Residents of affordable housing motel in Norman being evicted after property sale
NORMAN, Okla. (KFOR) - Residents of a motel in Norman are being forced to look elsewhere for somewhere to live after they found out that the property serving as affordable housing in town had been sold. Their date to move out is February 1.
It was a mostly empty parking lot at the OU Motel in Norman Thursday morning. Those that were there were either packing up to move out, or stuck trying to figure out what’s next.
"A lot of us don't have a lot of options,” Stacey Matthews said. A resident of the motel for 9 years.
"Here we are starting all over again,” Bryan Poindexter said. A motel resident for about 5 months.
It was New Years Day when residents like Poindexter and Matthews were told they needed to find somewhere else to go due to the sale.
"I'm a grown man. I live by myself. So, I mean, it sucks, but there's little kids out there,” Poindexter said.
Poindexter said he was homeless before he moved there in October. Now, he has nowhere to go.
"Everybody wants you to make three times as much rent,” Poindexter said.
"We made some of the best friends we've ever had here,” Matthews said. “This is it. We became a family."
Matthews moved there 9 years ago with her mom. Now alone since her mom passed, she might get an apartment with her neighbor for the time being.
"It is a very big concern to me what happens to them,” Ward 7 City Councilman Stephen Tyler Holman said.
Holman said affordable housing in Norman and elsewhere is a big problem.
"We don't have enough shelter beds for them,” he said.
The buyer’s plan is to turn the motel into apartments for students and a current Norman affordable housing development won’t be done until 2026. For now, things are left up in the air for those being told to leave.
"Some of those people, I don't know what they're going to do,” Matthews said.
We reached out to the current owner selling the property but we have not heard back. We also reached out to the property buyer, who is out of Dallas. They declined an on camera interview with it still being early in the buying process.