Integrated Community Services celebrates two-year anniversary By Monique Balas News-Chronicle Although she moved in only 12 days ago, Soua Yang's new home on Roy Avenue is already cozy: Candles glow atop the upright piano and her grandchildren play down the hall. The closing of Yang's home on July 25 marked the 25th home Brown County's Integrated Community Services has been able to connect with an owner. The agency celebrates its two-year anniversary this month by helping Yang and a 26th homebuyer, Rose Jordan, purchase homes of their own. "It's just a great opportunity to help so many families in the community to help achieve the American dream, which is something they might not be able to do without this program," said Robyn Hallet, Section 8 homeownership coordinator for ICS. To qualify for Section 8, a federally funded housing-assistance program, households must make 50 percent of the county median income for a similar-sized household. ICS is a local distributor of the funds. The agency's Housing Choice Voucher program helps low-income families and individuals receive rental or home-buying assistance. It helps people like Yang to meet mortgage payments and eventually work toward self-sufficiency. Yang receives supplemental security income benefits and found that renting was becoming too costly. She was eligible to receive assistance through ICS because she is on a fixed income, Hallet said. "It's been so expensive just to rent, even though she gets the rental assistance program," said Yang's daughter, Ka Youa Kong, who translated for her. "She just couldn't find anything, so finally she decided to go with purchasing a home." Kong, a corporate recruiter for WPS and a part-time teacher at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, said she knew about the program and urged her mother to contact ICS. "About a year ago, my mom thought about it and it kind of got all the planning going," she said. First, there was all the usual paperwork, such as having her credit approved. Then came the matter of finding a house that was within ICS' financial limitations. Yang's other daughter, Ka Moua, was driving by the house on Roy Street on Green Bay's West Side this spring when she saw the house up for sale. With a fenced-in yard and a deck in a quiet neighborhood, the home seemed more attractive than others on the market. Plus, it's close to Yang's church, the Hmong Alliance Church on Mather Street. ICS will provide assistance for a portion of Yang's monthly mortgage payments throughout the 30-year term of her mortgage, Hallet said. For Yang, having her own home means having a garden and her own backyard. She had traditionally used community gardens at UW-Extension and other areas in the community, but now she can grow her own peppers, corn, herbs, onions and cucumbers. "She loves to garden, and there's a little garden in the back," Kong said. But the most important thing of all is having control of her living environment. "If she wants to, she can do a lot of things with the house, whereas before, she had to get permission from the landlord," Kong said. "When she was renting, she did not have a lot of options. When she was looking for (her new house), she was the decision-maker." Yang's new home means a safer place to bring the kids than her old apartment on busy Shawano Avenue. "It's kind of new, still kind of like a dream," Kong said of her mother's new house. "I see that she's really happy." Rose Jordan, whose home on Day Street was the result of a partnership between Habitat for Humanity and ICS' Individual Development Account program, was the organization's 26th and most recent homebuyer. "The way the IDN program works is, they commit to putting money into savings - $20 or $30 or whatever they could afford to putting into savings each month," Hallet said. "It's a three-to-one match up of to $2,700." Like Yang, Jordan said renting was more expensive than homeownership. "I'm paying less for my mortgage payments than I was for my rent," said Jordan, who works in the medical records department at Bellin Health's Ashwaubenon Clinic. Plus, her three-bedroom home is "the kind of house I want" - just big enough for her and her three children, and not so big that she'd have to devote a whole weekend to cleaning it. Now, she said with a laugh, her main focus is getting grass to grow in her yard so her children will no longer bring sand into the house and she can grow her own flowers. "It'll be kind of doing my own landscaping and my neighbors said they would help out," Jordan said. "I've got friendly neighbors, I'm close to downtown, close to everything. That's all I wanted."