The thirty percent
A floor, not a target — continuous, written into the bylaws, and the reason House 1 opens before any other.
The thirty percent
Thirty percent of budgeted services are dedicated to women veterans who have survived abuse of any kind, including military sexual trauma. It is a floor, it is continuous rather than an end-of-year average, and it is written into the bylaws so that a future board cannot quietly let it lapse.
Veterans overall are not over-represented among this county's homeless — 9 percent of those counted in 2026 against 15.6 percent of the adult population. Women veterans are a different matter. A woman who served is three to four times more likely to become homeless than a woman who never did, and a history of military sexual assault multiplies her adjusted odds of homelessness by 4.4. Its prevalence among homeless women veterans is 53 percent, against 27 percent among their housed peers (Washington et al., Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved, 2010).
The order in which the houses open is not an administrative detail. House 1 is the women's house, four bedrooms and four beds, every room single occupancy. It opens first. Between its opening and the second house, the program is one hundred percent women's beds.
The mandate has an origin. The founder's mother served as a corporal in the Marine Corps Women's Reserve in the Second World War. House 1 will carry her name — recorded by board resolution, and never on the building, because the address of a survivors' house is not published anywhere, ever.
