Shelters Bulge at Welfare Vanguard

The snow and biting cold of winter in Wisconsin has yielded, for a strange, brief interlude, to balmy days and merely chilly nights. For those living on the streets of this Midwestern city, the break in the weather is a welcome respite.

Oddly, the bout of false spring is bad news for Sherrie Kay and other beleaguered managers of Milwaukee’s homeless shelters, who have been besieged since early December by unprecedented numbers of homeless people, particularly women and their children.

Warm weather, it turns out, emboldens weary landlords, parents, siblings and friends to throw out the women--and their unruly gaggles of kids--who moved in weeks or months ago with little money and uncertain prospects. As spring comes to Milwaukee, many fear that the surge in homelessness could turn into a raging flood.

But although spring thaws may play a role, Kay and other homeless advocates express little doubt as to the underlying cause of the city’s burgeoning crisis: It is, they say, the result of welfare reform, which is picking up steam in Wisconsin well ahead of virtually any other state.

“It’s not the cold or the heat that makes people homeless,” said Kay, who runs Hope House, a homeless shelter designed to house 63 people but which has been sleeping up to 90 per night since late November. “It’s poverty that makes people homeless, and [welfare reform] is making more people poor and driving the poor deeper into poverty. Then they show up on our doorstep.”

Shelter System Almost Full

In recent weeks, Milwaukee’s three main shelters have bulged with a total of about 900 homeless people--roughly divided evenly between individuals and women with families. That represents a 30% increase from the same period last year, when homelessness had already begun to rise precipitously. The current numbers come to within 15 beds--mats on a church basement floor, to be exact--of the system’s capacity.

Advocates say the experience of Milwaukee, where fully half of all Wisconsin’s welfare recipients live, holds lessons for other states and cities intent on effecting a rapid transformation of their social services systems.

Even in the best of economic circumstances, they say there’s danger in paring welfare rolls too quickly, outpacing the ability of caseworkers and information systems to communicate and implement changes, punishing failure to comply with new rules by cutting aid to families with an already precarious grip on housing. The combined effect, they warn, will be to put many more people out of their homes.

They will be people like Cynthia Geiger, a 34-year-old mother of three who on a recent night rocked her coughing 18-month-old son in the family shelter at Milwaukee’s Joy House. Geiger’s path to homelessness started when her welfare check was docked partially in November, then fully in December, because she failed to show up for required job-search activity after losing a job as a waitress. Short of cash to pay her rent, Geiger and the two children who live with her shuttled among the homes of friends and families until wearing out their welcome. They landed at Joy House in early February.

“All of a sudden, you think everything’s OK, and then, boom!” said Geiger, who blames herself for believing she would get a warning notice before the sanctions on her welfare payments began. “It’s a real shocker.”

They will also be women like 21-year-old Starr Jackson, a mother of two preschoolers who is four months behind on her rent. Jackson--who offered a false last name to disguise her identity--hasn’t received a welfare check since she was cut off in November for failure to comply with the program’s work requirements. Now, she says, she is logging the required 40 hours a week in work, class and job-search activities. But she says she is not sure when she can expect to receive her next check and can’t get a caseworker to give her a clear answer.

Fearful she will soon be evicted, she has been calling the city’s homeless shelters but has been told they are full. Her mother, who lived with her for several months, is already living on Milwaukee’s streets. Jackson fears she and her children, ages 2 and 3, may soon join her.

“I get by with the help of friends and family members, but I can’t do that anymore,” she said, staring despondently into a blue Milwaukee sky.

State and county officials vigorously deny that Wisconsin’s aggressive welfare reform program is responsible for Milwaukee’s surge in homelessness. At the same time, they admit they are puzzled by the phenomenon.

‘Erosion of the Social Safety Net’

No one is likely to step in to resolve the controversy soon. In the state’s comprehensive welfare reform plan, no provision was made for an independent assessment that would help settle the heated debate over why Milwaukee’s homeless shelters are overflowing into church basements for the first time in the city’s history.

Using his line-item veto last April, Gov. Tommy Thompson eliminated a requirement in the legislation that would have required an evaluation of welfare reform’s impact on homelessness, arguing that homeless shelters would send up a red flag if they saw a problem.

Now they are.

“What we’re starting to see is the erosion of the social safety net,” said Joseph Volk, chairman of the Milwaukee Emergency Shelter Task Force, which drew up an overflow plan that has now taken effect. “You take this strand out, two months later you take that strand out. Pretty soon, you have a gaping hole. It’s happened over time, over about two years. But each time it’s gotten worse.”

Volk, who calls Wisconsin the nation’s “laboratory for welfare reform,” acknowledges that advocates for the homeless lack hard data that would link changes in welfare reform to the record-breaking need for emergency shelter. But he also said that state officials who are declaring welfare reform in Wisconsin an unqualified success similarly lack evidence to support their claims.

Wisconsin’s success in reducing its welfare population has been the object of national acclaim, making Thompson a spokesman for reform efforts as well as a rising star in the GOP. In the 12 months beginning in September 1995, almost 20,000 households left Wisconsin’s roster of Aid to Families with Dependent Children. By 1998, according to a recent congressional report, the state is expected to pare its welfare rolls to 44% of the 1995 level.

Rethinking of Reforms Urged

In Milwaukee, that is only part of the picture. In September 1995, 7,000 Milwaukee households lost their general assistance checks after Wisconsin’s counties were told they could no longer rely on state funding for the program. More recently, the federal government discontinued disability aid for the drug- and alcohol-addicted. Both have caused steady increases in the homeless population, say shelter officials.

Since March 1996, those on AFDC rolls have been placed in an interim welfare-to-work program called Pay for Performance, which imposes monetary sanctions for failure to comply with new job-search, class-attendance and work requirements. Of 12,000 Milwaukee households enrolled so far, more than one-quarter have had their checks reduced or eliminated. In December alone, 4,020 Milwaukee households were hit with sanctions.

But one-quarter of those sanctions were overturned on appeal, according to advocates who are helping the program’s participants with their cases. That, says Kay, indicates that the rate of administrative error remains very high.

Such an error rate, advocates say, should cause the state to rethink whether it is ready to move from its Pay for Performance interim program to Wisconsin Works, the state’s permanent response to the welfare reform bill passed by Congress last year.

In March, all 24,000 aid recipients in the Milwaukee metropolitan area are scheduled to make the transition to Wisconsin Works, which will require all grant recipients, including women with children older than 12 weeks, to work in exchange for benefits. It will also tighten the definition of education activity that will satisfy the program’s requirement, limit all recipients to 60 months of benefits over their lifetime and require new applicants to mount a job search before becoming eligible for benefits.

Wisconsin Works will have no uniform appeals process. But in interview after interview, recipients complain of administrative mistakes in the interim program that lead to undeserved sanctions, and of harried caseworkers who are either inaccessible or who often don’t appear to understand the rules themselves.

“They sent me a check for $14 instead of $450 in December,” said 21-year-old Zhanyieah Hill, who managed to hold on to an apartment for herself and her 2-year-old through the month with the financial help of a boyfriend. “I had to wait two weeks to fill out the forms to correct it because they screwed up. And my caseworker’s never in.”

Even as Milwaukee’s homeless population sets records, there is evidence that the numbers might rise further. According to sources as varied as landlords, county human services caseworkers and shelter workers, the number of households that are doubling up or even tripling up under one roof appears to be increasing.

Kay calls this the “true measure” of the problem. Many of those who show up at the doors of homeless shelters have been put up, usually for several weeks at least, by friends and relatives. Hope House’s phone logs for December show that of 146 people who inquired about space in the shelter, 100 were staying with family and friends.

That means, say Kay and others, that as Wisconsin’s welfare reform heats up with the weather, Milwaukee’s homeless are virtually certain to surpass the shelters’ capacity.

“We’re looking at July and August, when this Wisconsin Works program fully takes effect, as not a pleasant time,” said Tim Ballering, president of the Apartment Assn. of Southeast Wisconsin, a landlords group. Ballering, who owns and rents 260 apartments to low-income residents, is one of the community leaders who have begun to voice concern about the pace of welfare reform and its impact on homelessness.

“Society, I think, made a big mistake creating this whole welfare system in the 1960s. We’ve got to give people a vision for their futures,” he said. “But we can’t turn this off like a light switch. . . . This is just happening too rapidly.”