Richard Vogel/AP Photo
Ro Mantooth plays with his dog, Champ, at a dog park with the nonprofit People Assisting the Homeless, in the Venice section of Los Angeles, April 5, 2022. It was the first facility of its kind in Los Angeles County to allow homeless shelter residents to bring animal companions.
In 2020, Dianne Prado, founder of the Housing Equity and Advocacy Resource Team, known as HEART LA, represented Elliot Haas, a man living on the streets of Los Angeles, in a lawsuit filed against Little Love, an animal rescue group. Haas alleged that a pair of social workers working for the organization stole his dog Luna after visiting him in the tent where he lived with his pet. He claimed that one person helped him set up a table as a distraction while the other worker lured Luna into their car. The rescue group maintained they received Haas’s permission to take Luna. Haas has countered that he did not consent.
Prado claims that the group doubted Haas’s ability to care for Luna. In 2019, she suffered a seizure that left her hind legs paralyzed. By the time Prado secured a court order for the animal’s return, it was too late. Only then did Haas find out that the woman who adopted Luna from Little Love had euthanized his pet. Haas passed away in 2022, but the suit is still pending.
The vast majority of homeless shelters do not accommodate pet owners, while most animal shelters search out new homes for the dogs, cats, and other animals already in their care and are not set up to temporarily monitor animals until a person finds shelter. The conditions that lead to pet and human homelessness are facets of the same problem: When owners face hardships and lose their housing, in the most serious cases, the person and any animals they choose to keep may end up in the streets. Given the deep human-animal bonds, it is not surprising that some pet owners like Hass prioritize their animals over shelter.
Distrust between unhoused people and service workers makes it difficult to gather the real-world data on people and pets who lose their homes. Psychology Today estimates anywhere from 6 percent to 24 percent of unhoused people own a pet.
The conditions that lead to pet and human homelessness are facets of the same problem.
There are strong prejudices against unhoused pet owners. HEART LA received hate mail and threatening letters from the public for helping Haas. Animal advocates, police officers, and even workers in homeless shelters often assume one cannot be both homeless and a responsible pet owner. Prado rattles off the doubts they often express: “Can you afford to have your pet? Do you have pet insurance? Where does your pet sleep?” For Prado, the irony is that Luna’s major ailment was the inability to control her bowels. She needed constant access to the outdoors and the attention that Haas provided her.
As the director of pet placement initiatives at PetSmart Charities, Heidi Marston manages a program that connects pets in animal shelters with new homes. A former executive director of the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, she says that stigma hinders her work with unhoused people and animals. Battling discrimination “is the work,” she says. “Being unhoused, especially in America, is not about having a character flaw. It’s about a system of policy failure.”
The people she worked with were often so distrustful of social workers that they declined to share their names. They have strong bonds with their animals, often making sure that their pets have food before they think about their own meals. In return, they receive warmth, protection, and love, which is especially invaluable for unhoused people who may otherwise lack social connections. Marston stresses a need to understand the housing crises that produce unhoused people and pets instead of “blaming individuals for the position they’re in.”
A 2023 survey conducted by Human Animal Support Services (HAAS), a collaborative project including 4,600 animal welfare professionals in 1,500 organizations, aimed at keeping people and pets together, found that the vast majority of animals enter shelters for reasons unrelated to their behavior. Owners often surrender their pets after suddenly descending into poverty or homelessness. For example, the survey indicates that 28 percent of surrenders were the result of evictions. HAAS’s eviction calculator estimates that California’s 609,000 households behind on rent will result in 870,000 pets being evicted from their homes in the next 30 to 90 days.
In Los Angeles, eviction is one of the major reasons that people find themselves on the streets. The California Tenant Protection Act caps annual rent increases at either 10 percent or 5 percent plus the increase in the Consumer Price Index—whichever is lower. However, the Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Act allows landlords to raise rates to market levels after a tenant leaves or is evicted. When ownership of a rent-controlled property transfers from one landlord to another, the new landlord may use the opportunity to evict longtime tenants and increase prices.
In some multiunit buildings, landlords give tenants permission to have a pet even though their leases actually prohibit animals. A new landlord can take over a building and use the prohibitions in the original lease to justify an eviction even though some tenants have lived with their pets for years. HEART LA educates tenants on how to evaluate eviction threats that a landlord can’t legally enforce. In cases where a new owner invoked the original lease, HEART LA has presented the past owner’s consent as a legal defense in court and successfully protected tenants from eviction.
Frequently, “tenants have no idea they have rights,” Prado says. Many of her clients speak only Spanish or are undocumented immigrants wary of seeking legal counsel because they fear deportation. “They think they’re beholden to whatever the landlord says,” Prado explains. “The moment [tenants] get representation, it changes the game.”
Many unhoused people remain on the streets because local ordinances only allow service animals in shelters—and they often lack the funds to have their pets certified even when they are actually providing physical or emotional support. The National Service Animal Registry estimates that training and certifying a service dog can cost anywhere from $17,000 to $40,000. Prado points out that a pet can do everything service animals do and more. Luna, for instance, would bark to warn Haas about strangers and provided him with the companionship he needed to quit drug use and manage his severe depression and anxiety.
Many unhoused people remain on the streets because local ordinances only allow service animals in shelters.
As animal advocacy groups study the economic origins of pet homelessness, they’ve begun to prioritize strategies that aim to keep people and their pets together. Memphis Animal Services, the municipal animal shelter in Tennessee’s second-largest city, calculated that supporting the 25,000 creatures in their care costs an average of $300 per animal each year. The shelter created a Pet Resource Center to help owners find alternatives to relinquishing their pets. The agency often provided owners with $50 for pet food or $200 for veterinary care. This strategy has ultimately saved money by allowing pets to stay with their owners, diverting 20,000 animals from the shelter annually.
Through its network of 1,700 partners, Feeding Pets of the Homeless, a national nonprofit group that provides care for pets of unhoused people, distributes food, sleeping crates, and veterinary care to animal and homeless shelters. The group provides free and low-cost vaccinations and sterilizations that are especially valuable for veterans enrolled in the federal Housing and Urban Development–Veterans Affairs Supportive Housing program, which combines HUD’s Housing Choice Voucher with case management from the Department of Veterans Affairs to find and subsidize housing costs for unhoused veterans and their families. Of the 110,000 veterans enrolled in the program, those with pets are frequently required to keep them up-to-date on shots to gain eligibility for housing.
Marston acknowledges the importance of preventative measures to keep people in their homes with their pets, but insists that animal advocates and homeless shelter officials should work toward merging their resources, spaces, and staff to create and strengthen the people-plus-pet housing networks organizations like Memphis Animal Services have developed. She believes that partnerships with nearby homeless shelters would be more effective and could provide additional insights into the causes of pet homelessness. (PetSmart Charities provides grant funding for food pantries, low-cost veterinary services, and vaccine clinics to assist people with pet ownership costs so they can keep their pets, but is not currently involved in any co-location programs.)
Some homeless shelter officials have concerns that accepting animals could pose liability issues and generate resistance from insurance companies, endangering shelters already struggling to keep the lights on. However, Laura Brown, executive director of Feeding Pets of the Homeless, believes that “with the right management and documentation, liability risk could be [reduced].”
It is a challenge that if done correctly could offer major benefits: Co-locating organizations in the same building would allow homeless shelters to hire their animal welfare colleagues to monitor and train incoming pets and allow their people to participate in their care. Creating this type of synergized care network that serves both unhoused humans and animals is an ambitious goal, one that would require animal welfare groups and advocates for the homeless to reassess their fundamental missions and update their decades-old strategies.
