Tulsa Tiny-Home Village for Homeless Residents Opens August 2026

Thirty tiny homes sit finished and move-in ready on a 23-acre stretch of north Tulsa. Forty-five more are still going up. That's the scoreboard at City Lights Village this week, with the nonprofit City Lights of Oklahoma targeting an August opening for what will become the city's second purpose-built neighborhood for chronically homeless residents.

The 75-unit development near East 46th Street North is designed exclusively for people who have been homeless for at least a year and live with at least one physical or mental disability. Rental applications are expected to open in July, with the first residents moving in by August and September. Each unit, built in triplex clusters, includes a full kitchen, a living room, a bedroom, and a full bathroom. Rent is $400 a month, utilities included.

That price point lands against a hard backdrop. Founder and executive director Sarah Grounds says Tulsa currently has more than 1,200 people on the waitlist for permanent supportive housing. "We know people are living and dying on that waitlist," Grounds said, "so we just really want to be intentional about bringing people home, helping them settle, helping them stay in that housing so that we're not just returning to homelessness and repeating that cycle."

The project carries a $26.1 million total budget, with $19 million raised to date and a $3.8 million gap that City Lights is actively closing. Beyond the housing units, the campus includes a community center, gardens, an orchard, and a memorial garden planned for Phase 2. Housing coordinators will live on-site full-time to connect residents with wraparound services: financial planning, mental health care, and food assistance. As Grounds has framed it, "Housing alone won't solve homelessness. It takes wraparound services and a community to be successful."

City Lights Village will be Tulsa's second neighborhood at this scale. Eden Village, already open in West Tulsa, houses 65 residents. Once all 75 City Lights units are occupied, the two villages together will serve 140 people who previously had no stable address.

August will be the first real accountability checkpoint. Funders and city officials will be watching whether the opening timeline holds and whether the remaining fundraising gap closes in time. The longer-term metrics that will determine the model's credibility are the ones residents generate: how long they remain housed, whether they cycle back into homelessness, and what health and financial gains they show in the months after move-in.

The 23-acre site also has room to grow beyond the current 75-unit plan, meaning City Lights Village could eventually make a larger dent in a waitlist that already runs into the four figures.