...and the Poor Get Poorer (Page 3)

In fact, thanks to the recession, the use of rent vouchers is rising across the country. But the Bush Administration is planning cutbacks that would leave 184,000 vouchers currently in use across the country without adequate funding to cover them. At the same time, the Administration envisions turning the entire rent voucher program into state-administered block grants. Legislation to accomplish this has been introduced in both houses of Congress. Despite volatile rental housing markets, the block grants would cap funding for vouchers. Vic Bach, housing expert at the Community Service Society, says, "Over time, the vouchers will be devalued and will cease to be an effective way of obtaining affordable housing." The program will be renamed Housing Assistance to Needy Families, an allusion to Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), the name of the program created by the 1996 welfare reform law. Conservatives such as Howard Husock of the Manhattan Institute dream of the day when there will be time limits and work requirements for public housing, and Michael Liu, an assistant secretary at Housing and Urban Development, has said that the Administration will not prohibit states from setting time limits for public housing. Counties in southern Delaware and Charlotte, North Carolina, are already experimenting with public-housing time limits. Another Bush housing proposal is a $50 monthly charge for families in public housing with little or no income. But some housing authorities have already tried minimum rents and given up--in one case, according to the CBPP, after tenants were found selling their blood to pay the rent.

Many liberals hoped that Clinton's welfare reform would mean an expansion of assistance for working-poor families--more generous daycare or health benefits, for example. But the Bush Administration is building on the most punitive aspects of the 1996 welfare law, seeking to expand work requirements while tightening access to education and training. Meanwhile, many people who left welfare for jobs during the 1990s boom have lost them as the economy has soured.

For example, 39-year-old Brooklyn resident Rosario Rodriguez left welfare a year ago when she landed a $6.50-an-hour job making maternity garments at a small Brooklyn factory. She liked the job, she says, even though she worked in a dirty, unheated room, lost her health benefits as she exceeded Medicaid's income limit ("it was a factory job, it had no healthcare") and got only a half-hour lunch break. But after six months, she was laid off as business slowed down.

Now she spends her days at the "job center," New York's euphemistic name for welfare offices, where there aren't any jobs to be found. She says, "My caseworker told me he would pray for me." Rodriguez suspects that she won't be able to find paid work, and will instead have to go into the city's Work Experience Program. Meanwhile, her daughter, a high school student, just had her first baby. Rodriguez would like to help out and stay home with her grandchild, but she fears this would result in a loss of benefits.

It's easy to overlook the connections between Bush's sweeping vision and the program changes of the Clinton years. But when it comes to TANF and to poverty, the two Presidents are very similar--in that both have emphasized work, regardless of its quality, and regardless of whether or not it is stable, pays a living wage or provides health coverage. The marketplace, not the government, is supposed to soothe poverty, even when all the evidence shows that it does not.

Against great odds, low-income activists struggle to fend off these attacks on the remnants of the welfare state. For example, Community Voices Heard, a group representing poor women in upper Manhattan, organizes around economic issues. It has not been an easy time, and activists are deeply frustrated. "A lot of people on WEP got jobs," said longtime activist Stephen Bradley at an organizing meeting on a rainy mid-May evening--jobs that they've now lost. "They got off welfare, but now they are back on welfare." Politicians, he says, are unresponsive: "We go and we plead our case, but they don't listen." Congressman Charles Rangel, who represents Harlem, has never consented to an in-person meeting with them. Harlem native Lloyd Anderson says, "People need to be able to pay their bills and take care of their children."

Through organizing and lobbying, people have made some advances. This past spring, Community Voices Heard and other community groups won passage of a City Council law that permitted people in WEP to attend college for part of their work requirement--though Mayor Bloomberg promptly vetoed the law. Healthcare for poor people in New York State was threatened with cutbacks, but these were averted when the state raised taxes on upper-income people to maintain Medicaid spending for the poor. And a successful action was held May 14, when about 100 activists thronged the lobby of Club for Growth, an elite Beltway fundraising organization that funnels money to conservative Republicans and pressed for the Bush tax-cut plan. Holding photographs of firehouses that are closing and schools in disrepair, they chanted, "Where's the jobs? Where's the jobs?"

Almost all the forces of the rich and powerful are stacked against them. Right now, Bradley says, "People are desperate. We are like a lost society." His words ring true. As Loretta Gruytch faces life without the medication she needs, and Rosario Rodriguez prays for work, it is hard not to feel as though our whole society has somehow gotten lost. Yet at the same time, despite the array of forces against them, the dedication and courage of these activists in Harlem offer hope for the future. When Lloyd Anderson says, "It's getting ready to get hot," one can only hope that he is right.

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