Well, the past several weeks have been challenging to say the least. Members of the Nashville legal community have stepped up to the plate to take on additional projects and give advice to those in need as a result of the recent flooding. I know most of my colleagues have been out offering free legal advice at centers around the city, and knowledge has been appropriately dispersed from the top down in an efficient manner. Guidebooks for advice have also been available, which helps those attorneys who may not be familiar with insurance-based emergency questions. I have been proud to be a part of those efforts.
Of course what we have all discovered is that these situations cannot be solved with the mere distribution of information. Sign up for FEMA. FEMA may cover you, it may not. Sign up for a SBA loan. As wonderful as low-cost loans are, that's just not going to cut it for people already in debt. The content of the information we are distributing needs to be improved. Now that we are a few weeks out, we can look back at what the community (read government) is offering to our intrepid Nashvillians.
Let's take a look at the legal hotline. While I have not called it myself, I hear from clients, friends, and family that it feeds to Legal Aid. Legal Aid, strapped as always, struggles to cover as many as they can - but at last check it ran at about 1-7 accepts per request. That number reflects the rate after the stringent monetary limits have already stripped down the number of applicable requests. We need to offer more, especially during a disaster, where people certainly cannot afford to pay an attorney for legal advice.
One family I've been dealing with had this experience: they bought their house when the market was high, lost equity when the market fell, and then had their home flooded. Now all the value is stripped out of the home. FEMA relief will provide them with a fraction of the money that it will take to rebuild. So - here they are - wondering what to do. Who would put thousands of dollars into a home they already cannot afford when only a fraction of the rebuilding costs are supported? Given the additional problem of having already gone through a bankruptcy, they have few options. I can only imagine how many people are in similar situations. If there are as many Nashvillians as I expect in this quagmire, a legislative solution is needed. And did they try the hotline as I suggested? Yes, but no one got back to them.
We need to do better.
