The waiting list at Harbor House of Wentworth County has never been longer, its director told commissioners this week, and survivors are staying nearly twice as long because they cannot find apartments they can afford. On Tuesday, the county board answered with the largest funding increase in the shelter's history.
The Wentworth County Board of Commissioners voted 5-0 on Tuesday to increase annual funding for Harbor House of Wentworth County, the region’s only dedicated domestic violence shelter, from $1.25 million to $2.1 million. The increase will add 12 beds to the shelter’s current 38, expand its 24-hour hotline staffing, and fund two housing-navigation positions aimed at moving families out of shelter and into permanent homes faster.
Harbor House turned away approximately 300 households over the past year because its beds were full, executive director Celeste Marroquin told the board, while calls to its hotline rose 24 percent. The average shelter stay has stretched from 45 days to roughly 70, she said, driven less by the crisis that brings families in than by the housing market that keeps them there.
We are not full because more people are being hurt, necessarily. We are full because the exits are blocked. A survivor with a job and a voucher used to find an apartment in six weeks. Now it’s four months, and every one of those extra nights is a bed the next family cannot have.
Celeste Marroquin, executive director, Harbor House of Wentworth County
The funding vote drew emotional testimony. A former Harbor House resident, who asked to be identified only as Dana T. for her safety, told commissioners the shelter’s hotline answered on the second ring the night she left with her two children and a single duffel bag. “Whoever funds that phone line funded the rest of my life,” she said. “I need you to make sure it keeps getting answered.”
Demand rising across the system
The shelter’s numbers track with law-enforcement data. Domestic-related calls to Bellwater police rose 11 percent over the past year, according to department figures, and District Attorney Vivian Ashcroft told the board her office’s domestic violence caseload has grown enough that she is reassigning a prosecutor to the unit. Advocates cautioned that rising reports can reflect greater willingness to call as much as rising violence — but either way, they said, each call feeds the same overloaded pipeline of shelter beds, protective orders and court dates.
Board Chair Louis Renfro said the request initially competed with a long queue of county needs in a tight year, but the turn-away figure settled the question. “Three hundred households asked this county for a safe bed and were told no,” Renfro said. “I am not interested in explaining to anyone why that was the best we could do.”
Commissioner Dale Hutto, often the board’s skeptic on new spending, voted yes and said the math persuaded him as much as the testimony: emergency-room visits, police callbacks and foster-care placements tied to households that could not reach shelter all land on public budgets anyway. “We pay for this either way,” Hutto said. “This is the version where we pay less and a kid sleeps somewhere safe.”
The housing bottleneck behind the beds
Much of Tuesday’s discussion circled a problem the funding only partly addresses: survivors ready to leave shelter cannot find affordable apartments. Marroquin said Harbor House families with housing vouchers routinely lose out in a rental market tightened by the city’s tech-sector growth, and some return to unsafe homes rather than wait. The new housing-navigation staff will cultivate relationships with landlords and help families compete for units, an approach that cut shelter stays sharply in counties that pioneered it.
The bottleneck connects the shelter’s ledger to the city’s broader affordability fight, including the council’s ongoing debate over a citywide affordable-housing mandate. Council Member Aisha Muhammad, who chairs the city council’s housing committee and attended Tuesday’s county meeting, said domestic violence survivors belong at the center of that debate. “When we talk about who gets priced out, we picture a family moving to the suburbs,” Muhammad said. “Sometimes the person priced out is a mother deciding whether going back is safer than a shelter waitlist. That should end the argument.”
The expansion will roll out over six months. The twelve new beds require converting Harbor House’s administrative wing, with offices moving to donated space nearby; Marroquin expects the beds open within four months and the housing navigators hired sooner. The hotline expansion begins immediately, adding overnight staff so that calls after midnight — nearly a third of the total, she noted — no longer roll to an on-call system.
The county funding also stabilizes programs that operate beyond the shelter’s walls. Harbor House runs support groups at three locations across the county, sends advocates to accompany survivors to protective-order hearings at the courthouse, and staffs a legal clinic twice monthly with volunteer attorneys. Those services had been patched together from year-to-year grants, Marroquin said, and the new baseline funding lets the organization commit to them without an annual scramble. “Predictable money means we can promise a survivor we’ll still be here in month six of her court case,” she said.
Marroquin closed her testimony by inviting commissioners to visit the shelter’s donated-goods room, where families assemble household kits before moving into new apartments. “The plates and the crib sheets are donated by this community,” she said. “What we needed from its government was the beds and the staff. Today you provided them, and I intend to hold you to making it permanent in the next budget.” Renfro, closing the item, answered from the dais: “Understood. Hold us to it.”