City pays lawyers while homelessness persists

Six years and more than a million dollars later, the Oklahoma City ordinance criminalizing panhandling has led to its inevitable end: the city lost its legal battle and has been ordered to pay plaintiff lawyers. VOICE leaders approached the city six years ago seeking investment in a variety of social service, job, and education pilot programs to combat panhandling and homelessness. What the city pushed through instead - fighting against homelessness advocates, anti-poverty groups, and VOICE - was an unconstitutional ordinance that they paid outside attorneys to unsuccessfully defend. 

While overwhelming voter support of MAPS 4 has committed the city to invest in additional infrastructure, mostly buildings, to help with mental health, addiction and homelessness, the services that come with it are still severely underfunded and nearly entirely reliant on our stretched nonprofit sector. By criminalizing poverty, mental illness, addiction and joblessness, we have created a crisis of people left to live on our streets and beg for money in the richest country in the world.

Study after study shows that helping people get housing, treatment, and jobs is what gets them off the street. The Oklahoma City Council can still invest more heavily in those services. Six years ago, multiple councilors admitted that the city social service budget was woefully inadequate for a city of our size, only a few hundred thousand dollars on a more than $1B budget. Instead of investing in meaningful solutions, the city continues too often on the path of criminalization and punishment of poverty and homelessness, with little progress to show for it. 

“As people of faith we need to recognize our call to help our brothers and sisters 

In need,” said Father Tim Luschen, pastor at St. Charles Borromeo and president of the VOICE Education Fund. “But we also need to keep pedestrians and drivers safe. It is sad that we did not heed the work of social service agencies and other citizens groups to craft a workable solution that would have avoided this costly situation.”

Oklahoma City can learn from this experience. As we continue to build new infrastructure to get people help and rebuild lives, the city has an obligation to make sure we have successful programming and adequate resources to run that programming. It is not acceptable to have our neighbors living in the streets and begging to survive. The Oklahoma Standard demands more.   

VOICE (Voices Organized in Civic Engagement) is a nonpartisan coalition of congregations, nonprofits, and worker associations in the Oklahoma City metro area that has come together out of a deep sense of mission to address some of the challenges that people in their institutions face. Current work includes improving public education, ending predatory loans, improving access to healthcare, and reforming criminal justice systems at the local level. More information at www.voiceokc.org.