Robbye’s story

By Timothy Pratt

Sunday, Dec. 2, 2007 | 1:16 a.m.

A painting that hangs on Robbye Wright's living room wall shows a black woman reaching for a ray of light beaming out of a Bible.

It could just as well be Wright, her life about reaching.

She remembers moving around Las Vegas as a child, in and out of apartments paid for with Section 8 vouchers. Her mom was a waitress with a thin paycheck.

Wright found herself at 20 facing the same future, working at McDonald's, her daughter, Passion, on the way.

"I didn't want to do the same thing," she recalled, sitting on a couch near the painting in the house she bought in January.

But things looked the same for a while. She wound up slinging burgers for six years, living off and on with her mother. The relationship with her husband was also unsteady. Her son Patrick was born in 1998.

By that time, she was living on unemployment checks. She enrolled in the same Section 8 rent assistance program.

She was aware of the stereotypes many people carry when it comes to families who get help from the government - what she calls "ghetto types ... all loud ... having babies."

"I didn't want to be one of 'em," she said. "I always wanted somethin' better."

Nearly two years later, she discovered the Family Self-Sufficiency Program.

Wright says owning a home was always on her list of things to do, but "I didn't know how I was going to get there. I didn't ever know anyone with a house."

She got a job driving buses for the Clark County School District. "It was my first job earning double digits an hour," she recalled. "I was like, whaaat!"

She spent a long time paying off debts to raise her credit scores. She learned about mortgages, escrow, loans. The Las Vegas Housing Authority put money away each month. Her salary went from $11 an hour to $19 an hour.

Her case worker at the Housing Authority began lining up houses for her to see. It seemed surreal, she said. She moved into the house she now owns 10 months ago, four years after starting the program.

Still, she couldn't believe it. "When I moved in, it wasn't soaking in that this was mine," she said.

Her 13-year-old daughter Passion, sitting nearby, asks whether she notices that she has been sleeping better since they own their house. But Wright isn't stopping there. She's buying another house and moving again this month. She hopes to rent the first one to a family like hers, perhaps from the same Section 8 program that helped her.

"I want to get a person who's really trying, since I was right there," she said.

As for the next house, she said, "Let's keep it moving."

"I want to show my kids - I was in the system, we needed help. But we didn't abuse it.

"Now, I want more."