Domestic violence and homelessness often intersect. In fact, it’s common for one to lead to the other. But in Fresno County – which has one of the highest rates of DV calls to law enforcement in California – only one shelter exclusively serves people facing both.
The Marjaree Mason Center, a short-term shelter that aims to help people into long-term housing, is a boxy building in a quiet subdivision. It has 40 individual rooms for people and families escaping danger in their homes or on the streets. And while it’s common for shelters to have large, shared rooms with rows of beds and no privacy, Leticia Campos, the center’s chief programs officer, said such conditions are inadequate for people leaving violent situations.
“We don’t double bunk,” Campos said. “We make sure that every single family, every single individual has their own room for their own confidential space, especially because of the trauma that they’ve endured and the trauma that the kids have endured.”
Besides respite and privacy, the center offers therapy for trauma, counseling for children and help finding housing. There are medical services, relationship education for high schoolers and layers of 24/7 security to assure that abusers don’t follow clients in. For those who manage to get a room, it’s a full-service operation.
But the shelter can only take in 40 households, or about 140 people at a time. On average, they stay for only 30 days before they have to leave to make room for someone else. Some advocates say that isn’t enough, but it comes down to funding – which can fluctuate a lot.
That can leave agencies tasked with addressing homelessness with whiplash, and funding that changes so often that it’s hard to plan around. It’s not new in the second Trump administration, but people who lead that work say it’s hobbling their efforts.
Campos said 30 days is a short window to help people into new housing while supporting their mental health – especially if they’ve experienced financial abuse.
“Let’s just say I have three children with me, all under the age of 10,” said Campos. “I’ve never been employed because I’ve been prevented from being employed. I didn’t graduate high school, and now I have multiple evictions on me because that’s all part of the control and the power that this person imposed on me.”
Because of high demand for beds at the shelter, Campos said, they turn many people away. The Marjaree Mason Center did not respond to an email requesting data on how often that happens.
Campos said clients frequently strike out trying to find a home in Fresno’s competitive housing market, even with support from the center, and return to abusers, who might be upset they left.
‘For the life of me, I’m not getting the help’
Nova Coburn said she has stayed at the center a few times, including a period when she weathered a violent relationship that ended in 2023. She currently lives on the street in Fresno’s Tower District, where she grew up and has lived and worked as an adult.
“They housed me and I was thankful for it, but they never got me rolling with any kind of permanent housing, long-term housing,” she said. “I never got a real explanation for why, and nothing else happened for me.”
Coburn sat in a camping chair on an April afternoon in the grassy strip around a parking lot with about 10 people she knew, chatting and sharing food. She’s been unhoused for four years, and frequently looks out for others, helping connect them with social workers and people with who stop by with donations.
“Anytime anybody drops anything off, I might be the only person here,” she said. “But if they have extras…I always offer up the idea that if you leave it with me, I’ll pass it on.”
But helping her neighbors on the street hasn’t made the system easier for her to navigate.
“Any outreach worker, navigator I’ve had, I’ve never seen more than maybe twice, and then they’re gone,” she said. “They leave that position and I start with a new person altogether. It’s been so repetitive and then nothing’s come of it.”
She said she’s currently on multiple waiting lists for housing.
“For some reason, for the life of me, I’m not getting the help,” she said. “I should have been in housing by now.”
The work of the Marjaree Mason Center, and other organizations like it, depends on funding, and while some of that comes from private donors, most of it comes from federal, state and local government.
Year to year, government funding that the center receives can swing dramatically. Those swings reflect how much political will to deal with housing and victim services can change, said Jennifer Willover, housing policy analyst for the California Partnership to End Domestic Violence. As a result, she said, most funding is one-time or short-term.
“Every year, housing and homelessness providers, as well as domestic violence service providers, are constantly kind of holding their breath because at the federal and state level, we don’t really have long-term investments in both services,” she said.
Willover said state funding, especially for housing and homelessness programs, is usually allocated one to three years at a time. On the federal level, several agencies provide consistent funding streams, but programs still have to reapply for grants on a short-term basis. She said that puts providers like the Marjaree Mason Center in a bind.
“It’s very difficult to plan services and try to build programs without knowing how long you’ll have funding for,” she said.
Willover said the money that comes down from state and federal programs often doesn’t meet the need. That limits the number of people service providers can help.
“There’s often a lot of waitlists because a lot of folks are working with limited funding and they don’t want to overpromise,” she said.
For example, the average wait time in California for a housing voucher is 28 months, according to data from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). In that time, someone waiting might live on the street, in shelters, on friends’ and family members’ couches, or, in the case of a domestic violence victim, with an abuser.
Uncertainty creating harm
Several federal programs provide funding for work related to domestic violence and homelessness, but some have been struggling since before President Trump returned to the oval office. The Violence Against Women Act, for example, funds housing and legal assistance for survivors, but nearly a third of its budget has gone unallocated over the last year.
The Victims of Crime Act (VOCA) created a fund for work that supports victims of crime, including domestic violence. But its grants for victim assistance have dropped from $3.3 billion in 2018 to $779 million in 2024. That’s because it relies on large criminal fines, the amount of which can change from year to year depending on rates of prosecutions and convictions. California’s VOCA funding decreased 78% from 2018 to 2024.
Willover said California has made up for its decrease by allocating comparable funds in the state budget – $103 million in 2024 and $100 million in 2025. This year, the state budget includes just $50 million to make up for decreased VOCA funding. According to Willover, that’s enough to keep the state’s current programs afloat, but that’s because the state has already cut funding to several of them.
She added that providers are responding to the unpredictability of the Trump Administration by cutting back so that unanticipated changes or cuts are less likely to destabilize them.
“Worst case scenario, if some funds did get dropped, they’re still able to continue to help folks for a while,” she said.
Monica Davalos, who analyzes housing and health policy at the California Budget and Policy Center, said state funding for homelessness and housing insecurity boomed after Governor Gavin Newsom took office. From 2018 to 2019, it jumped from $515 million to over $2 billion, and peaked at about $10.5 billion in 2021.
Davalos also said 2021 and 2022 were big years for homelessness funding at the federal level. The Trump administration’s pandemic response provided money for state programs addressing housing insecurity and homelessness, including in California.
But since then, some state leaders, including Newsom, have changed their approach. State funding for homelessness peaked at $6.9 billion in the 2022-2023 fiscal year, and sank to $2 billion in 2025-2026. That decrease affected funding for shelters and other programs, including the Marjaree Mason Center.
Along the way, the state budget got tighter. The California Legislative Analyst’s Office had warned for several years that the state’s revenues would likely drop. At the same time the current Trump administration is making deep cuts to state funding. Those penning the state budget are in result being asked to make fewer funds go farther.
Davalos said that seeps down to providers like the Marjaree Mason Center.
“A lot of the uncertainty that has been coming from the federal government is already creating harm, stress and tension at the local level and at the service provider level,” she said.
In the San Joaquin Valley, Laura Moreno chairs the Fresno Madera Continuum of Care – the county body that handles homelessness funding that comes down from the HUD. She said the unsteady nature of funding right now makes it hard to get people into safe, stable, long-term places to live, and certainly doesn’t help to prevent homelessness or abuse.
“All we’re doing is we’re picking people back up as they fall into [domestic violence] or homelessness,” she said, adding that she wishes her team was able to do more to prevent people from entering homelessness in the first place.
“Prevention is what goes first, right?” she said. “But then it becomes a harder issue to deal with because you have more people on the back end that you’re trying to assist as opposed to stopping the inflow.”
She said under the Trump administration, HUD has been erratic with regard to policy changes, making big asks of providers and issuing tight deadlines that send teams like hers scrambling.
“We are constantly having to plan [for] different scenarios,” she said.
For example, last year, HUD changed a major deadline at the last minute. Then, a lawsuit paused that move, and it’s still working its way through the courts. That pattern is playing out across various federal funding streams. Moreno said even when the courts order funding to be reinstated, the process creates extra work, and sometimes chaos, for providers.
She said that means fewer options and longer wait times for survivors of domestic violence – time they don’t have.
“When somebody has to escape,” she said, “they have to escape.”
Megan Myscofski is an independent reporter covering health care and state politics. She is based in Sacramento. meganmyscofski@proton.me