There are residents in Ames who have problems finding access to affordable housing.

That’s where Section 8, a program run by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, comes in. Section 8 is a rental assistance program that provides financial assistance – primarily to qualified low-income families with children or elderly members.

“What happens is when a family qualifies, they get a voucher from us,” said Mark Stokesberry, Section 8 lead specialist for Cedar Rapids. “That voucher means that we will pay a portion of a person’s rent.”

The voucher recipient pays no more than 40 percent of their monthly income toward rent and utilities, and the rate is usually closer to 30 percent.

Also, the recipient has a choice of where to live. As long as the housing unit meets some basic qualifications, it can be considered a Section 8 housing unit.

Ames has only 222 housing units that are acceptable for Section 8, and supply is not meeting demand.

According to a presentation by Vanessa Baker-Latimer, housing coordinator for Ames, given to the City Council in late November, the program had 288 applicants in 2007.

Over the last six years, the housing authority has had to deny 553 applicants, although the vast majority of the denials were due to the fact that the applicants did not reply to a housing authority letter.

Once a family has been accepted and received its voucher, they can move anywhere in the United States where the local housing authority operates a Section 8 program.

“This program is good because it doesn’t concentrate people in low-income neighborhoods. People can choose where they want to live,” Stokesberry said.

Baker-Latimer said the program is attractive to applicants because of the relatively short waiting time between being accepted and receiving a voucher.

“For us, there is an average waiting time of 18 months to receive a voucher. Some other states, though, have a waiting time of eight to 10 years,” she said.

In order to qualify for Section 8, a family must not have committed fraud against any federal housing agency, cannot owe money to a housing agency, must not have a history of drug- or violence-related activity and none of its members can be subject to registration as sex offenders, Baker-Latimer said.

“We scrutinize people pretty closely before we give them a voucher,” Stokesberry said.

A big issue at the City Council meeting at which the slide show was presented was that of people coming into Ames from inner city areas via Section 8 and bringing criminal activity with them.

Baker-Latimer said although her department doesn’t track that data, she doesn’t think that’s happening.

“Over the past six years, we have terminated people from this program more for lease violations and failure to provide moving notices enough in advance,” she said. “The number of drug and crime terminations are small.”

According to Baker-Latimer’s presentation, over the last six years, 37 people have been terminated for failure to give a moving notice within 30 days, and 30 were terminated for failing to report their income. Only nine have been terminated for drug activity and 10 for violent activity.

“In my time working with this program, I can only think of one person in Section 8 involved with a crime, and she was a victim. Someone broke into her house,” Stokesberry said.

Baker-Latimer said a bigger concern of hers is funding.

“We used to get enough funding that we could house everyone, but now we have 171 of the total 222 units leased and we’re almost out of money,” she said.

The program received a little more than $1 million this year, and 91 percent of that money is already going into rental payments, according to the slide show.

But for those people it can help, Section 8 does a good job of putting roofs over people’s heads.

“It’s definitely helpful for the people that I see,” Stokesberry said.