Philadelphia Inquirer, February 4th, 1998

The Future of the City

Welfare law threatens area's economic stability
 

 ByEd Schwartz
Given the visible turnaround of Philadelphia's economy, there is now great hope that the next five years will bring us unparalleled growth, high employment and economic recovery.

But the worst may not be over.

As Mayor Rendell himself is warning, the problem is welfare reform. Welfare "downsizing" would be a better name for it. On March 3 of last year, the state Department of Public Welfare sent notices to welfare recipients throughout Pennsylvania saying that they needed to start looking for work because in five years they would be cut off forever.

Imagine what would happen if Ed Rendell sent letters to the 26,000 people who work for the City of Philadelphia, saying, "There is now a lifetime limit on city employment. You have five years to get another job." All hell would break loose.

Yet that is exactly what 72,000 welfare recipients living in Philadelphia received from the Welfare Department last year -- seven times the number of people who were laid off at the Navy Yard. Even the mayor is predicting that by 2002, there may be as many as 38,000 Philadelphia households -- including 76,000 children -- with no income at all.

Of course, we are all reassured by both President Clinton and Pennsylvania's welfare secretary, Feather Houston, that welfare downsizing is going quite well. The President boasts that welfare rolls are at their lowest level since the 1970s. The secretary reports that the Pennsylvania caseload has dropped by 10,000, half of those in Philadelphia alone. Not to worry, right?

Not exactly. Start with the 72,000 households on welfare in Philadelphia as of March 3, 1997. The state can exempt 20 percent of this group from the five-year limit -- roughly 14,400 -- for medical problems and similar hardships. This leaves us with 57,600 adult recipients in Philadelphia to be downsized over the five-year period -- an average of about 11,500 a year. Given this timetable, the reduction of only 5,000 since last March is less than half of what we need. At this rate, by 2002, we will end up with 32,000 households in the city without jobs or income but with 76,000 children to support.

There's an added difficulty that, again, has been largely ignored. It's what I would call the literacy gap.

According to the 1990 Census, more than 400,000 Philadelphia residents over 18 don't have high school diplomas. Of these, 120,000 never got beyond the ninth grade. Not surprisingly, most welfare recipients are in this position. Nearly every census tract with more than 500 welfare households has at least 1,300 adults without high school diplomas. Given that most of the 39,000 jobs gained in the region last year came in fields such as business services and finance, which require at least a high school diploma or a GED, where are all these recipients supposed to work?

Inexplicably, closing the literacy gap is not even on the welfare reform agenda at this time. Quite the opposite:

Last year, the federal welfare reform act required all recipients to undertake an intensive, eight-week job search. This could take place at any point during the year. In Pennsylvania, however, caseworkers forced recipients to quit training programs if these conflicted with their search on theschedule. Some were even pulled out of training a few weeks before they might have graduated.The welfare department blames Washington for the job search requirement, but the onus of implementation lies with it.
By 1999, all recipients must be engaged in a "work-related" activity for 20 hours a week. Under the federal law, however, they can use adult education to meet this requirement for no more than one year. Forget two-year GED or community college associate degree programs. At a time when President Clinton tells us that he wants every American to be able to go to college, his administration is refusing to help adult recipients spend two years finishing high school.

Pennsylvania spends just $8 million on adult literacy, an average of $400 a student. This hasn't increased more than 5 percent since 1990, despite huge budget surpluses in Harrisburg. The result is that only about 1,800 Philadelphia residents are awarded GEDs each year -- far short of the number who are going to need them. The $23 million in the Governor's new budget for "job training for welfare recipients" is the state's match to a federally funded program whose current drafts don't even define the literacy gap as part of the problem.

Yet none of this seems to faze the decision-makers.

What should we do? The federal government ought to permit recipients to participate in education and training programs for at least two years. Harrisburg needs to triple its budget for adult literacy. Philadelphia ought to aim at producing at least 5,000 GEDs every year. We all need to support the public service jobs program envisaged in State Sen. Vincent Hughes' bill for recipients who will not find work in any other way. Apart from the public service jobs bill, the rest of these proposals aren't even under consideration.

In December, a broad coalition of community organizations and human service agencies called JOIN -- Jobs and Opportunity to Improve Neighborhoods -- came together to advance this agenda, along with reverse commuting, quality child care, and a municipal living wage bill. But aside from reverse commuting and increased support for child care, even welfare secretary Feather Houston has refused to support it.

We have a problem, Houston, and we need to start dealing with it now before it's too late.

Ed Schwartz (edcivic@libertynet.org ) is president of the Institute for the Study of Civic Values. He is a former director of the Office of Housing and Community Development and was on City Council in the 1980s.