This is a short piece taken from our podcast "Walking the Margins: Mental Health & Housing Precarity Along Admiral" which you can listen to on demand at KOSU.org, the NPR app, NPR.org, or wherever you get your podcasts.

A motel room. The interstate. Winter wind. Days of walking with no plan but to witness life on the street. Nick Alexandrov set out to report on mental health along an extended-stay motel corridor in Tulsa. What he found was a quieter, more elusive, more human story.

Unfolding on sidewalks, overpasses, church steps, and in fleeting conversations with people living outside. This quarterly feature asks: How does this environment produce its own kind of mental strain? How do people cope with that stress? And what if, rather than the other way around, housing insecurity itself helps drive mental distress and addiction?

This special episode of Focus: Black Oklahoma is part of a larger quarterly effort from Oklahoma media addressing mental health. Find the rest of the quarterly and more stories and coverage from Tulsa Flyer, The Oklahoma Eagle, KOSU, La Semana, and The Frontier at https://tulsaflyer.org/snapshot/mental-health/.

Focus: Black Oklahoma is produced in partnership with KOSU, Tulsa Flyer, & Tri-City Collective.

Our theme music is by Moffett Music.

The production team for this special quarterly edition of Focus: Black Oklahoma are Quraysh Ali Lansana, Bracken Klar, & Jesse Ulrich.

You can visit us online at or FocusBlackOklahoma.com, & on YouTube @TriCityCollectiveOK.

You can follow us on Instagram @FocusBlackOK & on Facebook at Facebook.com/FocusBlackOK.

You can hear Focus: Black Oklahoma on demand at KOSU.org, the NPR app, NPR.org, or wherever you get your podcasts.

https://linktr.ee/focusblackok