When Home Isn’t Safe: Domestic Violence and North Carolina’s Affordable Housing Crisis
Written by Deeya Majeed
A Carolina Impact Fellowship reflection on Carolina Across 100’s Our State, Our Homes program
More than a third of domestic violence survivors experience homelessness at some point in their lives (pull-quote). For many, the choice isn’t between a good option and a bad one; it’s between staying with continued violence or leaving into an affordable housing market that has almost nowhere for them to go.
Through the Carolina Impact Fellowship this summer, I’ve had the chance to support Carolina Across 100 by digging into research, visualizing data, and helping spread awareness about the organization’s work across North Carolina. Early on, I found myself drawn to Our State, Our Homes, a collaborative effort spanning 22 counties working together to tackle the state’s housing crisis (bold “Our State, Our Homes”). The more I learned about the program, the more one intersection kept surfacing: how the housing crisis and domestic violence intertwined with each other, making it increasingly difficult for survivors trying to find safety.
North Carolina’s Affordability Problem, By the Numbers
Our State, Our Homes defines affordable housing using a familiar federal standard: a household spending no more than 30% of its income on housing costs. Maps of renter cost burden across North Carolina show the scale of the problem: most of the state is shaded in red, indicating widespread numbers of renters crossing that 30% threshold. In some counties, 20 to 30% of households are severely cost burdened, spending more than half their income on housing (pull-quote or bolded callout).
Cost-Burden — Percent of renters spending 30% or more on housing-related costs, by North Carolina county. Source: HUD CHAS
That 30% rule is useful because it’s the standard federal and state programs are built around, but it can also obscure what’s actually happening in a household’s budget. A family earning $80,000 a year, after taxes and the cost of food, childcare, transportation, and healthcare, can really only afford around $1,200 a month for housing. Drop that income to $50,000, and there’s barely anything left over for housing at all, even after cutting corners everywhere else.
Programs also sort households by Area Median Income (AMI), the regional midpoint income set annually by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), into brackets like extremely low income (30% AMI), very low income (50%), low income (60% in North Carolina), and moderate income (80%). These brackets determine which agencies and programs are even legally allowed to serve a given household, which matters enormously once you get into who’s actually eligible for help.
Supply gets organized the same way, on a continuum: emergency shelter and transitional housing on one end for the most vulnerable, income-restricted units (built through programs like the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit) in the middle, and market-rate rentals and homeownership on the other end. Government subsidy is vital at the low end simply because the math doesn’t work otherwise: if a household can only afford $300 a month in rent, but it costs several hundred dollars more to operate that unit, someone has to cover the gap. That’s not a design flaw; it’s the point of the subsidy.
Roughly 85% of North Carolina’s affordable rental units aren’t subsidized at all: they’re “naturally occurring affordable housing,” affordable only because of their age, condition, or location. That’s the bulk of the state’s affordable housing stock, and it’s also the most exposed to renovation, redevelopment, or a hot market pushing prices up.
Where Domestic Violence Survivors Fall Into the Gaps
This is where the housing crisis becomes a safety crisis. Domestic violence is one of the leading causes of homelessness for women and children, and survivors face a set of barriers that make the general affordability crisis even harder to navigate:
– Financial abuse is common among survivors. Many have been cut off from family finances, blocked from working, or had their credit destroyed by a partner, all of which make it harder to qualify for housing on their own (call-out quote along with being present in the list)
– Survivors can face housing discrimination tied to a partner’s criminal or violent history, even when they themselves did nothing wrong.
– Confidentiality and safety needs limit where and what kind of housing survivors can safely access, and many mainstream homelessness assistance programs aren’t built with those needs in mind.
– Landlords are often hesitant to rent to survivors at all, especially in a tight rental market where they can afford to be selective.
Marginalized survivors (people of color, LGBTQ individuals, immigrants, people who are formerly incarcerated, and people with disabilities) face compounded barriers to safety on top of all of this.
Programs like NC’s Safe at Home rapid re-housing initiative, funded through HUD and the NC Balance of State Continuum of Care, exist specifically to connect survivors to permanent housing quickly and without the usual entry barriers: case management, childcare help, moving cost assistance, job training, and legal services all bundled together (bold “quickly connect individuals and families experiencing homelessness to permanent housing, without preconditions and barriers to entry”).
Emergency Shelter Isn’t Always the Answer
It’s worth pausing on something easy to overlook: transitional housing and shelter access isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution for survivors. Leaving home for a shelter can mean a longer commute to work, pulling kids out of their school, or additional trauma layered onto an already traumatic situation. Some survivors move between shelters for years without landing anywhere permanent, simply because there isn’t enough stable, affordable housing to move into.
And the housing shortage doesn’t just strand survivors; it can also complicate accountability for people who cause harm. When someone is served with a restraining order and has to leave their household, a shortage of affordable housing makes it genuinely difficult for them to comply, which in turn puts survivors at greater risk.
Homelessness data collected across HUD’s federal categories also has a known gap: the definition used to count “homeless” households doesn’t fully capture people fleeing domestic violence, dating violence, sexual assault, or stalking: even though these are explicitly recognized as a distinct category of housing instability under federal statute. That mismatch between definition and lived reality means funding doesn’t always reach the people who need it most.
Why This Matters for Cross-Sector Work
None of this is solvable by any single sector alone. It takes coordination between local governments (who hold statutory authority over how AMI-based funding is spent), nonprofits and domestic violence service providers (who understand survivors’ specific safety needs), and private landlords and developers (who control the supply of naturally occurring affordable units that most people, including survivors, actually rely on).
That’s the whole premise behind Our State, Our Homes: getting cross-sector teams from 22 counties into the same room, using the same shared language around affordability, AMI, and the housing continuum, so that when it comes time to design solutions, for survivors or for any other vulnerable population, everyone is working from the same map.
This post draws on research and programming from Carolina Across 100’s Our State, Our Homes initiative, coordinated by the UNC School of Government’s ncIMPACT Initiative, along with public materials from the NC Coalition Against Domestic Violence, the National Network to End Domestic Violence, and the Center for Justice Innovation.
Citations
Webinar: What We Mean When We Talk About Affordable Housing
Webinar: Coordinating to Address Homelessness: Insights from State and Local Practice
Resource: Manufactured Housing and the Power of Resident Ownership
Resource: Establishing and Operating a Community Land Trust
Why Housing Justice Is Crucial to Ending Domestic Violence, Center for Justice Innovation
The Impact of Safe Housing on Survivors of Domestic Violence, National Network to End Domestic Violence
Housing for Survivors of Domestic Violence, NC Coalition Against Domestic Violence
