When Isaac, a young Oklahoma City man, was 7 years old, he and his mother moved from Las Vegas to Oklahoma City. Just two years later, Isaac’s mother died.
He never met his father. His grandparents took him in, but when he turned 18, they kicked him out, he said.
He tried to live in rentals, but he was fighting addiction and couldn’t find stability.
Now 21, Isaac has a long scar on the side of his neck, a reminder of being attacked with a knife last fall. Being young and homeless is scary, he said.
During these formative years, Isaac has found refuge at Sisu Youth Services, an emergency shelter for homeless youth ages 15 to 24.
“Sisu is my safe place,” he said.
But the shelter is experiencing growing pains. A group of crime-conscious neighbors are campaigning to derail the shelter’s plan to grow the facility.
Sisu has petitioned the local city council to approve SPUD-1694, a zoning change that will allow Sisu to expand its facility onto the vacant lot next door. The shelter’s blueprint includes space for more specialized service providers on-site and six rooms for youth with babies.
Concerned neighbors say the shelter’s young clients are engaging in dangerous and illegal behavior around the Shepherd and Sequoyah neighborhoods, particularly at Swatek Park.
Shepherd neighborhood resident Sarah Ashmore emailed Oklahoma Watch in January stating that neighbors have seen and captured on video young adults from the shelter engaged in various offensive behaviors.
“Imagine coming home from work to find people sitting on your front porch and blocking your entrance into your own home,” she wrote. “Imagine stepping outside your door to find an active fist fight on your front lawn that ends in a stabbing.”
She cited people blasting profane rap music, yelling curse words and racial slurs, brandishing weapons and more.
She said she and other neighbors have complained to the city to no avail. Ashmore’s husband, Chaz Farrell, has become involved with a group of about 30 neighbors from Shepherd, Sequoyah and Military Park neighborhoods who hope to make the area safer.
Farrell said he witnessed several incidents involving shelter clients, when his toddler was playing with gardening tools in the dirt under the swings at Swatek Park.
“She was digging under the slide in the playground there, and we found syringes, like dirty syringes,” Farrell said. “Since then, we’ve probably found half a dozen more.”
Farrell said he once saw a youth pull a knife on an older woman when she asked them to turn down their music. And once, he said, he took his daughter out to ride her bike when, out of the blue, someone started shouting profanities and threatening to kill them.
Farrell said he and other neighbors feel like they’re being gaslighted when they report these incidents and nothing is done. After the bike riding incident, Farrell said police never responded to his call for assistance.
Farrell and Ashmore said they want the city council to nix the zoning request, saying they already don’t feel safe in their neighborhood. Ashmore said expanding the shelter will only drive more traffic to the area.
During their January meeting, members of the Oklahoma City Planning Commission debated the rezoning request and allowed public comments.
“We’re talking about people being threatened with weapons, we’re talking about people being harassed, we’re finding used syringes in our park, (people are having) public sex in the broad daylight,” Ashmore said at the meeting. “There’s a lot of stuff going on that’s not just innocuous.”
Ashmore said she wants accountability from Sisu and a decline in incidents with the homeless youth before the zoning change is approved.
The planning commission passed the rezoning request, which will be voted on by the full Oklahoma City City Council on March 11.
An Inner-City Problem
Rachel Bradley, executive director of Sisu Youth Services, said she doesn’t deny some of her young clients may engage in unsavory behavior when not on shelter property. But she thinks many of the serious allegations from neighbors may be committed by homeless adults who also frequent the area.
“We are in an inner-city neighborhood, so you’re going to have people experiencing homelessness in your area, whether they’re teenagers or not,” Bradley told Oklahoma Watch.
A data request to the Oklahoma City Police Department returned 259 police calls to the Sisu shelter starting in July, 2023 when the shelter relocated to its current building, a former church on NW 30 near Pennsylvania Ave in Oklahoma City.
Of the police calls, 192 were listed as valid calls with no report made.
“Some of the things that the neighbors bring up is that there are a ton of police calls to Sisu,” Bradley said. “We’ve tried to explain to them that calls do not equal crime.”
Some of the calls, she said, originated from Sisu youth themselves who needed police assistance. Or when a runaway shows up at the shelter, Sisu works with the police to reunite the youth with their families.
Of the 27 times police have visited Sisu this year through Feb. 21, five resulted in police reports: two were runaway juvenile calls, two were hotline transfers and one was an attempted suicide.
An additional 10 disturbance calls and 12 similar calls did not result in police reports.
One call was for armed robbery, but no report was made. One was a found-child incident that resulted in an arrest.
“And so our interactions with those law enforcement partners are varied, and I think that that’s kind of just tough for some people to understand how many different situations happen that law enforcement is involved with,” Bradley said.
Oklahoma Youth are Homeless in the Shadows
The youth sheltered at Sisu represent a greater problem of homelessness among Oklahoma’s youth.
According to school-sourced data, more than 26,000 Oklahoma public school students were documented as homeless in 2024. That’s up more than 2,000 from 2023.
According to Positive Tomorrows, an Oklahoma City school that serves homeless students, 21% of the students the schools serves were couch homeless upon enrollment for the 2023-2024 school year. Another 62% stayed in homeless shelters. To qualify as homeless, students were documented as lacking a fixed, regular and adequate nighttime residence.
This data is collected as part of the McKinney-Vento Act, which allows school districts to collect additional funding to make extra accommodations to ensure homeless students get to school.
Nationally, in 2024, more than one of every four people experiencing homelessness was a child under 18 or a young adult between the ages of 18 and 24.
While most of these students likely are accompanied by a parent, some are unaccompanied youth like Isaac, whose parents are absent or have died.
These homeless students are not typically counted in local Point in Time surveys because PIT counts only include people sleeping outside and in shelters – families and unaccompanied minors usually double up with friends or family members.
Services tailored to homeless youth are few and far between in Oklahoma and youth experiencing homelessness are less likely to seek services and shelter, said Beth Edwards Sveltic, assistant executive director of Youth Services of Tulsa.
They’re less likely than adults to seek services, she said.
“Navigating some of those systems is super complex, and so they often just don’t,” Edwards Svetlic said. “Just tracking down a birth certificate or a Social Security card from a guardian who maybe isn’t accessible can create enormous barriers for some of our young people.
Youth Services of Tulsa owns five apartment complexes, where half are leased at market rates and half are used for rapid rehousing of homeless youth.
Edwards Svetlic said the program aims to create “a more typical and normal living environment for young people, so they can practice things like how to be a good neighbor and navigate some of those challenges of being a neighbor and building community and things like that.”
Sisu has a similar rapid rehousing program with apartment sites rented to at-risk youth.
Despite their concerns, Ashmore and Farrell said they care about the homeless youth and support the shelter, even if it is in their neighborhood.
“I think most all of us neighbors who have complaints are supportive of their mission,” Ashmore said. “We don’t want to see anyone suffering with homelessness and would like to see everyone get the support that they need.”
“I just think that we need to make sure that we’re doing it in a safe way,” she said.
Whether or not the city council approves the rezoning request, Sisu will carry on serving homeless youth.
If the request is approved, Sisu will create a courtyard effect by fencing in three sides of the property, with the main building providing street access.
Bradley said she hopes that will help keep her clients from roaming the neighborhoods while easing concerns among the shelter’s housed neighbors.
