Eloise Lawrence

Just to the right of the narrow stairway Frances Amador climbs to her fourth-floor apartment, a freshly painted door leads to the only renovated unit…

At the beginning of the year, Kristen Seery had a home, a stable income and dreams of returning to school. Her dog-sitting business was bringing in enough money to cover her $1,025-a-month rent for a studio and living expenses for herself in Pawtucket. But when the pandemic brought her steady stream of pet care requests to a halt, she began struggling with rent. After paying in full for the month of February, she paid partial rent in March, applied for unemployment, and eventually informed her landlord about her financial situation. Seery began receiving unemployment in April. She and her landlord traded emails over the next three months, arriving at no resolution for a pandemic payment plan. Then in July, Seery, 37, found herself in court facing eviction a month after the state’s courts began re-opening...Preventing crises like Seery’s is the aim of a $7 million initiative between the state government and the United Way of Rhode Island. The Safe Harbor program started last month and is designed to head off evictions through mediation and rental assistance before court cases render tenants homeless. Funding comes from federal coronavirus relief... “I think the governor should be praised for extending the moratorium,” said Eloise Lawrence, deputy faculty director of the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau. But Lawrence said that move is just giving state leaders time to find a longer-term solution. “Scrambling around when people’s lives are at risk, makes absolutely no public policy sense, so what is really important now is that we don’t squander the time and the breathing room that we’ve created,” she said.