Paul Bass Photo
Kim Jones joins the throng on Orange Street.
Some 500 people crammed the housing authority’s offices within hours of the start of a lottery — not for Powerball, but for precious rent subsidies.
The sign-up for the lottery began Monday morning at the housing authority’s 360 Orange St. headquarters. The authority’s Evelise Ribeiro said she expects 4,000 potential tenants to fill out forms to participate in the lottery by the end of the week. The “drawing” for the lucky 900 winners takes place in January or February.
The lottery prize: being placed on a waiting list for federal “Section 8” subsidies for two‑, three‑, and four-bedroom apartments.
The authority sent out a notice to prospective applicants that it was holding the lottery, the first time the waiting lists have opened up since February.
That brought applicants from across New Haven and as far as Norwalk and New York, all with tales of hard times in the recession.
Jasmine Black (pictured) is hoping to land a two-bedroom apartment for her and her 2‑year-old son. They’re currently squooshed into a rented room on Dickerman Street, she said. Black said she has been looking for work since she got laid off last year as a packer and shipper at the Milford Schick razor plant.
“I can’t afford rent by myself,” she said. “There’s no jobs.”
Kim Jones (pictured at the top of the story) said she’s having trouble affording the $500 a month for her two-bedroom apartment where she lives with her son in the Quinnipiac Terrace complex in Fair Haven. She, too, hasn’t been able to find work since she got laid off as a housekeeper at a Montowese rehabilitation center, she said.
“People are in crisis,” said another applicant, from Carmel Street, who lost her job at a convalescent home. “Times are hard right now.”
Annette Rose traveled from Norwalk when she learned of the lottery. She’s been doubling up with a friend since losing her job in 2010. Her unemployment benefits end next month.
Housing authority Deputy Director Jimmy Miller (pictured) said the turnout would actually have been larger if it had been a normal lottery. This one is restricted to people making between 30 and 60 percent of the median area income ($20,100 to $40,2000 for a two-member household; $33,150 to $66,300 for an eight-member household). And it is limited to just mixed-income developments, including two soon-to-open complexes in West Rock, Wilmot Run and the first phase of the replacement of the old Brookside projects.
The authority also held a lottery for one-bedroom apartments for veterans and the disabled. Gary Cole (pictured) applied for one of those. He left Bella Vista in 2009 to care for an ailing mother, who’s 89. Soon he’ll be selling mom’s house to pay for putting her in a convalescent home, he said. And he needs a place he can afford on his $650-a-month social security check.
New Haven legal aid lawyer Amy Marx was present at the Monday morning stampede as the lottery began. She said she was “struck by the fact that each person standing in line, each person filling out an application, has a story of hardship and need.”
“It is so sad to see how many people in our community can not afford safe and decent housing for themselves and their families. Now more than ever, with the economy so bad and with so many people out of work, the need is so great,” she said. “Unfortunately, only a few win the lottery and get the help that they need to afford housing.”
People have until the end of the work day on Friday to submit applications at 360 Orange St.
Lottery conductors (housing authority staffers) don’t draw winning tickets out of a hat or a ball. They spend weeks feeding data from the thousands of applications into a computer system. Then the computer randomly selects qualified winners.
Instead of spending time and money loading all of this data into computers, why not just draw names out of a hat? Then vet those selected by reading their applications (with your eyeballs, not a computer) to see if they qualify.