There isn’t enough housing or shelter space for domestic violence survivors in Sacramento

Emergency housing for domestic violence survivors and their families in Sacramento has been tough to find during the COVID-19 pandemic. Really tough.

The largest domestic violence service provider in the region reported record levels of requests for shelter, often from increasingly dangerous homes, and finding a safe place to keep them has been challenging.

“We sort of saw a perfect storm around housing and safe shelter for victims,” said Allison Kephart, director of legal services at WEAVE in a presentation to the Sacramento County Board of Supervisors last month.

The “perfect storm” was a wave of survivors looking for a safe place to go, and few options available to domestic violence service providers when some shelters closed and many had to reduce capacity.

In an interview with The Sacramento Bee, WEAVE CEO Beth Hassett said the organization has had to completely change its approach to emergency housing during the pandemic.

But initially, that wasn’t the case.

Last spring, before WEAVE closed its shelter temporarily to incoming victims, “What we saw was a decrease initially in requests for housing,” Hassett said. “ We really saw people being too afraid to leave at first.”

It took months before the requests for shelter started to roll in, and by then WEAVE had reopened its shelter but at 50% capacity to allow enough space for social distancing and quarantining when needed. So rather than housing six families in a wing of the 12,000-square-foot facility, only three could be accommodated.

But, Hassett said, that presented new challenges for many who found the added isolation in the shelter even more traumatizing.

And by the summer, demand for housing had ramped up. Months of isolation and stress acted as a “pressure cooker” for already violent relationships and victims were looking for help, Hassett said.

Calls into the organization’s legal line more than doubled last year, and staff reported a “significant increase in requests for shelter,” Kephart said in her presentation.

“Again those cases are just more dangerous, more violent, really complex family law matters,” she said. “So it’s multiple, multiple issues. I’d say the complexity of the domestic violence cases is nothing like we’ve ever seen before.”

Faced by mounting demand and limited shelter space, staff at WEAVE turned to hotels.

In 2020, WEAVE bought 950 nights in hotels and motels across the county, up from 200 nights in 2019.

Staff looked for hotels that had kitchenettes so victims would be able to prepare their own food, and made sure the hotel was in a safe area, close to the survivor’s support network.

The move to hotels as a form or shelter is one WEAVE has used in the past, but Hassett said it’s not their “M.O.” because it’s not the best way to support someone leaving a violent relationship.

“It’s not the optimal way to support a family,” she said. “And then figuring out how to support them virtually while they’re staying in a hotel and can get really tempted to go back into the violent home that they left. So (it’s about) making sure that we’re wrapping them with supportive services and that it’s working for them.”