and municipalities will experiment with different approaches only to find that a different tactic may work better.

“But in our democracy, that is their right,” Gorsuch said.

Camping bans, however, can effectively ban actions that are involuntary, such as sleep.

Sleep is a biological necessity, not a crime, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in the dissenting opinion.

The status of being homeless is evidenced by the conduct being singled out for punishment – sleeping outside, Sotomayor wrote.

“For someone with no available shelter, the only way to comply with the Ordinances is to leave Grants Pass altogether,” Sotomayor wrote.

The dissent also includes strong words from Sotomayor about the tactics the Grants Pass City Council contemplated to alleviate its problem of homelessness, including creating do-not-serve lists and most unwanted lists, including photographs of homeless people, and handing them out to local service providers.

“The idea was deterrence, not altruism,” Sotomayor wrote.

She noted one city council member suggested the homeless people weren’t hungry enough or cold enough to change their behavior.

Many camping bans enacted this year are based on model legislation from The Cicero Institute, a conservative think tank in Austin, Texas, that promotes camping bans, punitive measures for violations, and government-sanctioned encampments.

“Many people are upset by this decision, which on its face may sound cruel,” Devon Kurtz, public safety policy director at The Cicero Institute, wrote in an email to Oklahoma Watch. “But I implore critics to consider those situations when the authority affirmed by the Supreme Court really matters: a person sleeping outside ahead of a winter storm; people living in or next to an encampment filled with toxic trash that is polluting a waterway; or someone too mentally unwell to accept the help they need.”

Preventing police from taking action in these situations is the crueler option, Kurtz wrote.

The Supreme Court ruling will make laws criminalizing homelessness more prevalent in the United States, said Meghan Mueller, CEO of The Homeless Alliance in Oklahoma City.

“Housing ends homelessness,” Mueller said. “Criminalizing people who are sleeping outside and do not have other options ultimately creates additional barriers to housing. As homeless service providers, we would like to see investments in proven solutions, such as permanent, affordable housing and robust supportive services.”

Oklahoma’s nonprofits plan to continue rallying to end homelessness, Mueller said.

“We believe that everyone deserves the dignity of a place to call home.”

Oklahoma’s camping ban will criminalize unauthorized camping on public right-of-ways and state-owned land such as highway underpasses. Offenders will first be asked to move or agree to be given a ride by a law enforcement officer to a nearby service provider. Should a person refuse, they can be fined up to $50, be charged with a misdemeanor and potentially jailed for up to 15 days.

The state’s camping ban is set to take effect Nov. 1.

This article first appeared on Oklahoma Watch and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

This article originally appeared in Oklahoma Watch, a nonprofit news organization that produces in-depth and investigative journalism as a public service.

Two bills would outlaw sleeping on state land that isn’t a designated campsite. Supporters say it’s for safety. Opponents say there are better ways.

Valerie G. was sitting alongside Oklahoma City Boulevard on March 5, huddled with some friends, trying to keep warm in 45-degree morning weather, next to a makeshift fireplace made from a metal bucket with holes punched in it, burning a piece of wood. She asked that Oklahoma Watch not use her last name.

Valerie, 41, a well-spoken woman with vibrant blue eyes that reflected a hesitant trust, said she has been living homeless in Oklahoma City for eight years. During that time, she said she has been sexually assaulted numerous times and is now trying to get out of a human trafficking situation with a drug dealer in the area.

“Being a female out here is extremely dangerous,” she said. She spoke of other homeless female friends who had also been victimized and even murdered on the streets of Oklahoma City.

When her trafficker caught wind that she was considering pressing charges, she said, things became worse for her.

“I have to watch my ass constantly,” she said. “I don’t know if he’s going to turn against me one day. It’s scary.”

To stay away from her trafficker, she said she moves around from place to place, on state and municipal land and even private property.

Bills intended to keep people like Valerie, who are experiencing homelessness, from sleeping on state-owned lands, are making their way through the 2024 Oklahoma Legislative Session. Two bills in particular would evict people from sleeping on public rights-of-way or state-owned lands and threaten fines, misdemeanor charges and imprisonment if people don’t comply.

“I believe that’s a violation of my constitutional rights and actually, my civil rights,” Valerie said.

“Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” Valerie quoted the Emma Lazarus poem that graces the Statue of Liberty.

Valerie is one of more than 1,430 people in Oklahoma City and more than 1,130 in the city of Tulsa who slept in emergency shelters or under the open sky during the 2023 Point in Time counts. Many of those people are children who, with their parents, sleep on state-owned and public-owned land, including under highway overpasses.

The Oklahoma Senate and House of Representatives on Wednesday passed from their chambers HB 3686 by Rep. Chris Kannady, R-OKC, and SB 1854, co-authored by Sen. Darrell Weaver, R-Moore, Kannady, and several other lawmakers.

The bills would require officers to first issue a warning, asking the person to leave and offering a ride to an emergency shelter with overnight beds or other types of assistance facilities such as food pantries. Failure to move or accept a ride could result in a fine of up to $50 or a maximum of 15 days in jail.

“We’re already down on our luck,” Valerie said. “We’re already depressed. We don’t want the situation that we’re in.”

While many Oklahoma legislators seem to support the bills, some local and national experts think they are a waste of time and resources. Better ways exist to handle the problem of homelessness other than clearing homeless camps by forcing people out and clearing the grounds, they contend.

“You’re going to fine us and put us in jail?” Valerie said. “How is that helping us? You can’t bulldoze the problem.”

Under the bridge downtown

Kannady declined to talk about the bills with Oklahoma Watch, saying if the public wants to know his opinions, they can watch the videos of committee meetings and floor activities available at the Oklahoma State Legislature website. During a committee meeting, Kannady said the bill was necessary to give law enforcement tools; now, he said, there isn’t much they can do and the minimal penalties called for are just tokens.

Weaver said his biggest concern is people sleeping under overpasses and the dangers it presents them and the general public.

“I know there is a certain location that literally, if (a person sleeping there) were to roll off down the ramp at the back of this underpass, I mean there’s nothing that would stop them from rolling right out into the road,” Weaver said in defense of his bill on the Senate floor.

“It’s clearly a safety issue for not only those individuals, but (also for) the person that’s driving their car that could be in a potential of now having to run somebody over and having to live with that for the rest of their life,” he said.

“Just get out from under the underpass, that’s all I’m saying,” Weaver told Oklahoma Watch.

Nowhere in the bills do the words underpass or overpass appear. On the Senate floor, Weaver said a person asked to move by an officer could simply relocate across the street from their original location, from state land to municipal land.

“If you really want to address this problem there are ways to do it, but criminalizing homelessness is not an effective tool.
Dan Straughn, The Homeless Alliance

Sen. Julia Kirt, D-Oklahoma City, voiced serious concerns over the proposed new law during the Senate floor session when lawmakers voted to pass the bill out of the Senate.

“What I’m concerned about is criminalizing someone who doesn’t have a home,” Kirt said. “That doesn’t solve our problem. When we talk about moving someone across the street, that is still in our community. We’ve not solved that challenge that that person is facing. This is written in a very broad manner that makes it difficult to analyze who would be impacted, what type of assistance we’re talking about and what would count as a refusal.”

Kirt went on to say that Oklahoma needs to change the way the state approaches the challenge of homelessness.

“If somebody is sleeping under a bridge, they have nowhere else to sleep,” she said. “We are short of units for people to live; we are short of shelter beds; some of our communities don’t have overnight shelters available at all.”

Dan Straughan, founder and executive director of The Homeless Alliance in Oklahoma City, agreed with Weaver that sleeping under overpasses is dangerous, but he said it’s virtually the same as people sleeping in tents in the woods or on sidewalks.

The state has failed to invest enough in facilities that assist with factors like mental health, substance abuse, legal representation for evictions and healthcare, which can lead to, or be exacerbated by homelessness, Straughan said.

“When we haven’t set up the infrastructure to take people out from under the overpass and get them into housing, then people sleep under overpasses,” Straughan said.

Valerie agreed.

“You want us to get off the streets and stuff, why not take those resources that you’re putting into making laws against us, and put them into trying to help us?” Valerie asked.

A dangerous life

“The public health part of this is more for the people that are sleeping up there (in overpasses) than it is for the general public,” Straughan said. “The danger to the public is more of a moral injury.”

As people drive through the city and see homeless people sleeping in dangerous conditions, they may feel bad and wish it weren’t happening along their roadways.

“I think there is a legitimate government interest in curbing those activities, but there is a smart way to go about it and a dumb way to go about it,” Straughan said. “And (these bills are) the dumb way.”

When homeless people are asked to move, Staughan said they usually comply. He recalled a recent situation near Virginia and NW 4th in downtown Oklahoma City. The area has a lot of trees and, Straughan said, if you don’t mind traffic, it could be a good place to camp.

Law enforcement officers started fielding calls from residents and business owners upset about the camp, its residents, and the amount of trash accumulating in the area. Officers told the campers they had to move, so they packed up and moved east, to a large undeveloped plat that’s privately owned.

“So what happened then is a government entity moved people off public property and made it the problem of a private citizen,” he said.

Straughan said that will continue to happen if laws are passed that make homeless camps illegal on state or public property.

A constitutional question

A pending court decision could call the constitutionality of these laws into question if cities don’t provide enough shelter beds.

In April, the U.S. Supreme Court is set to review an appellate court ruling out of Grant’s Pass, Oregon. The appeal is partially based on a 2018 precedent in Martin v. Boise, in which a three-judge panel found that anti-camping ordinances violated the U.S. Constitution.

The Boise case ended with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals deciding that forcing people off public property when not enough beds are available in emergency shelters is unconstitutional under the Eighth Amendment’s Cruel and Unusual Punishment clause.

In Oklahoma City, emergency shelters providing overnight stays have 950 beds. During the city’s 2023 Point in Time count, those beds were mostly full, leaving about 550 people without access.

During Tulsa’s 2023 Point in Time count, 686 people occupied beds in the city’s 688 total emergency shelter beds. Two beds were open, likely because family units of three occupied spaces that could accommodate four. For safety reasons, shelters decline to place a non-family member with family groups.

Considering the city’s 1,130 homeless on the day the Point in Time count was taken, the data suggests a shortage of about 440 shelter beds available in Tulsa on any given night.

A proven path home

“I hate being out here,” Valerie said. “I love the people. I try to be positive with people, and I try to help people when I can, but I hate being out here. It’s been long enough.”

She teared up when asked if she would accept help if offered and said she needs help.

“It’s nice to be treated like a human being,” she said. “So many people despise the homeless.”

Oklahoma City government and nonprofit projects, such as the new Key to Home Encampment Rehousing Initiative, address the problem of people living in homeless encampments by engaging dozens of nonprofit, private and public stakeholders.

Since September 2023, the Encampment Rehousing Initiative has targeted nine encampments, one being the underpass at I-44 and Pennsylvania Ave, said Jamie Caves, strategy and implementation manager for the Key to Home Partnership.

Eighty-eight people living in those encampments have been successfully placed in homes, the city of Oklahoma City reported. Those people were assigned case managers and provided with wrap-around services to address the particular problems that contributed to their becoming homeless.

These problems may involve criminal records, health debt, less-than-honorable military discharges (preventing the VA from providing housing assistance), evictions, mental illness, substance addiction and other obstacles.

Nowhere in the Encampment Rehousing Initiative are people threatened with fines, which they usually couldn’t pay and would likely lead to warrants, or arrests, adding criminal charges to homeless people’s lists of obstacles. And contrary to threatening jail time, the Initiative can help its clients get some criminal records expunged so they can clear that slate.

Key to Home aims to rehouse 500 people experiencing unsheltered, chronic homelessness by the end of 2025.

The Encampment Rehousing Initiative is similar to models used in Houston and Dallas. In 2021, 91% of Houston people experiencing homelessness who were offered housing accepted, Caves said, and since 2011, Houston has seen a 63% reduction in homelessness.

Homelessness and a housing problem

“Do I feel like homelessness is a housing problem?” Weaver said. “It could be. I mean, it could be if they don’t have any place to live.”

The National Income Housing Association estimated that Oklahoma lacks more than 81,600 homes available for people seeking them. The group estimated $26,500 per year as the minimum income for a family of four to sustain housing and related costs.

Oklahoma City and Tulsa initiatives are incentivizing building multi-family units to help offset insufficient housing supplies. But building affordable housing meets resistance with 96% of the residential land in Oklahoma City and 81% of Tulsa residential land zoned for single-family units according to Sabine Brown, infrastructure and access senior policy analyst at the Oklahoma Policy Institute. Rezoning is needed to help residents, especially people with very low incomes, to escape their niches under overpasses and find safe and affordable homes.

Straughan pointed to a continuum of housing needs ranging from entry-level renters who move up the housing ladder, eventually becoming homeowners. If something kinks that spectrum, Straughan said, people can’t move up and others can’t move into the entry-level homes.

Even if available, affordable homes weren’t so scarce, people experiencing homelessness generally don’t have the money it would take to move in.

Though 14% of people experiencing homelessness reported having jobs in the Tulsa Point in Time census, the state’s low minimum wage, $7.25 per hour, hasn’t increased since 2009. That is a far cry from the Oklahoma Policy Institute’s estimate of a wage of at least $18 per hour needed to sustain a market-value two-bedroom rental.

When people don’t have stable housing, they cost communities money, cycling through emergency departments, psychiatric centers, detox programs and jails, according to The National Alliance to End Homelessness.

Alleviating the financial burden homelessness brings also takes money and time, Straughan said.

“If you really want to address this problem there are ways to do it, but criminalizing homelessness is not an effective tool,” Straughan said.

No city in America has ever managed to arrest its way out of homelessness, Straughan said.

The Oklahoma standard – a moral dilemma

Oklahoma is the third fastest-growing economy in the country as of 2023, according to the Oklahoma Commerce Department.

“We’re also one of the most compassionate states,” Straughan said.

The Oklahoma Standard, he said, was born from the willingness of Oklahomans to help one another after disasters such as the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, the 2023 spate of wildfires that destroyed 47,222 acres of lands, and the 1999 Bridge Creek–Moore tornado that destroyed 8,000 buildings, killed 46 people, and injured 800.

“You drive by and you see people sleeping under an overpass and you ought to feel some level of guilt,” Straughan said. “You ought to think to yourself, ‘My community can do better.’”

“We were based on immigration and underprivileged people,” Valerie said. “That’s what America is about.”

We can do better, but not by fining and imposing jail time on people during their lowest moments, Straughn said.

“We’re homeless – that’s a condition of America,” Valerie said. “That’s not our fault. Start looking at the government, not at us.”