City Lights Village, an affordable housing community for chronically homeless people in Tulsa, will celebrate its grand opening Friday.
The community, located at 4467 N. Rockford Ave. in north Tulsa, will feature 75 one-bedroom homes when completed. Each unit includes a kitchen, is fully furnished and can be occupied by up to two people.
“We are celebrating the opening and welcoming our first few neighbors home,” Haley Kardokus, City Lights Foundation of Oklahoma’s director of development and communications, told The Eagle.
Three people have already moved in, and 10 should be moved in by the end of the year, she said. City Lights staff members will live on site.
The complex is set up as permanent supportive housing, meaning tenants can take advantage of on-site medical, mental health and addiction-recovery services if needed.
“We’ve known from the start just building a house and putting someone in it does not solve homelessness,” Kardokus said. “Housing alone will not solve homelessness, but it has to be housing coupled with community.”
The complex features on-site laundry and a community kitchen for shared meals. A memorial garden is also planned. “Really, everything that somebody needs to be successful in their housing — and staying in their housing — they will have access to here,” she said.
The agency modeled the community after the Community First Village in Austin, Texas.
To qualify for the Tulsa housing, residents have to have been experiencing chronic homelessness, meaning they were unhoused for more than a year, and have at least one certified physical or mental disability, Sarah Grounds, executive director of City Lights, said.
Rent is $400 a month, which includes utilities.
“We’ll make sure throughout the leasing process that they have income, whether that’s through Social Security or disability benefits,” Kardokus said.
Tulsa County’s official Continuum of Care data showed that there was a waitlist of 1,300 people who could potentially qualify for the type of housing offered at City Lights Village, Grounds said last year.
Kardokus said City Lights raised $26.1 million over three years, mostly through private donations, to fund the development of the 75 homes. And it isn’t stopping there.
Now it’s looking into the possibility of adding more homes on the property. But first it will have to get over the hurdle of getting more land rezoned for multifamily housing.
“Our hope is that we get our neighbors in here, they settle, they’re successful and we can prove that this works and then prove to the community that we’re going to keep our word and this is going to be what we say it will be,” Kardokus said.
