Some on Welfare Fear Loss of a Lifeline

Try walking, even for a few hours, alongside Brian Rogers, a strapping teen who dropped out of a South-Central high school to escape gang violence, or Claudia Acosta, a young single mom from an abusive family in Pico-Union, and the scope of the problem becomes clear.

Even a passing acquaintance with their lives illuminates a deeply held belief of those most engaged in anti-poverty policy, Republicans and Democrats alike: Welfare reform alone will not reinvigorate the nation’s deepest pockets of chronic poverty.

In fact, these makers and shapers of policy contend that the sweeping welfare overhaul President Clinton signed into law in August could multiply the worst symptoms of urban poverty.

The legislation was crafted expressly to break the cycle of dependence that often is blamed for many ghetto pathologies. But many scholars argue that crime, drugs, gangs, domestic violence and inadequate education are such ingrained problems that workplace-oriented welfare reform will touch them only glancingly, if at all.

“It’s going to be a very unsettled time,” said Paul Jargowsky, a political economy professor at the University of Texas at Dallas. “Many, many children are going to be damaged by this, both because some of them will have less resources in their households and because some will be neglected more as parents are forced to work more.”

Even some of the law’s most enthusiastic supporters acknowledge that it could exacerbate already dire conditions in the nation’s poorest urban communities--and by extension the country as a whole--unless followed by an aggressive campaign to address deeper problems.

Rep. E. Clay Shaw Jr. (R-Fla.), a chief author of the welfare reform legislation, calls the nation’s inner cities “a toxic waste dump of humanity” created by misdirected federal programs. Washington, he said, has a continuing obligation to help clean up the mess in which residents of the poorest neighborhoods now find themselves.

“I see it as a federal responsibility to help revive these communities,” he said. “We cannot just dump this on the states.”

Solutions will require a concerted effort on the part of affected communities, state officials and the federal government, experts say. The responsibility should be shared, they argue, because it was a combination of federal laws and local neglect that helped create these dense areas of intractable poverty.

“If we all lay down on the job, the new system will be worse for some poor people and their children than the old system,” Clinton told business leaders earlier this month, encouraging them to pitch in to provide jobs to welfare recipients.

Despite such assertions, there is little evidence of a policy consensus on what needs to be done, or of the political will to launch a major effort to uproot problems that have proved remarkably resistant to past initiatives.

Although such neighborhoods scar most American cities, their scale is particularly vast in places like Los Angeles.

It is here where residents feel the most trapped, experts say. It is here where the probability is lowest that intervention will make a difference. It is here where mainstream society has become most inured to stories of people like Rogers and Acosta.

But it is the lessons of their lives that help explain the true complexity of the task at hand and help point the way to possible remedies.

Reluctant Dropout

A 16-year-old living in one of the 450 units in the sprawling Pueblo Del Rio housing project, Rogers feels terrorized by a fact of urban life that welfare reform cannot hope to address: gangs.

On a recent sunny afternoon, when he should have been in school, the lanky teen was moving between the cramped rooms of his mother’s apartment like a large animal held captive in a small cage.

The South-Central housing project, which for four decades has been home to his grandmother, mother, sisters and now his nephew, is surrounded by Los Angeles’ fiercest gangs. Rogers could not be more popular.

“Everybody wants me, but I don’t want to die over no color,” said Rogers, dressed in yellow shorts and a white T-shirt. “I don’t wear blue and red--I wear only white and yellow.”

But it takes more than a neutral color scheme to escape the gangs’ reach. “I don’t kick with them,” Rogers said. “I don’t do nothing but stay in the house.”

It has been more than three months since Rogers attended class at Dorsey High School. On his last day there, he witnessed a gang shooting. He was told he would be next.

“I can’t go to school,” he said. “I’m going to get killed.”

That is exactly what happened to an older boy who was the closest thing to a brother that Rogers has ever had.

“I was at a party, and my mom called and told me to come home. When I got there she said DeAndre got shot,” Rogers recalled, tears filling his eyes. “DeAndre was killed. There was nothing I could do.

“It’s hard. It’s really hard in this world. All you are doing is trying to finish school. Innocent people are getting killed over nothing. I’m just scared because I might be next.”

His decision to drop out has special poignancy. It was only this year that he learned how to compensate for dyslexia, a learning disorder that makes reading difficult. The Cs and Ds he used to receive on his report cards had begun to be replaced by As and Bs.

Rogers has a notion of what it would take to improve his life: a sense of security at home and at school, and supervised, constructive activities for the afternoons and weekends. It is a prescription that probably applies to thousands of urban teenagers across the country.

If he’s right, welfare reform is probably not the answer.

Under the new law, 40-year-old Velma Rogers, Brian’s mother, must find work within two years to continue to qualify for the monthly income support she has been receiving under the Aid to Families With Dependent Children program.

If she gets a job, an outcome that is by no means certain, she will no longer be around to supervise and discipline her son. As a result, his resolve to resist joining a gang may wilt. If she fails to find work, the financial support that she and her son need to make ends meet will disappear.

Velma Rogers believes that Washington is naive to think it can fix the problems of underemployment and dependency with passage of a welfare-to-work law while ignoring the other harsh realities of life in Pueblo Del Rio.

“Until you’ve walked a mile in my shoes, you can’t tell me anything,” she said. “My biggest concern is my son--trying to find a school where he feels safe. It’s hard for a young black man to survive in the city, especially without a father figure.”

Many parents will be faced with the same dilemma as welfare reform is implemented across the country. Already rough neighborhoods could become even tougher.

“It’s going to be 100 times worse,” Velma Rogers predicted. “At least with welfare, parents could give kids some money to buy some popular things. Without it, there will be more crime, more prostitution. You think there’s a drug problem now? It’s going to be much worse.”

Many politicians, local activists and scholars who study poverty and the inner city suspect that she is right.

“Steady work is not going to be available for a lot of these people,” said Harry Holzer, a professor of economics at Michigan State University in Lansing. “They’re going to suffer and their children are going to suffer. If we’re serious about attacking the problems of poverty and inner-city joblessness, you don’t just cut people off.”

Work is scarce in poor urban areas, and public transportation to the jobs in the suburbs is often unavailable. Many residents of urban ghettos do not have the skills, the support or the confidence to get jobs and keep them. Even if they get jobs, their inexperience, combined with the fickleness of the low-wage sector, will make job stability elusive, analysts predict.

As states move quickly to enforce the work requirement mandated by welfare reform and financial penalties for failure to comply, there is no bipartisan agreement on a strategy for addressing the other chronic ills suffered by poor urban communities.

Breaking the Cycle

Moreover, neither the president nor the Republicans in Congress are contemplating the scale of funding necessary to make broadly available the kind of comprehensive assistance that has made a difference for people like Claudia Acosta.

Thanks to an extraordinary level of community intervention, Acosta is lifting herself out of the victimized and victimizing behavior that characterized her life in one of the communities that affluent Angelenos tend to race past on freeways without noticing.

Although gang violence is the biggest threat Rogers faces, it is another type of intergenerational pathology, one that is alarmingly pervasive in poor communities, that has been 20-year-old Acosta’s most debilitating handicap.

Regular beatings by her mother and sexual fondling by her stepfather, she says, led her to run away from her home in Pico-Union at the age of 10. For years, local priests sheltered her but provided little rearing.

Hampered by a learning disability, Acosta managed to graduate from Belmont High School despite a dismal academic record. Teachers at the crowded neighborhood schools she attended failed to detect her learning problem, which affects her short-term memory.

At 19, she found herself facing eviction from a single-room dwelling that she shared with her infant daughter and another poor young woman in one of the many dilapidated, crammed residences of Pico-Union.

Acosta’s relationship with her daughter’s father had soured because she had been beating him, repeating the pathology she had learned from her mother. She had no job skills, and her only source of income was welfare.

Today, she is full of optimism. Before losing her apartment, Acosta learned about La Posada, a subsidized home that connects young single mothers with the counseling, training and job placement they need to heal past wounds and become independent.

“Life wasn’t good to me,” Acosta said. “I grew up on my own. But I have better dreams for my daughter.”

La Posada is helping her fulfill those dreams. Regular talks with a counselor have helped her control her violent urges; she says she has never abused her daughter. She is learning to compensate for her learning difficulties. She has a position lined up to teach children to read through AmeriCorps, the Clinton administration’s national service program. She will receive a modest salary and a stipend to use for education and training.

She also has repaired her relationship with her baby’s father, and the two plan to marry.

“We’re together again,” said Acosta, who immigrated from El Salvador when she was a baby and is applying for U.S. citizenship. “Now he has graduated from college and has a good job. We’re trying to make it work out for our daughter.”

Without La Posada, or the ability to pay for its services with the AFDC check she receives every month, Acosta believes that she would be living on the verge of homelessness and passing on to her daughter the same array of problems she inherited from her mother.

When she gets on her feet financially, she plans to leave Pico-Union for good. The neighborhood, she said, makes it almost impossible to give her daughter the kind of opportunities she wants her to have.

Things will only get worse, Acosta said, if people here are denied the money they now get from welfare without getting the kind of support she has received.

“If you deprive people of their basic needs, crime is going up,” Acosta said. “We lack the skills and the self-esteem to do it on our own. I don’t want to say we’re lazy, but we can’t provide for ourselves. We need guidance.”

Although welfare assistance has been broadly criticized for perpetuating the cycle of poverty, for Acosta and many other women in poor communities it has been a lifeline to something better.

‘I Was Scum’

Adrienne Carrington, 39, used her monthly welfare check to pay the residential drug treatment center where she was able to finally turn her life around after 16 years of substance abuse and crime.

“I know I wouldn’t be here today if it were not for AFDC,” said Carrington, who recently got off welfare and has a full-time $8-an-hour job. “It was the only way I could pay for the services. If those services were not available for me when I needed them, I wouldn’t be here today. It would be easy to just abuse myself into oblivion.”

To look at Carrington, a vivacious, articulate woman with a broad smile and large, clear eyes, one would never suspect that most of her adult life was a downward spiral into drug addiction and crime.

Although she has received welfare at several points over 20 years, she derived most of her income from a combination of legitimate employment and illicit activities. When her drug abuse caused her to lose jobs, she supported her addiction with thievery. She spent 16 months in prison on a felony charge of grand theft and fraud.

Through the years, she largely ignored her sons, who are now ages 20 and 6.

“I was scum,” she said. “I was somebody I wouldn’t even want to know.”

Although Carrington blames no one but herself for her behavior, she believes that living in Compton made it easier for her to get into drugs in the first place.

“Where I lived made a big difference, just by virtue of the fact that there was nothing else to do,” she said. “I started out smoking marijuana without inhaling. I wanted to be cool, and this is what everybody did in my neighborhood. When I passed over to addiction, then it didn’t matter where I lived. The main question in my life was, how am I going to support that addiction? I’m going to do anything I can do. I’m going to break into your house and rob you.”

She first sobered up in prison but started using drugs again for a short time after her release. Then she finally realized her addiction was taking too large a toll on her family and entered a residential treatment center.

“I had to be taken out of my environment and stabilized,” said Carrington, who recently moved to an apartment in a mixed-income neighborhood. “Things just started to happen for me once I fixed myself from the inside.”

If welfare assistance is denied to people like her, Carrington believes that conditions in her old neighborhood will become more desperate.

“I understand how frustrating it is for the government to keep feeding and clothing people,” Carrington said. “But once the cycle has been established, it’s really hard to break.

“They could hurt a lot more people than they’re helping,” she continued. “There will be an immediate escalation of crime. People will continue to get high. They’ve got to eat. They’ve got to feed their kids.”

Solutions Evasive

The policymakers who launched welfare reform understand that people like Rogers, Acosta and Carrington face substantial risks if the government cuts off the income support that now flows into urban neighborhoods without alleviating the chronic problems of gangs, inadequate schools, drugs and domestic violence.

“The problems are so deep and so terrible, even students who would like to succeed can’t,” said Shaw, chairman of the House Ways and Means subcommittee on human resources.

Shaw said that if the Republicans retain control of the House, his subcommittee will press to pass policies to improve educational opportunities for poor youths and address the other seething problems in poor communities.

Two young Republican lawmakers--Reps. James M. Talent of Missouri and J.C. Watts of Oklahoma--have held hearings on a second wave of anti-poverty legislation that would use tax incentives and federal grants to stimulate recovery and community involvement in such neighborhoods.

“We’ve been doing the wrong thing as a society and a government for a long time, and we have really damaged ourselves,” Talent said.

“We can change it, but it’s not going to happen with any one bill,” he continued. “We all have to understand that this is our problem--this is not a problem that happens to other people. I believe very strongly that this is one country, and we all have to move forward together.”