Photo by Steven St. JohnTribune

Tribune

Danny Trujillo waits for the bus in the early morning cold along Lomas Boulevard. Trujillo rides the bus from his apartment in the Southeast Heights to St. Martin's Hospitality Center, where he and his case worker have been working on getting him government help for his rent. At one time, Trujillo was at the top of the waiting list, but after a paperwork problem, he was bumped to No. 1,650.

Photo by Steven St. JohnTribune

Tribune

Danny Trujillo looks for a prescription he needs to fill before heading out to catch the bus. Trujillo is on a long waiting list for government help for rent payments.

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Danny Trujillo knows all about waiting.

He has stood in soup kitchen lines waiting for a warm plate of food. He has curled up next to bushes in Roosevelt Park waiting for the cold night to end.

But for Trujillo, 54, who suffers from mental and physical disabilities, the wait for housing assistance might be the cruelest so far.

After two years on the city's waiting list for help paying his rent, Trujillo was first in line in September. But when he couldn't meet a 10-day deadline for paperwork, he says, he was bumped back to No. 1,650 with another years-long wait ahead.

"There's no hope," Trujillo said. "I don't know where I'll be in a couple of years."

The setback for Trujillo is somewhat unusual, but the long wait for financial help is not.

Housing assistance managers for the city of Albuquerque and Bernalillo County say the demand for housing assistance far outstrips what's available. Waiting lists stretch into the thousands.

A report published by the city of Albuquerque's Department of Family and Community Services shows the number of people earning less than $10,000 per year in Albuquerque has increased by 66 percent between 2000 and 2005.

The increasing numbers have led to an increase in need, housing officials said.

Bernalillo County caps its waiting list for rental assistance at 1,000 to keep time on the list within reason.

"It's already discouraging if you're 1,000, and we have to tell you that it's going to be a year and a half on the waiting list," said Betty Valdez, housing director for Bernalillo County.

Housing assistance takes on a variety of forms, but the most common is federal rental assistance known as Section 8 vouchers.

Under the program, which is administered by both the county and the city, low-income families must use 30 percent of their income for rent. Vouchers from the government make up the difference.

People qualify for the Section 8 vouchers based on a combination of gross income and family size. A family's income cannot exceed 50 percent of Albuquerque's median income, which the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has determined is $54,200 for a family of four.

Information gathered by the city's Department of Family and Community Services estimates that 39 percent of the households in Albuquerque generate incomes at or below the median income, with 45,140 households falling into the extremely low to low income category.

Last year, the department issued 4,026 vouchers and the Bernalillo County housing department issued 1,726.

Valerie Vigil, executive director of the city department, said every year her department sees an additional cut in funding, so she is left "trying to do more with less." Last year she had a budget of $20.5 million to work with, she said. The money was used for vouchers, employee pay, insurance fees and company supplies, she said. The year before, Vigil's department received $21.4 million in federal funds. The year before that, the amount given to the city was $21.7 million.

Vigil said cuts made to funding limit the amount of assistance her department can provide and have a ripple effect on the Section 8 waiting list.

Valdez said the heavy demand for Section 8 vouchers in the Albuquerque area makes the waiting list inevitable.

"I mean, people don't just come off the waiting list," she said. "It's not like a revolving door, because people get those Section 8 vouchers and hang on to them."

Vigil said the city has 2,161 people on its Section 8 waiting list. She said the city doesn't limit the number of people who can wait for vouchers, but it does purge the list on occasion to verify that the applicants are still in need of assistance.

"Periodically, we go through and purge the list," she said. "I believe we send a letter that goes out and tells them, `Please tell us if you still want to be on the list.' "

Lynn Atwood, Trujillo's case worker at St. Martin's Hospitality Center, said purging the list is an ineffective way of staying on top of it.

"If they don't address the mail and they don't contact the worker within a certain period of time — I think it's two weeks, 10 days, something like that - they are just dropped," she said. "And then the person doesn't know unless they call in and listen to the automated line."

Atwood said Trujillo is the second person in the past year whom she has had to help put back on the Section 8 waiting list.

"That's their system," Atwood said. "You have to stay up on top of all your clients to make sure no one has been dropped."

Everyone on the Section 8 waiting list has different circumstances that contribute to their need for financial assistance. Trujillo's plight is that of a homeless man who lost his job, fought to stay alive on the streets and found help at St. Martin's. The combination of his disabilities - severe depression, anger, anxiety, Hepatitis C and arthritis in all four limbs - keep him from finding employment, so he has no income to live on as he waits for a Section 8 voucher.

Trujillo was at the top of the list in September 2006. Ten days before his case was scheduled to be reviewed, Trujillo got a letter that said he needed a doctor to sign off on his disabilities. But, Trujillo couldn't get a doctor's appointment at the University of New Mexico hospital within the 10-day period, so he was dropped to the bottom of the Section 8 voucher list.

Because of the growing number of people with situations similar to Trujillo's, the Albuquerque City Council approved a five-year plan in November. The plan will provide a grant for community development programs and emergency shelters. The community development program involves the revitalization of neighborhoods by integrating partial market townhomes - housing units that combine high-end and low-income housing - into the neighborhoods.

Contractors will then compete against one another for the rights to develop the land.