Welfare Cases Are Soaring in Orange County

Maria Medrano never thought she would be in this position.

Medrano, a native of Guadalajara, Mexico, arrived here four years ago and had worked steadily until her recent layoff from a job on an airplane parts assembly line. Her savings dwindling and with two daughters to care for, one of them a diabetic, she turned to government assistance as her one remaining hope, her last resource.

“I often cry,” she said recently through an interpreter at the county’s Garden Grove welfare office. “Everything is falling in on me, and I have to make so many decisions.”

Medrano is one of the increasing number of people applying for government assistance in Orange County, contributing to some of the heaviest welfare rolls in the county in nearly 10 years.

Moreover, Orange County appears to be the only major urban center in the state that has not experienced an exodus of low-income residents to more affordable rural communities.

“We have seen some Laotians moving to the Central Valley, but the people who seem to be moving out are middle-class people who want a bigger home and typically move to the Inland Empire,” said county demographer William F. Gayk.

Analysts say the reasons for the Orange County anomaly are varied: a thriving local economy that produces jobs; an accommodation to high housing costs that finds more families--especially Southeast Asians and Latinos--sharing housing, and a maturing of the county as an urban center.

The county is not, to be sure, possessed of a needy population or a welfare apparatus on the scale of Los Angeles, but it has nevertheless grown out of its suburban image. Many poor families perceive that they have more options here than they would in distant rural areas, social welfare officials say.

“Orange County traditionally has had a much lower rate of welfare than, say, Los Angeles,” Gayk said. Over time, he said, it has become more like the average urban area.

A large proportion of Orange County’s new welfare cases are teen-age mothers, divorced mothers and Latino and Southeast Asian immigrants--members of groups that have apparently not benefited from the expansions in the local and state economies.

County social service officials say there has been a steady growth of 5% to 7% in the welfare caseload over the past four years. In several welfare categories--Aid To Families With Dependent Children (AFDC), food stamps and Medi-Cal--the rates are at levels comparable to those of the early 1980s, when federal officials took steps to restrict eligibility.

A relaxation of eligibility standards in recent years has played a part in the resurgence of applications, but county officials also single out other factors, such as local authorities’ stepping up efforts to reach those eligible for assistance, applicants’ larger family sizes and high living costs.

Local officials say they are particularly alarmed by the growing number of unattached women who are unable to provide for their families.

“You get into the issue of the disintegration of the family--with divorce rates skyrocketing, leaving mom with the kids and totally unprepared to support the family,” said Lawrence Leaman, director of the county’s Social Services Agency. “The consensus here is that the feminization of poverty is real and Orange County is not exempt.”

Social service officials speak of welfare offices’ bursting with women and children and that the picture is not likely to improve any time soon.

Joerline DeBerg of Anaheim, a 31-year-old mother of three, leaned against her car outside the county’s Garden Grove welfare office recently and, puffing a cigarette as she spoke, talked about her life.

DeBerg said she had just received approval for an increase in her monthly AFDC check, from $694 to $834. She has been on and off welfare for years, she said, but she has also worked as an escrow officer. It is a good profession, a solid background, she says, but with 8-year-old twins and a 1 1/2-year-old, she cannot afford to return to work.

“I pay $650 a month for a two-bedroom apartment,” she said, “and I would have to pay a babysitter at least $130 a week. I make more on AFDC than I would working right now.”

For DeBerg, as for Medrano, depending on welfare is not something she likes doing.

“I felt like scum, like I couldn’t do it on my own,” she said. “It’s embarrassing to take food stamps to the store and have them look at you. But after a while you realize that you have no alternative.”

It has been even harder on the children, she said. Twins Glen and Jason think their mother goes to the bank to get money. Kyland, the baby, is still too young to know the difference.

“It’s the children that miss out, not me,” she said. “They have to suffer by coming here all the time. We barely cope, but I have a good outlook, I have a goal. It won’t be like this forever.”

Although the number of participants in the county’s general relief program has remained fairly steady, increasing only by a few hundred, the number of AFDC and food stamp recipients rose dramatically between 1988 and 1989.

Through October of 1989, the county listed 60,000 people on AFDC, up from 52,000 in early 1988.

Food stamp recipients numbered 57,000 last October, up from 40,000 in early 1988. Those on general relief number between 2,700 and 3,000.

County officials note that applications for aid dipped between 1987 and 1988, possibly because many undocumented Latino immigrants feared jeopardizing their eligibility for permanent residency status if they applied for welfare.

Scott Mather, chairman of Orange County Homeless Issues Task Force, attributes much of the increase in welfare recipients to the high cost of living here.

“The middle class is shrinking from both ends,” Mather said.

In addition, he said, wages for service sector jobs have not kept pace with the rising costs in other areas.

Mather also suggested that the vast numbers of baby boomers, who have left impressions in so many other areas of American life, are now of an age that produces the greatest number of welfare applicants.

Southeast Asian refugees, the latest wave of immigrants to the United States, have begun to make their marks on the social fabric of Orange County.

To Hocquyen Tang, 44, is a refugee and former political prisoner from Saigon who landed in the United States with his parents and two sisters six months ago. Each was given $175 by the Catholic organization that co-sponsored their trip. All moved to Dayton, Ohio, to live with a brother.

But Tang found the climate there too cold for his liking, so he came to Orange County a few weeks ago. He now pays $250 to share a room with a family in Midway City, a small unincorporated community near Westminster.

Tang had brought about $400 with him from Ohio but, without a job, he applied for aid under the county’s general relief program. He will receive a monthly check of a little more than $300.

“It seems like I have to start from the beginning, to re-learn everything because here it is totally different from life in Vietnam,” he said through an interpreter at the county’s international assistance center in Anaheim. “Here, everyone must work to support themselves, but in Vietnam, the parents work and support the whole family.”

He hopes that eventually the rest of his family will be able to move here. There are not many Asians in Ohio, he said, and the family would be better able to communicate here and perhaps even “make a success.”