Innovative Program Provides Job Skills, Support, Incentives

The William Mead Homes, a public housing development just north of downtown Los Angeles, has provided more than just shelter for Miguel Ramirez.

Ramirez enrolled in an innovative work program called Jobs-Plus at the housing project two years ago. Since then, the 22-year-old has been transformed from an aimless, at-risk high school dropout to a goal-driven worker, earning $10 an hour loading UPS trucks. The program helped him earn his high school equivalency diploma and has continued to provide support: He can get a bus pass at the on-site Jobs-Plus office, use the phone or computers to seek other support services or just talk about his dreams with the program’s staff.

“This program has been more than OK for me,” Ramirez said by phone from the Jobs-Plus offices at Mead, where he has lived with his mother, Sanjuana Perez, for nine years. “If it wasn’t for them, I wouldn’t be working by now and I’d probably be doing the wrong things.”

Ramirez’s experience is not unique. According to a national study released today, the Jobs-Plus program increased the earnings of participants at the Mead Homes by an average of $4,480, or 15%, over a four-year period compared with nonparticipants at another public housing project chosen randomly.

The earnings gain for one population segment, immigrant Latino men, was more striking: $12,994 over four years, or a 28% increase, according to the study by the nonprofit group MDRC, which conducted the demonstration project from 1998 to 2003 in Los Angeles; Baltimore; Chattanooga, Tenn.; Dayton, Ohio; St. Paul, Minn.; and Seattle.

Besides Los Angeles, Dayton and St. Paul also recorded significant four-year earnings gains: $8,517 for Southeast Asian men in St. Paul, and $4,576 for African American women in Dayton, according to the study. The program was less successful in Baltimore and Chattanooga, where it was not fully implemented, and in Seattle, where it was disrupted when residents had to be relocated.

Researchers said the findings offer promising strategies for increasing the self-sufficiency of public housing residents, whose living conditions in high-poverty, high-crime neighborhoods can provide significant barriers.

“This goes to the question of what is the mission of public housing: Is it solely to provide shelter, or can it be used as a means to escape poverty,” said Gordon L. Berlin, MDRC president. “These findings offer the first hard evidence that a work-focused intervention ... can promote the self-sufficiency of residents.”

The Jobs-Plus program, funded by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Rockefeller Foundation and several other public and private organizations, included three core components:

* Employment services, including job search assistance, vocational training, education programs and child-care and transportation assistance.

* Community support for work by fostering neighbor-to-neighbor exchanges of information and social functions.

* Financial incentives, including rent breaks, so that an increase in earnings was not automatically offset by an increase in rent. The program allowed for a stabilized rent for up to 36 months.

The rent breaks were discontinued at the end of the demonstration project in 2003, and researchers said the study’s findings suggest that at a time when public housing authorities face potential federal and state budget cuts, such incentives should be preserved and enhanced.

In Los Angeles, the Jobs-Plus program has remained popular with residents even after the rent breaks ended, said Lourdes Castro-Ramirez, acting director of resident relations for the Los Angeles Housing Department, which administers the program.

About 300 Mead residents are enrolled, as are a similar number at South-Central’s Imperial Courts housing project, where the Job-Plus program was not a subject of the MDRC study. Since 1998, more than 1,200 participants have used the services at both locations, and employment has increased by 30%, housing officials said.

The programs have helped with 726 job placements and now include services to help residents become more financially savvy. Two former residents have become homeowners and 14 have opened accounts to begin saving for homes, Castro-Ramirez said.

“The program has made a difference in the way people view themselves,” she said, “because they see they have potential and opportunity.”