Last summer, after an early pandemic ban on rental evictions issued by Congress expired, one court in central Ohio turned to a pop-up model in order to get back to business as usual. The Franklin County Municipal Court set up shop in an empty Greater Columbus Convention Center in June 2020 to process the heavy load of evictions in a socially distanced setting.
Tenant advocates tried to look on the bright side: Legal aid groups were able to establish satellite offices in the convention center, too. For more than a year, the housing court operated out of the convention center, only returning to the courthouse in July 2021. The churn of evictions never stopped. Despite federal orders, including the moratorium recently revived by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Franklin County continued hearing cases nearly the whole time. Columbus-area landlords have filed nearly 17,000 evictions in the 16 months since the start of the pandemic, according to Princeton University’s Eviction Lab.
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