The tenant hotline continues our streak of record month-over-month call volume. This was our busiest August—we just had our busiest July, etc. all the way back to last October.
In August, we took 2,008 new calls and 1,542 follow-up calls for a total of 3,550 total calls, all higher than our records from June of this year. August 2022 was our busiest month ever.
What’s driving these calls? Evictions. The eviction numbers remain staggering. We advised 666 renter households on eviction issues in August alone. Last August it was 256. In 2019—the last ‘normal’ pre-COVID year, we advised 2,821 tenants on evictions. That means that this August alone, we advised about 24% of the total year’s eviction calls from a normal year in one month.
Here are the official numbers for our top 10 call topics this month:
How did we manage all of these calls? For the first time, HOME Line hired help from the law schools directly:
This summer HOME Line hired six law students to help address the increase in call volume on the hotline. Samantha Arndt, Aidan Earnest, Morgan Rosser, Abby Petersen, Morgan Zuehlke, and Gabe Zempel all joined hotline staff in answering tenants’ legal questions in late May of 2022. For three months they responded to calls on the hotline, answering more than 1,400 callers’ legal questions between them. The most common issues these students worked on were repairs (422 calls) and evictions (252 calls). They also worked on a lot of security deposit disputes (178 calls).
At a time when eviction filings surged these law students responded in an impressive way to address a challenging and changing landscape of housing law.
These law students helped address that challenge and their work was invaluable to HOME Line, and to the clients we serve.
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