Averting Catastrophe Eviction Prevention Collaboration Alleviating Pandemic-induced Housing Plight By Joy Brown Hope House personnel are accustomed to empathetically addressing the region’s most sorrowful housing situations, but the COVID-19 pandemic has added a layer of anguish that makes them pause and choke up when articulating the problem. With lives and livelihoods threatened in unprecedented ways, more people here are hurting like never before, they said. Locking eyes in passing in a Hope House hallway with a fellow mask-clad, middle-class mother hammered home for Director Sue Lehman the heightened level of Hancock County eviction hardship. Counseling a solidly self-sufficient but recently laid-off grandmother, responsible for raising her grandchild solo, in the ways of 4 | Averting Catastrophe
financial assistance to avoid getting forced out of their home shook program supervisor Starr Laytart, L.S.W. Contending with a client whose fear of exposing his immunocompromised child to the virus therefore prevented him from going to work has been a heartbreaking example of calamitous love, explained Missy LaRocco, pro bono director/managing attorney of Legal Aid of Western Ohio, Inc. “The numbers have risen astronomically” since the pandemic, said Lehman of people accessing Hope House services. For the first two weeks of October, the organization’s intake load increased by 75% more than it did for the entire month of September.
