COVER STORY : A Special Report: Jobs : The Welfare Rut : Jordan Downs Epitomizes the Challenges That Officials Face in Moving the Hard-Core Unemployed Into Jobs

What if you can receive more money in welfare benefits than you can take home from a minimum-wage job? What if child care costs more than what a minimum-wage job would pay? What if employers won’t hire you because you lack a high school diploma or you have a criminal record?

The likely result: unemployment, accompanied by a dependence on the government for everything from housing to health care.

In Central Los Angeles, as in other inner-city areas nationwide, such circumstances are a way of life for a disproportionate number of people. But perhaps nowhere in Los Angeles County are the problems as acute as in Census Tract No. 2421, home to the 2,800-resident Jordan Downs housing project in Watts.

Nine of 10 residents there receive some form of government aid. Three-fourths of the households are headed by single women, and three-fourths of the adults did not finish high school, according to the 1990 U.S. Census. The estimated unemployment rate is 37%.

“All of my friends are on county (welfare) and have a gang of kids,” said 19-year-old Tamara Harris, a second-generation Jordan Downs welfare mother. “I haven’t got a friend who works.”

Although federal statistics show that about 70% of all welfare recipients leave the system at least temporarily after two years, many others remain on welfare much of their adult lives. Those who want to work find opportunities limited by a sagging economy and a legacy of shrunken job-training programs.

At a time when efforts to reform welfare and create jobs are under way nationwide, the residents of Jordan Downs epitomize the challenges that policy-makers face in guiding or pushing the hard-core unemployed into the work force.

Take Jordan Downs resident Alberta Harris, the mother of Tamara Harris.

The 36-year-old woman has had six children by three men. She has been on welfare since 1979, when she moved to Los Angeles with three children after leaving an abusive husband in Texas.

She took classes at Southwest Community College, and became pregnant by a Nigerian exchange student who was her math tutor. He has since returned to his home country. The father of her twin 2-year-olds was also a Nigerian who worked at the Jordan Downs rental office. He, too, returned home.

A high school dropout, her job options are limited. She recalled taking a job-skills examination at a local training center about five years ago. “Basically, I didn’t have no job skills,” she said.

Harris said she has applied for jobs ranging from an outreach worker at the on-site YWCA to a management coordinator at the Jordan Downs rental office. Each time she was told she needed a diploma.

“Not having that diploma is like a slap in the face,” she said.

A volunteer vice president of the resident corporation that runs the housing project, she spends her day taking care of her twins and running errands for the corporation.

Even if Harris took a full-time job, she said it would have to pay more than the $4.25 hourly minimum wage, which would be about $429 a month less than the $1,165 she receives from food stamps and her welfare check.

The job would also have to provide health-care benefits equal to those she receives from Medi-Cal and leave her enough to pay for child care for her daughters.

“Even if you get off welfare, it’s not worth it,” she said. “I don’t want to take a job for $4.25. It’s not going to help me and my family.”

Other project mothers voice similar views.

“Why should I take a job that pays less and gives no benefits?” said Sylvia Briseno, 28, a mother of four whose work experience has been limited to taking care of her home. “I would be crazy.”

For Briseno, the path to welfare started four years ago when her husband, Juan, was laid off from his job as a truck driver at a local factory. An illegal immigrant from Mexico, he has been unable to find work since then.

So the family of six has become a ward of the government, living off $923 a month in food stamps and welfare. Each morning at 4, Juan Briseno and his 18-year-old son get up to scour the streets for scrap metal, bottles and other recyclables. They make $15 to $30 a day, which they use to buy milk, tortillas and fruit.

“We don’t live this way because we want to, but because we have to,” Juan Briseno insists.

Under state welfare reforms that begin in September, women like Alberta Harris and Sylvia Briseno will have an incentive to work by being able to keep more of their welfare benefits if they take a minimum-wage job. They will also be able to receive an allotment for child care, state officials say.

“These are fundamental changes to the welfare system,” said Amy Albright, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Social Services. “We’re removing the hurdles.”

But critics question whether those changes will make a difference for people like Jordan Downs resident Lilia Hernandez, who lacks the most basic skills.

She speaks no English and only made it to the third grade in her native El Salvador. Until her husband left her five years ago, the only work experience Hernandez had was cooking family meals and cleaning her house. She found part-time work cutting clothing material at a Downtown sweat shop, but that ended when the company folded.

For about the past four years, she has survived on a $154 monthly welfare check she receives for her son, 3-year-old Roberto, and $94 in food stamps. Hernandez said she often goes hungry at the end of each month so that Roberto can eat.

“First my son. After that, if there’s food, I’ll eat,” said the 39-year-old mother, who became pregnant when her husband temporarily returned home. She said he “disappeared” two years ago.

Hernandez said she has dreams of becoming a nurse because she likes helping people.

“Who would want to live like this?” she said, pointing to the bare living room of her two-bedroom flat. It had no rug, and four old folding chairs were the only pieces of furniture.

Her rent is $56 a month. Residents of the housing project pay rent equal to about one-third of their income.

Some critics of the welfare system say the only real answer to reform is one in which young people are taught the values of work and education.

“We know the best prophylactic, the best prevention of welfare, is someone who has high hopes and aspirations,” said Doug Besharov, a social policy expert with the Washington-based American Enterprise Institute.

Nineteen-year-old Tamara Harris, the second-generation Jordan Downs welfare mother, said she didn’t have many goals in high school. “I had goals to have kids. That’s about it,” said Harris, who graduated last year from Mid-City Alternative High School.

For her, children meant she could receive welfare benefits, which she said was the easiest way to provide the financial freedom for her to leave the crowded apartment she shared with the six others in her family.

“I wanted to get out of my mother’s house. The only way I could get out of my mother’s house was to have a baby and get on county (welfare),” she said.

Harris said she learned the ins and outs of the welfare system from her mother. “I saw my mother do all this stuff,” she said. “Everything my mother does, I do the same.”

She said she wants to work, but said she has only looked into two job possibilities in the past few months. One was a temporary job as a youth worker with the one-site YWCA and the other was a landscaping position at the city’s Convention Center construction site.

She said she is waiting for a response from the employers.

Harris said she has not done more job searching because she has to stay home and care for her daughter, 8-month-old Janea. “That’s the only thing that’s holding me back. My baby is young,” she said.

She also said she would like to marry the father of her baby, but that she would lose her welfare benefits if she did.

Some urban affairs experts say her predicament underscores one of the reasons for the large number of families headed by women at Jordan Downs.

Experts say there are other reasons: Many young men do not have jobs that pay well enough to support a family; many others are unemployed, in school or in jail.

In the case of those with arrest records, their criminal past becomes “the scarlet letter of unemployability,” said James H. Johnson, director of the UCLA Center for the Study of Urban Poverty.

“Black males seem to be the major casualties,” he said.

Jordan Downs resident Koran Bible is an example.

The 21-year-old high-school dropout said he has tried many times to get jobs as a truck driver, janitor and gardener--only to be told that his felony arrest for possessing a gun disqualifies him for consideration. “A felony ain’t never going to leave. It follows you wherever you go,” he said.

Bible survives on a monthly $296 general relief check and $103 in food stamps. And every six months, he collects a $60 voucher for clothing that the county pays to everyone who receives general relief, which subsidizes the chronically unemployed.

Bible lives in an apartment with his sister, who receives a welfare check for her three children. He and others at the project often spend their day hanging around the modest apartment.

“If you know anyone who’s hiring, let me know,” he told a visitor to the apartment, as he sat shirtless on the couch and drank a bottle of malt liquor.

Like Bible, Jaime Zeledon is also out of work.

The Jordan Downs resident found himself unemployed two years ago when the janitorial company he worked for lost its contract at Los Angeles International Airport.

He receives a $179 a month in welfare and food stamps. The only work he has found is a part-time job helping Latino immigrants learn to read English. It pays $222 a month.

“I don’t want to be on welfare, but the (job) doors are closed,” said Zeledon, who was an elementary school principal in his native Nicaragua.

The cost of providing local welfare benefits last year was a staggering $2.6 billion, according to the county Department of Public Social Services. Nearly 90% of that money funded the AFDC program, which pays a monthly allotment based on the number of children a family has.

Statewide, 160,000 new people received AFDC benefits this past year, bringing the current total to 2.6 million recipients. That growth rate was more than three times the rate of growth of the state’s population, according to the state Department of Social Services.

To reduce the welfare rolls, more money is needed for job training, said Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles.) To be successful, those training programs would have to include extensive case management to individually guide the hard-core unemployed back into the work force, she said.

But as with other social services, Waters and others say, local job-training programs have been decimated by 12 years of cutbacks under Republican Administrations. The city now receives about one-third of the federal job-training money that it did during the late 1970s.

“What we provide is a pittance compared to the need,” said Parker Anderson, general manager of the city’s Community Development Department.

Given the current economy, officials said, the situation is not likely to change in the near future. In fact, President Clinton’s ambitious $16.7-billion domestic-spending plan has been slashed by nearly one-half by the Congress, according to a recent Administration report.

Waters said the result is that a whole generation of welfare recipients are unlikely to receive the help they need to break free from the cycle of government aid.

“This is not the time for politicians to talk about spending money,” Waters said. “The few of us who do get the hell beat out of us for being tax-and-spenders.”

While politicians battle over spending priorities, residents at Jordan Downs face a bleak future.

“This place is a haven for nothing but trouble, trouble, trouble,” Alberta Harris said on a recent afternoon, staring out the barred windows of her small apartment.

“The environment we live in here is terrible.”

Tract of Tears

U.S. Census Tract No. 2421 is beset by staggering levels of poverty. The roughly 50-acre area comprises the Jordan Downs public housing project in Watts. Only 37% of the adult residents are employed, and the median rent is $216. Here are some key statistics and comparisons with L.A. County as a whole:

* 1990 Population

Latino: 21%

Black: 79%

Total: 2,865

* Households headed by single woman

Tract 2421: 75%

L.A. County: 13%

* Residents younger than 18

Tract 2421: 42%

L.A. County: 26%

* Per capita income

Tract 2421: $2,331

L.A. County: $16,149

* Finished high school

Tract 2421: 25%

L.A. County: 69%

* Residents receiving welfare

Tract 2421: 87%

L.A. County: 18%

On the Cover

Koran Bible, 21, cooking macaroni and cheese in the Jordan Downs apartment he shares with his sister and her daughters, is among the many welfare recipients at the Watts housing project.

While welfare-reform and job-creation efforts are under way nationwide, the people who live in Jordan Downs represent the challenges policy-makers face in guiding the chronically unemployed into the work force.

A high school dropout with an arrest record, Bible said he has been turned down for jobs ranging from a gardener to truck driver.