As Tulsa grapples with its growing homelessness crisis, City Councilor Jayme Fowler is offering a novel idea for mitigating its effect on Tulsa’s quality of life — get a handle on the shopping carts.
“The reality is that the city is subsidizing, what I think, and a lot of other people think, is poor choices and bad behavior,” Fowler, a potential mayoral candidate, said Friday. “Shopping carts from retail merchants hauling people’s goods around town, those carts more often than not have been taken off premises and used for other things than what they were originally designed for.”
Fowler’s solution? Charge stores a fee every time the city has to collect one of their shopping carts abandoned off the store property.
“I don’t want to put a dollar amount on it yet, but we want to modify and change behaviors for everybody, and that includes retail merchants,” Fowler said.
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James Wagner, director of the city’s Working In Neighborhoods Department, said code enforcement regularly hires contractors to remove trash, junk and debris, and that often includes shopping carts.
“Our normal process is for all trash, junk and debris to be disposed of by our contractors, but when we can identify them, we notify the retailer and give them an opportunity to recover them,” Wagner said. “In the case recently at 64 Street and Peoria Avenue, our inspections manager contacted Walmart and the manager sent staff to come get the shopping carts.”
In Tulsa, like most other large cities, it is not unusual to see individuals experiencing homelessness pushing shopping carts full of their belongings through the streets.
Fowler said he understands that some might argue that the responsibility for abandoned shopping carts should lie with the people who take them from stores, but he suggested that reasoning could be carried a step further.
“Why should the burden be put on the city,” he said. “Why should the burden be put on the taxpayers to take care of these carts?”
Fowler noted that companies like Aldi — a grocery store chain — often keep their shopping carts inside their stores and require customers to pay a small fee to use them.
“So they have a good system, and the reality is, the world has changed,” Fowler said. “And our retail merchants need to adapt to the modern world. They need to take care of those carts, keep them on premises and keep them off our city streets.”
The results of the most recent countywide Point-in-Time Count, released earlier this week, found the homeless population increased 6.6% last year to 1,133, the highest number since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Forty-four percent of respondents pointed to a lack of affordable housing as a major cause of their homelessness.
“We need to do more for our unhoused population, and having them just aimlessly wander around the city is not a good solution, and that is not a good thing either,” Fowler said.
Fowler said he plans to do some listening before he decides whether and how to move forward with his proposal.
“We get input from our fellow city councilors, people involved in the community, everyone involved before we come up with some kind of solution and/or solutions to the issue,” he said.
Of 1,063 surveyed, 22% were employed yet experiencing homelessness, and 86% became homeless in Oklahoma.
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