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The rumors circulating in Ames last November were hard to ignore:
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development was conducting experiments to move inner-city poor to smaller communities, and Ames' Section 8 housing was being filled by poor black people from Chicago. There was a crime wave in Ames because black people from Chicago were moving in to local subsidized housing. Local schools were struggling with discipline, and the halls had become unsafe.
For Ames Mayor Ann Campbell, the rumors became too much to handle.
"There was a lot of misinformation going around," she said. "And there was a lot of finger pointing going on. I felt like we needed to do something about it."
The city's government decided to put the issue front and center, no matter how difficult it would be, and called a community meeting to discuss race relations.
"I still remember sitting in my office with a group of people trying to figure out what to call the meeting," she said. "It was not an easy topic to address. Race is a very delicate issue."
But the meeting, titled "The Changing Cultural Climate of Ames," was held. The city's leaders, including the chief of police and City Council, discussed the issues openly.
The forum attracted a capacity crowd in the council chambers and nearly filled the upper level of the city's auditorium. It focused primarily on a notion among many residents that an influx of Section 8 recipients from the Chicago area was causing crime rates to rise. Police have said in the past that many of the suspects, witnesses and complaining parties connected to a surge of major crimes in the city had Chicago backgrounds. However, the connection between these criminals and the Section 8 program appears to be more marginal than direct, officials said.
But as usual, the truth is a little more complicated.
According to police and news reports, criminal activity surged in Ames in mid-2007, and the people involved not only had a connection to Chicago, they had a connection to each other. Two murders within a month of each other, an armed car jacking and a number of other violent crimes swept the city, and in each case, the perpetrators or the witnesses were connected to Chicago. At the time, police said it was not those living in Ames' Section 8 housing committing the crimes, but rather people connected to those individuals who came to Ames to visit or stay.
Woods said the crime rate is cyclical and has very little to do with an increase in people with "brown skin" moving to town.
"The visual people were seeing when they were walking downtown was a lot browner than what they were accustomed to," said Barbara Woods, who co-chaired the Inclusive Community Task Force that was impaneled by the Ames City Council after the forum. "And at the same time, people thought the town was becoming more violent. It was all about perceptions."
The demographic changes experienced in Ames are occurring in towns across the country. Campbell said at a recent meeting of the Iowa Metropolitan Coalition, an organization that represents the state's largest cities, that she was asked about Ames' experience by a number of municipal leaders from communities that are experiencing similar issues.
Woods, a black woman who has lived in Ames for 30 years, said the difference is that Ames has always prided itself on being a very inclusive community. But the tolerance was partially because the city is home to Iowa State University.
"The people coming into our city were part of the university, so they were only here for a short time," she said. "Then, people start moving to Ames that have dark skin, and their kids are going to public schools and they are living away from campus. We can be very inclusive when we know the people are going to leave, but these were people who were obviously here for the long term, and I think that changed things."
Ames, according to census figures, is 87.3 percent white. And it's floating in the middle of an ocean of white people in Iowa, where 93.9 percent of residents are not people of color. The largest group of non-whites in Ames are Asians, which make up 7.7 percent of the population.
Until recently, diversity meant graduate students living in essentially the same socioeconomic strata as the average citizen of Ames, Woods said. And for many of the new residents of Ames, the welcome wagon was not rolled out.
"People were suspicious," Woods said. "They spread false rumors. It was not a very welcoming atmosphere."
Campbell said most of the new residents were here because they had family in the area and because they wanted a better life away from big cities. There were a number of people, and not just blacks but also other minorities, who came to Ames because of Section 8 housing, she said, but there was not one single factor to why Ames was becoming more diverse.
"This was a different population and one that has had a history of poverty," she said. "So we decided to put our heads together and figure out how to make Ames a more welcoming place for everyone."
The Inclusive Community Task Force aimed to do something about that. Several meetings were held earlier this year, and in May it submitted a report to the Ames City Council on how to take the initial steps to make the city more welcoming to new residents.
The 34-page report is posted on the city's Web site, www.cityofames.org, and contains a list of "challenges" and "opportunities" facing the community in respect to changing cultural diversity.
The report outlines what nearly everyone in the community can do to make the community more inclusive. Suggestions run from holding informal "getting to know you" neighborhood gatherings to implementing employer training to establishing a "Welcome to Ames" packet of information. The report recommends the city of Ames gather and disseminate demographic data to present an accurate picture of the community, not one based on anecdote.
Since the initial forum and the task force meetings, Campbell said she has had a number of people who are new residents visit her and talk about the issues they are facing.
"I think just having the conversation helped," she said. "It put the issue on everyone's radar and opened up a dialogue that I think is very helpful."
Woods said it's still too soon to tell if the discussions were a success, but there are certainly conversations happening today that weren't happening in November.
"Long term, I hope it opened up some minds and makes people less tolerant of unacceptable behavior," she said. "If they hear someone spreading terrible rumors, I'd hope they would step up and say something."
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