A newly proposed two-year time limit on rental assistance from the federal government puts 32,300 Oklahomans, 18,400 of whom are children, at risk of eviction and homelessness.
The federal government holds that Housing and Urban Development is supposed to be a temporary fix, not a permanent solution. However, housing experts in Oklahoma claim the proposed timeline does not adequately address the housing crisis.
“Putting an arbitrary time limit on rental assistance doesn’t solve the root cause,” said Sabine Brown, Housing Senior Policy Analyst for Oklahoma Policy Institute.
With a worsening national affordable housing and homelessness crisis, Brown said, wage increases are a way to start addressing the housing needs for working families in Oklahoma.
Economic Opportunity
Two people working full-time on Oklahoma’s minimum wage can’t afford a two-bedroom rental home at fair market value without exceeding the recommended 30% of income to be spent on housing, according to Oklahoma City’s 2025 Point in Time report.
“You have families that are having to choose between putting food on the table and paying rent because the dollars aren’t stretching as far and the cost of basic necessities continues to go up,” said Meghan Mueller, chief executive officer of the Homeless Alliance in Oklahoma City.
In order to afford a two-bedroom rental at fair market value, a minimum wage worker making $7.25 per hour would have to work 116 hours per week. About 5% of Oklahomans are making minimum wage, about 200,000 people.
“We don’t have a problem of people not working enough, we have a problem of rents rising faster than wages,” Brown said.
A study from New York University published in July found that working families were most at risk of harm from the proposed HUD timeline.
Of those Oklahomans possibly affected by the timeline, 15,400 are working households. There is a carve-out in the proposed timeline to protect the elderly and people with disabilities, but it is not clear how HUD will define those groups.
“It’s a situation where we have got lots of people who cannot afford to live here,” said Amanda Ewing, executive director of Oklahoma Community Action Agency. “Rental assistance is the thing that keeps them in their homes, keeps them from being evicted and keeps their kids from being homeless.”
Eviction & Homelessness
While not every eviction ends in homelessness, Mueller said that the speed at which an eviction can happen and the low barriers set to evict a tenant in Oklahoma contribute significantly to homelessness. That contribution would only get worse with the proposed rental assistance timeline, she said.
Mueller said that while the homeless response system can house people, such a large number of new people moving through the system makes it more difficult to meet everyone’s needs.
In 2016, Eviction Lab placed both Oklahoma City and Tulsa among the 20 cities with the highest eviction rates. Since then, Oklahoma’s eviction filings have gone up.
There have been 221,470 evictions filed in Oklahoma since March 2020.
“When you have those high eviction dockets and you have folks that have no other recourse, that’s when you see folks fall into homelessness,” said Mueller. “We’re having people who are losing their housing and going straight to the streets.”
Once someone has been evicted, it becomes increasingly difficult to secure housing. In Oklahoma, most eviction records remain publicly available indefinitely. Even eviction filings dismissed in favor of the tenant, filed by mistake or were discriminatory remain available to the public.
“Once you have an eviction on your record, getting housing anytime after that is going to be a lot more difficult,” Ewing said. “Landlords aren’t going to want to rent to someone with an eviction on their record.”
Ewing said the best thing that can be done is to help people keep the places they are in and avoid eviction entirely, but the new timeline will increase eviction rates.
Aside from harming tenants, the proposed timeline also presents a challenge to landlords. There is already a shortage of landlords willing to lease to people on rental assistance in Oklahoma, and the two-year time limit could make that worse.
Landlords who are willing to lease to tenants on rental assistance will begin to question where the tenant is in that two-year timeframe and if the tenant will be able to complete the lease or if it will be a problem halfway through, Ewing said.
“This is really going to throw a wrench in things for them,” she said.
