Looming Welfare Overhaul Casts Shadow on Lives of Recipients

Politics is not a common subject of discussion at the laundry down the street from the Mar Vista Gardens housing projects in West Los Angeles, a place where more than a few of the residents support themselves with Aid to Families With Dependent Children.

But this week, with welfare in California about to undergo its biggest overhaul since the New Deal, political realities finally began to intrude on the lives of Mar Vista parents and their children. The specter of a difficult trade-off--finding day care for children and going to work to keep welfare benefits--was suddenly visible.

Olivia Guttierez, a 19-year-old with an infant son, Jeremy, summarized her dilemma in one sentence: “I want to work, but I just can’t leave him.” As if to illustrate the point, she carried Jeremy even as she hauled a full laundry basket from her beat-up compact car.

With AFDC due to be transformed tomorrow into the more austere Temporary Assistance for Needy Families Block Grant, mothers like Guttierez will soon see cuts in their monthly checks and face a variety of “disincentives” to welfare.

“I’ll have to get a job and find a place to take care of the baby,” said Guttierez, whose boyfriend, a high-school dropout, is now doing a stint in state prison.

State officials, who will receive the block grant funds from the federal government, say they will begin cutting welfare payments for 2.7 million recipients Jan. 1. Welfare households in urban areas will take a 4.9% cut, dropping the monthly check for a family of three by about $29 to $565.

Under the new law, the time clock begins running immediately on the recently enacted limits to welfare. Recipients will be dropped from public assistance if they do not obtain work within two years; all recipients face a five-year cap on welfare aid.

At Mar Vista Gardens, a collection of pastel townhouses with well-kept gardens, most residents shook their heads in disgust at the mention of Gov. Pete Wilson and the welfare-reform plan.

A few recipients said the impending reforms were close enough to worry about, but still far enough way that they could procrastinate awhile longer.

“I thought it wasn’t going to happen for three years,” said Lynn McDonald, a self-described former crack addict. McDonald said she supports herself and a 2-year-old son on a $490 monthly check.

McDonald said she hasn’t held a job in five years, but wouldn’t mind working again. Years ago she quit working to stay home with her children, the oldest of whom is now 14. She would still prefer to stay home until her youngest child can enroll in preschool.

“It sucks, but I guess I’ll have to get a job,” McDonald said. “I guess it’s fair, but they should make the time [to get off welfare] longer.”

Several children played amid the tumble and spin of the laundry’s dryers. One small boy pulled clothes from a plastic bin even as his mother, Danielle Short, tried to put the clothes inside a washer.

Short, 20, found it hard to imagine a life that would not allow her to spend the day with her two children, ages 1 and 3. “It’s better for me to be here with them when they’re this age,” she said.

As they folded clothes, several young mothers lamented the circumstances that led them to have the children whose fathers wouldn’t be around to support them. Still, the unmarried women said, the children existed and they needed the government’s help.

Dahad Assfha, an Eritrean immigrant, took exception with the stereotype of a “welfare mother,” saying she was taking English classes at a nearby adult school. Divorced and alone in a new country, Assfha said the government should trust her to decide when she is ready to work.

“Nobody needs to push me,” said Assfha, 34. The mother of a 12-year-old, she supports her family with a $479 monthly welfare check. “When I understand English better and my son gets older, then I go to work. I don’t need anyone to tell me.”

Other elements of the reform will prevent mothers on welfare from receiving additional money when they give birth to more children--a provision scheduled to take effect in August--and new limits on aid to those who move to California from other states.

News of the reforms had already hit the gritty sidewalks in front of a Figueroa Street motel in South Los Angeles that is a notorious hangout for prostitutes.

“I think the changes are good if they offer some kind of job training,” said Tammy Brown, 33, who said she plans on returning to college next year.

Brown said that she was going to college to become a legal secretary when she got pregnant nine years ago. She quit school, she said, and has been on welfare ever since.

Brown said she is now receiving AFDC benefits for her 9-year-old son, but that it isn’t enough.

“If they take benefits away and not substitute something else, like jobs, then there are gonna be problems, because people are gonna provide for themselves by any means necessary,” she said. “I need to support myself--what the government gives me just ain’t enough.”

At a nearby used-car dealership on Vermont Avenue, several passersby agreed that at least part of the reform was long overdue.

“I think the two-year limit [on benefits] is a good thing because it might make people try harder to look for work,” said Barbara Hampton, 30, as she walked with her son along Vermont Avenue.

Hampton, who moved to Los Angeles from North Carolina a month ago, applied for welfare last week. “The stereotype of a lazy person waiting around for the checks is so exaggerated. I’m trying to find work. I’m trying hard.”

Geraldine Harris, 36, on her way to a pawn shop with a friend, said it was unfair that benefits are being lowered. “People think we’re just lazy, but we want to work,” Harris said. “I hate that I’m on welfare, but, until I start doing better, it sure helps.”

Times staff writer Hector Tobar contributed to this story.