A Woman Moves Closer to the Edge

Slashing general relief payments will save the county millions, but it may cost Starr Jones her home.

After shelling out $5 to cash her $285 check, the 48-year-old former teacher barely covers her $260 monthly rent for a one-room apartment at Hayward Manor, a crime-ridden downtown hotel.

Jones fears the worst when her monthly payment drops to $212, the amount set by the county Board of Supervisors on Tuesday.

“I may be out in the street or in a tent. Being left out downtown is the next step to the grave,” she said of the dangerous streets.

For four years, Jones has gotten by on her general relief and food stamps (she now gets $93 worth of them a month). She says she is unable to work because of arthritis, hypoglycemia and chronic depression.

News of the general relief cut reached Jones at the county Public Social Services Department office on skid row. In the first trip out of her room in four days, she had gone there to plead her case for Social Security disability payments that would substantially raise her income.

“It would put me in a better category. I could get Section 8 [public housing assistance] and have some money left over to function like a human being,” she explained hopefully to a reporter.

General relief is a welfare program limited to poor adults with few assets and no children. Most are men. Jones, who is articulate, cheerful and willing to scramble for survival, does not project the image of aimlessness that critics associate with the program.

In past years, general relief payments have gone back and forth from $212 to $285 as the legality of previous county cuts was fought in the courts.

Jones had solved earlier shortfalls by taking her monthly check to the downtown wholesale markets and buying toys, balloons and boxes of candy. She would resell them on the sidewalk in front of her apartment building, trying to earn enough to cover the rest of her rent before it came due three days later. Sometimes she would make as much as $100.

Even when relief payments were restored to $285, other neighbors up and down Jones’ sidewalk continued the practice. Welfare payments were invested in goods to be sold to other families with just-cashed checks, all in a rush to make the rent deadline.

“It’s a real rat race between the first and the 15th,” Jones said.

Without a kitchen in her room, Jones uses her food stamps to buy food in bulk: “canned fruit, coffee, tea, sugar, tuna, crackers, Vienna sausages, peanut butter, things that last a while.”

She walks everywhere, slowly and painfully after being hit by a car two years ago. Having extra money for bus fare is unthinkable. It’s a half-hour stroll to the soup kitchens where Jones gets her meals, two hours each way to County-USC Medical Center where she sees doctors for her arthritis and depression.

“Now they’re even cutting the mental health services,” she said.

Jones said she grew up in many places around the world as the daughter of an Army sergeant, learning to speak German by the time she came to Los Angeles at 17. She said she graduated from Pasadena City College and Cal State L.A. with an education degree.

At various times, Jones said, she has worked as a teacher, an assistant in a blood-testing lab and a personal assistant to a movie actor. She said she also owned a nightclub in Long Beach for seven years.

Six years ago, with savings and student loans, Jones spent $6,000 for computer classes at a fly-by-night trade school. But when she finished she found there were no businesses that used the outdated equipment she had been trained on.

She said she has two grown children who help her when they can. But her son, a Riverside tile contractor, has his own family to support and her daughter is a full-time student at UCLA.

Jones said she has only been homeless once herself, for one month before moving into her current apartment. She had lived in a larger apartment in South-Central, where the landlord reduced her rent in return for cleaning and gardening chores at the building. When the owner died and the rent was raised, she was left without a place to live.

County officials have in the past proposed eliminating general relief. Such talk turns Jones from cheery to hostile.

“If they cut general relief, the riots after Rodney King will look like a picnic,” she said. “By the time they get through martial law and paying for all the police, they’re going to be out way more money than the crumbs they throw us.”