The Northern Lancaster Hub, located in Ephrata, in conjunction with Lancaster Housing Opportunity Partnership (LHOP), Tabor Community Services and United Way of Lancaster County are sponsoring a county-wide forum designed to educate renters on the recent policies concerning rental properties and COVID-19, and to provide resources to help them in all social service areas.
Renters are very concerned as some have lost their jobs, others have not received either stimulus or unemployment help and still others on fixed incomes are seeing prices rise while their income remains the same.
The County-Wide Tenant Forum will be held on May 20, 2020 from 5-6pm via Zoom. All tenants across the county are urged to attend. This will be an open forum for renters all across Lancaster County to discuss issues that they have, ask questions and exchange ideas. “Tenants are facing a myriad of issues in Lancaster County. We want to provide information about federal fair housing laws, the eviction and utility moratoriums, recent state and federal guidelines and other helpful tips unique to the tenant experience,” says Adrian Garcia, Director of the Housing Equality & Equity Institute for Lancaster Housing Opportunity Partnership (LHOP).
Kelly Ernst Warner, Hub Coordinator of the Northern Lancaster Hub agrees, “We have partners getting calls from people who are getting desperate. If we help educate people upstream and provide them with robust resources, it will help mitigate more severe downstream problems.”
The Northern Lancaster Hub works closely with the other social services Hubs in Lancaster County. This forum is a follow up to last month’s widely attended landlord forum. Other hubs are encouraging renters who live in their regions of the county to attend. “We cannot know all the challenges that are going to come, but we can prepare. When it comes to crises management, I work on the theory that you need to plan for everything but can only prepare for one thing at a time. Being ready is about putting in the extra time and work on the front end so that we can implement the solutions more quickly on the backend,” says Kevin Ressler, President and CEO of United Way of Lancaster County.
Zoom Information: https://www.facebook.com/events/558330058431548/
