Put two numbers next to each other and the problem stops being complicated.
Fifty percent. In a study conducted at the midpoint of one shelter program, half the survivors said that losing their pets would have kept them in the abusive home.
Twelve percent. That is the share of domestic violence programs in this country able to shelter an animal at all.
That is the whole thing. Not a funding debate, not a philosophical question about the role of animals in human welfare. Just a gap between what people need in order to escape and what the system is prepared to give them. And people are living inside that gap right now, because the alternative on offer is abandoning the one creature keeping them upright.
A larger joint survey of 2,500 survivors, run by the National Domestic Violence Hotline together with the Urban Resource Institute, pushes the figure higher still: 97 percent weighed the fate of their pets when deciding whether to seek shelter at all.
Nobody who has ever loved an animal will find that surprising. What is surprising is how thoroughly the system was built as though it were not true.
The subway, for days
Lauren Schuster runs government affairs at the Urban Resource Institute, and she tells a story that began with a phone call from a council member’s office.
A constituent had gotten out of an abusive home, and she had brought her dog. Not one shelter in New York City would take the pair of them. She made her way to PATH, the front door of the city’s homeless system, the place that is supposed to route you to wherever a bed exists. The answer there was no animals, unless the animal was a service or emotional support dog.
So she went underground. She and the dog rode the trains, and slept on them, night after night after night.
It ended only because she was desperate enough to walk into her elected official’s office, and because that office happened to have heard of URI. A call was made. She and her dog were placed. Afterward she phoned the official back in tears, and what she wanted them to understand was that it was not simply a bed. There was food for the dog. There was a leash. There was a yard where he could run.
Schuster’s own framing is the part that lodges. Picture yourself walking out of your house with a backpack in one hand and a leash in the other, no destination at all, and then being refused at door after door after door. Then multiply that by every person fleeing violence who owns a dog, or a cat, or a lizard.
What co-living actually means
The Urban Resource Institute is a New York City organization whose mission, in its own words, is to break the cycles of violence, homelessness, poverty, and trauma, with a particular focus on communities of color and other populations the system has failed.
Its People and Animal Living Safely program, PALS, is not “pet-friendly.” Pet-friendly is a policy. PALS is infrastructure.
When somebody arrives at a PALS site with an animal, they are given what it takes to restart a household in temporary housing: the ordinary business of stocking a kitchen and a bathroom, and then the animal-specific things on top of it, a crate and a leash for a dog, a box and litter for a cat. A partnership with the ASPCA covers the veterinary care and behavioral support at no cost to the family.
Several sites also have pet parks, private outdoor areas walled off from the street, so that a survivor can walk her dog without stepping onto a sidewalk where she may not feel safe. Some have grooming stations, and at times groomers come in and do the work themselves.
Read that list again with an eye on who it is protecting. The private outdoor space is not a luxury for the dog. It is a security feature for the person, who may be hiding from someone who knows what her dog looks like.
URI piloted PALS in 2013, the first organization in New York City to do it. In the decade since, it has grown to nine sites and served just under 700 animals. It remains the only organization in the city that allows people and pets to live together in shelter.
Why nobody else has done it
Two reasons, and only one of them is money.
The money reason is real. For years, the dollars available for homelessness prevention and for domestic violence services have trailed far behind the scale of what they are meant to address. Inside an organization where the need already dwarfs the budget, arguing to carve out funds for animals is a hard case to make, even to colleagues who agree with you.
The second reason is more fixable, and it is the one URI has decided to attack. There is an education gap among policymakers, and a knowledge gap among providers. Other shelters have not refused to do this so much as they have looked at it, found it daunting, and had no idea where to start.
That is a solvable problem. It just requires somebody to write it down.
The Pawprint
In May 2023, URI published the Pawprint, a policy document that functions as a roadmap for lawmakers at the city, state, and federal levels.
It did not come out of a think tank. It came out of conversations with URI’s own PALS team, its leadership, and its clients, asking what they needed and what obstacles they hit, and then out of conversations with agencies that are not running programs like this, asking the same question. Every policy in it is designed to plug a specific hole, solve an existing problem, or remove an obstacle for a provider so that the provider can remove it for a client.
Here is what it asks for, sorted by who has to act.
Federal: pay for it
Most organizations do not have the funding relationships URI has spent a decade building, so the federal proposals are about financing.
URI is itself a PAWS Act grantee. That program put $3 million into the hands of agencies willing to house survivors and their animals together. What happened next is the most damning statistic in the entire document: more than twice as many organizations applied as could be funded.
Read that oversubscription correctly. It is not evidence that providers are indifferent. It is evidence that they are broke.
The PAWS Act first came into being through the 2018 Farm Bill, and URI has since joined a national coalition working to keep it alive in reauthorization and to push the appropriation up to $5 million.
A second federal bill, the PUPP Act, would direct the USDA and HUD to stand up a $3 million grant program for agencies housing unhoused people alongside their animals. That gap matters because survivors so often end up in the homeless system regardless: either the rules time them out of domestic violence shelter, or the beds simply run out. And homelessness is its own trauma, as is poverty. Holding onto an animal through both is frequently part of what gets a person off the street and, eventually, well.
State: two bills, one of them clever
The first would stand up a combined capital and operating fund, paying for the physical retrofits an existing shelter site needs and then for the running costs: veterinary care, food, sanitation.
The second is the one worth stealing. It would allow a veterinarian to work off part of their continuing education credit by treating, for free, animals living in shelter with their people.
That is an elegant piece of policy design. It costs the state almost nothing. It solves a provider’s single biggest recurring expense. And it answers a problem that exists on the other side of the ledger entirely: a lot of veterinarians want to help with this and have no idea how to plug in. This gives them a door.
The scale of the need behind it is not abstract. Around 29,000 children sleep on the streets of New York each night.
City: make it the default
At the city level, URI is working on legislation to make co-living permissible in every shelter city-wide, for people fleeing violence and for people experiencing homelessness alike.
And, alongside it, a training and technical assistance bill. This is the part that addresses the “I don’t know where to start” problem directly: URI has been asked every one of these questions over ten years and has answered them, so standardizing that knowledge into a city-run training program makes adoption far easier for everyone else. It also sets a floor, which matters. If co-living spreads, it should spread with minimum standards attached, so that every person and every animal gets the same level of care.
What you can actually do
The ask is specific, which is refreshing.
Call your member of Congress. Two asks: keep PAWS in the Farm Bill, and put their name on the PUPP Act as a co-sponsor.
That is it. That is the action. It is unglamorous and it is the thing that moves.
What’s new since this was written
The federal picture has moved, and mostly in the right direction.
The PAWS grant program has survived, and then some. The House Farm Bill reauthorizes the Protecting Animals with Shelter grant program through 2031, extending the funding stream URI and others have relied on. And during the FY 2026 appropriations process, congressional allies revived funding for PAWS grants after it was at risk, which is the sort of quiet, procedural rescue that never makes the news and determines whether a shelter can take a dog next year.
The timeline URI predicted has largely held, too. The Farm Bill has been slow, subject to extensions and delays, and the coalition work has had to continue in the meantime rather than waiting for a single decisive vote. That is what advocacy on this actually looks like: not a moment, but a decade of keeping a line item alive.
The gap between 50 percent and 12 percent is still there. It is smaller than it was.
References
- National Domestic Violence Hotline and Urban Resource Institute. “PALS Report: Domestic Violence and Pets.” https://urinyc.org/pals/
- Urban Resource Institute. “The Pawprint: A Policy Roadmap for People and Pets.” https://urinyc.org/
- Animal Welfare Institute. “Pet and Women Safety (PAWS) Act.” https://awionline.org/policy-efforts/pet-and-women-safety-paws-act/
- U.S. Congress. “Providing for Unhoused People with Pets (PUPP) Act.” https://schiff.house.gov/imo/media/doc/pupp_act.pdf
- Animal Welfare Institute. “Farm Bill and animal protection provisions.” https://awionline.org/press-releases/farm-bill-passes-house-missed-opportunity-help-animals
- U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. “Annual Homeless Assessment Report (AHAR) to Congress.” https://www.huduser.gov/portal/datasets/ahar.html
