For the last four years, Leona Al brecht has entered the Denver Housing Authority annual sweepstakes for a coveted federal housing voucher.
If her number comes up by computer draw, it means help with the rent toward a house or apartment for the unemployed mother of four and her disabled husband.
But the 25-year-old woman is just one of nearly 8,000 who register each year for Denver’s voucher lottery – “Lotto Day,” as Albrecht calls it – which on average picks just 300 winners.
“I can’t lose faith,” Albrecht said.
The losers are left to reapply the following year.
Denver officials started the annual lottery – the first in the nation – in 1995 to manage a waiting list that stretched on for 10 years.
Before the lottery began, police once had to quell a crush of applicants that knocked some elderly people to the ground.
Now, the Aurora and Adams County housing authorities, both struggling with long waiting lists, are considering copying the program.
“Ours is a fair and equitable system,” DHA spokeswoman Stella Madrid said. “It allows us to better manage our program and ensure an up-to-date picture of our actual housing needs.”
Some housing-program officials, however, have shied from an annual lottery, saying it could reward the last applicant on the last day with the first voucher.
“It just doesn’t seem fair,” Boulder Housing Partners coordinator Gale Stromberg said. “If I stay on a list, it’s a given they’ll get to me sooner or later. In a lottery, it’s just the luck of the draw.”
The so-called Section 8 vouchers are sought-after because a family can choose where to live – unlike public housing proj ects. As a result, most housing authorities have long lists of people who will wait years for a voucher.
Individuals with special needs – such as the disabled and the chronically mentally ill – who live within a housing authority’s borders get preference, making the wait for others even longer.
Nationally, the average wait for a Section 8 voucher is 28 months. Once in hand, a voucher can be used for as long as a family proves each year it qualifies.
“Without a preference, some people on a waiting list will never, ever get housed,” said Penny VanderWall, inventor of the Section 8 lottery system and now director of assisted housing at the Aurora Housing Authority.
Many would rather continue a hopeless vigil than drop from a waiting list. One family has been on Jefferson County’s list for 14 years; another has been on Boulder’s for 17, officials said.
The lottery method was devised in part to give people at the back of the line a sense that they’re still in the running, VanderWall said.
“It was created in order to give people a chance,” she said. “If you are No. 6,000 on a waiting list, you really don’t have a chance. This gives applicants a hope.”
Aurora’s waiting list is 4,000 names long, she said. The city has about 1,000 vouchers, of which an average of 110 become available each year. Denver has 5,231 vouchers, the most in the state.
About 2,600 housing authorities nationally struggle to assist a never-ending stream of low-income families in need of affordable housing.
The Section 8 program, established in 1974 and named for the section of the U.S. Housing Act that created it, pays about $18 billion a year to accommodate roughly 1.9 million families.
Under the program, families are required to pay up to 30 percent of their monthly gross income toward rent.
Some pay as little as $50 a month, while the most destitute pay nothing at all.
To be eligible, one has to be poor, typically earning less than half of the area’s median family income. But 75 percent of vouchers must go to the very poor, families earning less than a third of the median.
In Denver, that translates to about $18,000 a year – a job paying roughly $8.46 an hour – for a family of four.
But no matter how poor, not everyone gets a voucher.
“The bottom line is we do not receive sufficient funding to do the job they’re asking us to do: meet the needs of the lowest-income households,” said Edward Talbot, executive director of the Arvada Housing Authority.
Arvada has a three-year wait.
Things may get tighter as a Bush administration budget proposal to drop funding levels next year could lead to Section 8 cuts to 304 families in Colorado, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in Washington.
Despite long waiting lists, a swarm of people show up at city halls across America any time a list opens.
“We had people showing up at 2 a.m., and there were physical confrontations to be first in line,” said Jefferson County Housing Authority chief Alan Feinstein.
The agency has about 1,400 vouchers and a three-year waiting list.
In September 2003, the Adams County Housing Authority opened its list for two days. More than 1,600 applicants showed up, an authority official said. The county has 1,300 vouchers.
The list hasn’t been opened since.
Waits at some housing authorities, however, are longer, and some, such as San Antonio and Milwaukee, opted to close their lists years ago rather than give families a false sense of hope.
While fewer than one in 10 Denver vouchers become available each year, in San Antonio it’s one in 100. Portland, Ore., closed its waiting list four years ago.
“It’s never an easy choice to make,” said Shelley Marchesi, an official with the Housing Authority of Portland. “But if it wasn’t done, then there would be no end in sight.”
Jefferson County is one of several to use a modified lottery, mostly to alleviate the crunch of people at the front door. The authority chooses randomly from the first in line, much the way Denver Broncos playoff tickets are sold to the public.
“We still believe if you’re motivated to show up the first day, you should have first chance,” Jefferson County’s Feinstein said.
For Albrecht, the motivation needed to keep trying at the Denver housing lottery is simply necessity. She lost a seasonal construction job in November and relies on state assistance to meet monthly child-care expenses that top $2,000.
“I know I’d have a better chance at winning the real Lotto since it’s drawn every week,” she said.
Single mom Rita Fish is the first to admit she got lucky. Her number came up in Denver last year after just two tries.
“Lucky? Of course! And grateful,” said Fish, who says she was 30 days from facing life on the street.
She would have managed, she says, but she’s not so sure about her three children.
“I feel bad for everyone else who has to wait and wait and wait,” she said, “never knowing when their number will come up.”
Staff writer David Migoya can be reached at 303-820-1506 or dmigoya@denverpost.com.
