Hundreds ‘buy hope’

By Allison Brophy Champion

Published: September 18, 2008

Lisa Sams of Culpeper slept on the grass Wednesday night so she could be first in line.

The disabled single mom of two teenagers brought a blanket and a cooler, but she wasn’t hoping to nab the latest Xbox video game.

Sams, 40, was hoping for some help with her rent. But a lot of other people had the same idea, and it might not come any time soon.

On Thursday hundreds of elderly, disabled, handicapped and low-income people flocked to the offices of the Rappahannock-Rapidan Community Services Board on Bradford Road. There, they lined up to get their names on a waiting list for Section 8 rental assistance through the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

By 9:15 a.m. Thursday — just 45 minutes after officials from the CSB and Culpeper Department of Social Services began accepting applications — nearly 240 people had already been through the line.

By 3:15 p.m., 583 people had come through.

“I want to better my life for my children,” said Sams, reached later at her home on Belle Court.

Her children’s father is deceased, she said, and the household is solely supported with her disability check. Sams pays $488 a month for her three-bedroom place, but with gas prices sky high and utility bills going up, it’s been hard making ends meet.

“All you can do is pray,” she said. Pray and wait.

DSS employee Sue Hansohn said HUD has not increased its allocation of Section 8 vouchers to Culpeper County beyond the current 250 for a few years.

It’s a lifelong program, added Ginger McAlister, rental assistance agent with the Community Services Board. Priority is given to the disabled, elderly and handicapped.

Of the 250 vouchers available to Culpeper residents, all slots are filled; of those, DSS manages 45 for the low income.

The CSB last updated its waiting list for Section 8 during a five-day workweek in 2006. In that time, about 400 people applied. Two years later, things have gotten much worse.

“It’s unbelievable how many people are really needing the assistance,” McAlister said. “The economy is really bad.”

Bad enough for 70-year-old Marcia Brose to expend precious gas money to drive more than 20 miles from her home in a senior center in Locust Grove just to get her name on the waiting list.

“I’m here to get help,” said the retired bookkeeper living on Social Security. “It’s getting harder to make ends meet, especially with gas. When you live where I live, the closest grocery store is two miles away. To get to Culpeper or Fredericksburg, it costs a lot.”

It’s likely that most of the 500-plus people who showed up Thursday and the countless more expected today will not receive HUD rental assistance any time soon.

There are already 130 people still on the “old” waiting list.

“We don’t have any vouchers right now,” Hansohn said, noting that vouchers are made available only when somebody leaves the program. “If somebody leaves, we have a voucher, we go to the very top of the list and that person gets a letter and they come in.”

Any landlord can participate in the program, in which qualifying families are required to pay 40 percent of their income toward rent. HUD makes up the difference.

For a three-bedroom home, the average Section 8 assistance in Culpeper County is $1,035 monthly or $800 for a two-bedroom place, Hansohn said.

The program sees “a lot of success stories,” she said, noting how many people receive the assistance, get a job and graduate from the program.

“And then they don’t need us anymore. We like those.”

Bus aide and driver seek help
Gwen, a bus aide for Culpeper County Public Schools, got in line Thursday just after 9 a.m. — she asked that her last name not be used in this story.

“I need a home and need help financially,” said the 42-year-old single mother.

She and her daughter live in a one-room place on North West Street, paying $550 a month. Gwen said she does not receive any public assistance and has never applied for Section 8.

CCPS bus driver Tonya, who also asked that her last name not be printed, works with Gwen. She too came to Bradford Road Thursday morning seeking help with her rent.

“This goes to show how bad it’s getting,” said Tonya, a single mom with two children who pays $500 in rent for a basement apartment and, last month, $288 for her electric bill.

“Trying to look for a second job around here, you know it’s hard. Driving a bus has been great for us, we love it. But trying to find something in between, you just can’t do it,” Tonya said of the demands of raising kids on her own.

Like the Section 8 program, local housing assistance through Culpeper Community Development Corporation — a homelessness advocacy group — is in greater demand these days.

Utilities strain purse strings
CCDC founder and director Sam Aitken said local people especially need help paying utility bills. A year ago, his office would get an average of four or five applications per week for assistance with rent, utilities or medicine through Helping Hands, a church-funded program administered through CCDC.

“We are now seeing 20 to 30 a day,” Aitken said. “Eighty percent of them need help paying their utilities.”

If people are having trouble keeping the power on now, when the weather is relatively mild, what happens when winter comes?

“What are they going to do when it gets cold?” Aitken said.

While utility rates have gone up about 100 percent, he said, the pool of money to help people has lessened.

Area job layoffs only compound the program, said Aitken, who’s worked to build and advocate for affordable housing in Culpeper for decades. He doubted the waiting in line to sign up for Section 8 would do much good, saying the slots for the program don’t come open very often.

“They either have to die or give them up,” Aitken said of the program’s voucher recipients. “To me it’s like buying a lottery ticket,” he added of those who waited on line Thursday. “Buying hope.”

Allison Brophy Champion can be reached at 825-0771 ext. 101 or