Cedar Rapids passes local preference for Section 8 housing vouchers

CEDAR RAPIDS – City Hall has had a buy-local policy in place for some city purchases for several months now, and the City Council last night created a local preference in a program that hands out housing vouchers for low-income households.

The Section 8 Housing Voucher program in the Cedar Rapids metro area provides vouchers to 1,237 households and has a waiting list that can take from three to five years to climb.

Under the new rule, the city will give preference to families with children under age 18, elderly families or disabled families who are residents of Cedar Rapids, elsewhere in Linn County or Benton County at the time of application and whose name comes to the top of the waiting list in the Cedar Rapids Housing Agency's jurisdiction.

The second preference will be for families with children under age 18, elderly families or disabled families who are not residents in the Cedar Rapids Housing Agency's jurisdiction.

A third and fourth preference is for those with no children who are local residents and those who are not residents.

A family that gets to the top of the waiting list will have had to have lived in Cedar Rapids, elsewhere in Linn County or Benton County for a year to qualify as local residents, city staff told council member Monica Vernon last night.

Vern Zakostelecky, the city's land development coordinator who is temporarily managing the city's Housing Services Office, said earlier Tuesday that the local preference is designed to keep as much of the federal funds given to the city each year for Section 8 housing in the city and metro area.

Section 8 housing vouchers are portable, and the new city policy won't have any effect on someone with a voucher from another city who comes to Cedar Rapids and uses the voucher. The city from which the voucher has been secured typically uses its federal funds to support the voucher no matter where the voucher holder ends up living.

Zakostelecky said Cedar Rapids' local preference may cut down on the number of people with a voucher who move elsewhere but are still supported by Cedar Rapids' federal funding.

In the last year or two, the city has seen an uptick in what Zakostelecky called "port outs," though the current number of those is just 20, he reported.