For most of her life, Yenni Rivera found it difficult to ask for help. Raised in a working-class, Salvadoran, immigrant family in South Los Angeles, she often juggled three jobs and worked seven days a week. She never considered using public assistance programs like food stamps, and she rarely voiced her struggles, even to family. That changed nine months after her son was born, when she fled an abusive husband and had nowhere else to go, demonstrating the connection between the housing crisis and domestic violence. With a black eye and a swollen lip, she remembers walking into an LA County Department of Public Social Services office in 2014.

She remembers an exhausted employee informing her there were no appointments available.

She remembers being told she would have to wait eight hours to speak with a social worker about the possibility of getting into a domestic violence shelter or temporary hotel room.

She remembers there were no domestic violence shelter spaces available for her and her baby that day.

Instead, the county’s social services department supplied her with a six-week voucher for a hotel room in Jefferson Park. After the voucher expired, she and her son spent the next five years sleeping on a sofa and loveseat in the living room of her parents’ home.

“That’s how homelessness and DV interlaps,” said Rivera. “If you don’t have a family member that can take you in, if you don’t have a friend that can take you in, you’re going to end up part of the [homeless services] system.”

Rivera’s story illustrates an often overlooked crisis in LA: domestic violence as a major driver of homelessness. Across California, one in five women who become homeless fled their homes to escape violence and escalating abuse by an intimate partner. In LA, the numbers are starker: 44 percent of unhoused women surveyed in 2023 by the Urban Institute reported domestic violence as the primary cause of their homelessness.

Read the full article about the housing crisis and domestic violence by Aaron Schrank at The 19th.