���˶���

Chairman's Message

As the ���˶��� and its grantees looked forward to commemorating LSC’s 50th Anniversary in the coming year, the more than 12,000 lawyers and staff at LSC’s 131 grantees across the country spent 2023 grappling with a host of civil legal problems, many created or magnified by the pandemic.

Although COVID-19 began to fade as a public health crisis, it left many civil legal challenges in its wake such as a rise in domestic violence (up more than 9% since 2021) and housing insecurity issues which were expanded by the end of eviction moratoria, rental assistance initiatives and eviction diversion programs. In fact, in 2022, 41.3% of the cases closed by LSC grantees were housing cases, the first time one case type comprised such a large portion of cases closed in a year.

LSC’s Housing Task Force released four issue briefs on legal problems related to housing insecurity, illegal evictions, manufactured housing, extended-stay motels and contracts-for-deed housing arrangements. Together, the series alarmingly illustrates that many housing options that are financially accessible to low-income individuals do little to relieve their housing insecurity and often further jeopardize their financial well-being.

Housing insecurity is also a pressing problem for veterans and was the focus of LSC’s annual Veterans Day forum which featured Florida Rep. Laurel Lee and veterans advocates. LSC Leaders Council member, best - selling author John Grisham, also pointed to personal experience at a March Justice Forum in Washington D.C. to explain the significance of legal representation in eviction and housing matters, recalling his pro bono work for trailer park residents in Mississippi as he began his legal career: “It’s astonishing what happens when you’re a lawyer and you take the case of a person who cannot afford to pay you, or somebody who’s not supposed to have a lawyer, and you pick up the phone or you show up in court with them and everything changes—the whole game changes— suddenly they have respect [and] they get a fair hearing.”

Read full message