Tiny House Project For Homeless Veterans in Oklahoma City is Halted

OKLAHOMA CITY (KOKH) — A housing project that would have helped get homeless veterans off the streets has been halted.

The nonprofit behind the tiny house project is looking for new options.

“What we’re doing is we’re pressing pause right now in order to better engage with the community, meaning we purchased a piece of property and we’re pushing forward on that,” said Bryan Meyer, CEO & Co-Founder of the Veterans Community Project.

Meyer says the community outcry against this project is the reason for this pause.

“It’s so important for us that we have this community buy in. What we’re trying to do here get homeless vets from the street into permanent housing. It’s gonna take the entire community,” said Meyer.

Fox 25 spoke to some of the neighbors in the area to get their take.

“We already have a big issue with the homeless coming down this street,” said Heather Cullum, a neighbor in the area. “There’s been a few break-ins this year from it, so we’re really just concerned it’s going to drive down the value of our home.”

Meyer says these would have been a high-quality tiny homes, with slab-on-grade housing, up-to-date building codes, all connected to city utilities.

“No, property values have not gone down, actually they’ve increased,” Meyer said. “We’re putting in basically the infrastructure for a subdivision, we are building permanent fixtures to modern building code standards.”

And not all neighbors are unified in their opinion on this project.

“I think it’s absolutely wonderful, I would be proud to have an active part in that,” said neighbor Nancy Bell. “We can’t do enough for our veterans, there should never be a homeless veteran.”

Meyer says in some cases, this has encouraged people to advocate even more for this project.

“We owe them such a debt. They protected us in our home, now we should turn the favor over and provide safe homes for them,” said Bell.

Meyer says there’s no timeline on what they’ll do, either try to convince the community otherwise, do something else with this property, or sell it and have the tiny homes somewhere else.