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Iowa agencies see continued increase in housing issues
Nine months into the pandemic and many Iowa families are still being pushed into homelessness.
Waypoint Services, a Cedar Rapids-based provider, is seeing the need grow sharply among Iowans who never experienced homelessness before.
Housing services director J’nae Peterman says area shelters and other providers are also struggling to meet the demand for rent assistance and transitional housing. “Within a month-and-a-half time period, we served the number of people that we typically serve in a full year,” Peterman says. “That’s typically around 3,000 people and that’s what we’re seeing in less than two months.”
Parts of
Iowa can expect a major winter storm Wednesday with strong winds and temperatures dropping. Iowans are advised to avoid driving in the storm.
There are already widespread blizzard conditions especially in the northwest part of the state. The region can expect two to five inches of snow, but that’s not the most concerning part of the storm.
Jeff Chapman is a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. He says the snow accumulation is not the most important element of the storm, but gusting winds anywhere from 45 to 60 miles per hour are.
Chapman says this will make it really hard to see, so he recommends to hold off on driving anywhere until tomorrow. Temperatures in northwest Iowa will be near zero by morning.
âHuman-to-human coronavirus transmission confirmed.â
On Jan. 21, this headline and Associated Press story appeared in the bottom right-hand corner of The Daily Nonpareilâs front page. It was the first time the Nonpareil had picked up a story about an outbreak that was happening on the other side of the world.
It was not the first news of the pandemic. Stories of an outbreak in China had dotted national news outlets â in print, television and digital. At the time, many of us didnât know what exactly a âcoronavirusâ was. We had heard people were getting sick â -including the health care workers who were treating sick patients.