East Tulsa woman wants City to prioritize cleaning up homeless camps

TULSA, Okla. — Kathy Sebert volunteers to clean up trash in the City of Tulsa. She wants the City to clean up the homeless camps across the City and to clean up the dangerous trash left behind when the camps are abandoned.

Near E. 15th St. and S. Memorial Dr., there are five abandoned homeless camps in the lots behind a row of houses.

Serbert lives nearby and has picked up dangerous items left in the abandoned camps in order to keep children from getting hurt if they wander into them.

Among the trash she has picked up are a defibrillator, a used hypodermic needle with blood in it and notices from the City’s Working in Neighborhoods department, which is responsible for enforcing city codes in neighborhoods.

On Friday, Sebert called City Hall to complain about the camps.

On Sunday night, when she saw no one was stirring around in the camps, she went to investigate them.

Sebert said she is happy with the City investing in projects that beautify the city to attract new businesses and tourists, but the City Council needs to make cleaning up the city’s neighborhoods as much of a priority.

“The quality of life needs to be excellent in our neighborhoods,” she said. “We have to have a clean city, a safe city, if we’re going to have people come and visit us to attract our tourists.”

Both the large projects and the large problems, Sebert said, take a lot of time and effort.

“It takes many years to plan these things but, in the meantime, it seems to be that maybe they’re not listening so closely to the constituents and the neighborhoods get frustrated,” she said.

Grant Miller is the City Councilor for District 5. He said his focus is on cleaning up his district and working with the City Council to fix the larger homelessness problem city-wide.

“The more minds we can get behind this, the better,” Miller said. “I’ll be putting together a comprehensive plan of my own, working with, as I said, developers, neighborhood leaders and private individuals to try to come up with a solution, especially for District 5.”

Sebert said she and her husband have lived in their house for 32 years and she has kept an eye on the growing homelessness problem encroaching on her neighborhood over several years.

She is worried about her own property value.

“We have been lucky in recent years with the prices of houses have gone up, even more than we paid for them but a lot of times people will say things like, ‘I like your neighborhood but I wouldn’t want to live there because you have several places nearby that look sketchy,’” Sebert said.

She said she has compassion for the homeless population but the City has already been generous in providing resources for them.

“I don’t think they should be able to have all the attention,” Sebert said. “And neighbors who pay for their homes and work hard for their lifetimes to have them, should not have to sacrifice their quality of living.”

Miller said the City’s homeless population is around 1,000 people but the City needs to put its resources toward cleaning up the homeless camps before they become unmanageable.

“But if we don’t do something about it and really put a laser focus on the issue, we are going to have a problem the cities like Seattle are having,” he said. “For example, in Los Angeles, you’ve got 69,000 homeless out there. Seattle, you’ve got 12,000. Here, we’re not nearly at that number, and I think it’s becoming enough of a problem, that folks like Kathy and other neighbors who contacted me, are having serious, serious issues with it.”

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