Advocates in Tulsa are learning -- and proving -- that a home isn't a goal; it's a foundation.

His apartment has a spectacular view of the Tulsa skyline and especially of Boston Avenue United Methodist Church, an art deco masterpiece with a landmark steeple on the south side of downtown.

But that's not what Johnny Fagin means when he says, "I love this place."

He loves this little apartment -- with a living room that doubles as a bedroom and a kitchen the size of a coat closet -- the way a transplant patient loves a new organ.

"If it wasn't for this apartment," Fagin, 47, declares, "I'd be dead."

Before he moved into the Altamont -- built in 1930 as a residential hotel and owned by the Mental Health Association in Tulsa since 2003 -- Fagin used to break into abandoned houses to find places to sleep.

"If I wasn't here," Fagin says, tapping a dining-room table in front of a window with that church steeple in the background, "I'd be buried in a grave somewhere. That's where I was headed."

An understated, yellow-brick building that might easily escape notice from passing cars, the Altamont is a prototype for how the Mental Health Association wants to battle homelessness from now on.

Instead of just providing temporary shelter, it offers long-term housing. And to use the Mental Health Association's terminology, the apartments come "wrapped in social services" -- including financial counseling, mental-health care and drug-treatment programs.

Homeless advocates used to work the other way around -- first, get off drugs, stop drinking, save up a little money, then come off the streets into housing.

"Now, we realize that somebody needs a place to live before they can realistically do those other things," says Michael Brose, executive director of the Mental Health Association in Tulsa. "Housing first -- that's the approach that works."

Most people in a traditional homeless shelter will wind up back on the streets. Nearly 80 percent of Altamont residents eventually move into homes of their own and never go home less again, Brose says.

In fact, the Altamont-style approach has proven so effective that experts including Brose have changed their whole perspective on the issue of homelessness. Instead of seeing it as a problem to cope with, they've begun to think of it as a problem to solve.

The Mental Health Association has about 225 low-rent or rent-free apartments at the Altamont and various other locations around the city. If the program could add 611 or so more apartment units, it could virtually eliminate homelessness in Tulsa, Brose says.

"It's a big, hairy, audacious goal," he admits.

In fact, Tulsa would be the first city in the country to eliminate what Brose calls chronic homelessness.

"But it's doable," he insists. "It really is."

It would cost about $27 million to buy, renovate or build the apartment units, with a few million dollars left over to pay for maintenance and upkeep, he estimates.

Under a project called "Building Tulsa, Building Lives," the Mental Health Association and its allies already have raised more than $7.8 million -- including $2 million from the state of Oklahoma and $1.5 million from the Anne and Henry Zarrow Foundation.

The apartments will be scattered across the city to avoid overconcentration of social services in one area, Brose said.

"It's a win-win-win for everybody, especially as we're trying to revitalize and attract people to downtown," he says.

"Nobody likes to be panhandled, and the truth is, nobody likes to panhandle. If we offer a way for people to get off the streets, it's better for everybody."

It was certainly better for Kevin Rowell. After a storm destroyed his home on the Gulf Coast, he drifted north until he reached Tulsa and found a bed at Walker Hall, a Mental Health Association property near the trendy nightspots at 18th Street and Boston Avenue.

Mental illness had kept him jobless and penniless, but after after a few months at Walker Hall -- with health care, three meals a day and a safe place to sleep -- Rowell was able to function normally again.

Now he lives on his own and works at the downtown YMCA.

"If I hadn't come to Tulsa and found this program, I'd be dead," he says, not realizing that Fagin made essentially the same remark. "It's saving lives. It saved mine."

Michael Overall 581-8383
michael.overall@tulsaworld.com

By the numbers:

26 percent, or 150,000 people: Percentage and number of Tulsa’s population that is either at risk of being homeless or is actually homeless

560: Average number of homeless people in Tulsa per night

4,100: Homeless people per year in the city of Tulsa

20,000: People living in subsidized housing in Tulsa

130,000: People who couldn’t pay rent if they missed one paycheck

Source: Mental Health Association in Tulsa