The War on Affordable Housing
Damn him.
Just damn him.
I got knocked up when I was 20. Decided to keep the baby. Went on welfare when my child's father decided that he wasn't ready for parenthood and that he'd rather I went on welfare than continue living with him. My preference was to wait a few more months, get work, then move out. He made life intolerable enough that waiting was not an option.
At that point in my life, the waiting list for Section 8 was between 1-3 years. I first rented a single room from a midwife. After about 6 months, I moved in with my parents, paying rent out of my welfare money. Food stamps helped too, as did WIC. I managed to scrape up just enough extra cash to buy a crappy old car, which ran so well that when it got swiped a couple years later, it was still running when they found it in the Goodwill parking lot.
More:
That was in the early years of welfare reform. Clinton's administration and the Republican congress were putting together the "JOBS" program and exploring welfare-to-work options. When my child was 18 months old, I started on a pilot program that paid for my childcare and gas so I could go to training to get some skills so I could get a better-than-minimum-wage job.
When my daughter was 2 1/2, Section 8 came through, and I was able for the first time to move out on my own with my daughter. We had a small little two-bedroom apartment in a bad neighborhood, but when my income was really low, our rent was $60 per month. When my income went up, my subsidies went down, but I had more money, so that was okay.
After about 18 months of training and very part-time work and volunteer work that amounted to an internship, I worked my way off welfare, but Section 8, childcare assistance, food stamps and medicaid were still essential to my independence and growing adulthood. With those, I was able to keep my low-paying but flexible job, and still make ends meet.
When my daughter started school, I stopped needing childcare for the most part. Then I got a raise and stopped qualifying for food stamps. Eventually my job offered medical benefits, and medicaid disappeared. Section 8 diminished to the point where I was paying at least 80% of my rent. During that time, I joined a program called "Family Self Sufficiency" designed to help families save for buying a house while moving off the program. This combined active counselling and help with getting my credit in order, with links to community resources and as a real incentive to working off the system, every time my income went up and my rent went up, they put that "extra" money in an escrow account. That, combined with matching grants from several programs, leveraged so that when I finally graduated the program for good, finally went off section 8 completely, and shortly after bought a house, I had an extra $10,000 toward a down payment. It meant the difference betweeen a crappy manufactured home outside the "good" school district, and a real house in the district my daughter was already thriving in. It meant everything in terms of what we were able to look for and consider in buying a house.
I'm now completely, 100% "off" the system. I'm a success story. My kid is a success story. We're how it's supposed to work.
While this was going on, I met a family who wanted to buy a house too. I pointed them to the programs that had helped me.
I just talked to them a few days ago. They said that when they first applied, they didn't qualify. That when they did qualify, the program had just lost all its funding. They're struggling to buy a house, will have to move out of the district their kids are enrolled in, and are going to be locked into higher rates and a riskier, larger loan because this essential help is missing.
And what about a young woman who gets pregnant now, and decides to "do the right thing" and keep the baby? Well, instead of being allowed a year, or three, to get her feet back under her, get training, etc... she's expected to go find a job, any job, by the time her baby is 3 months old. Section 8 is being gutted. Here in Oregon, they have a "list" of conditions Medicaid will pay for, and every year they lop a few more "less essential" things off the list, like allergy treatments, or drugs to treat yeast infections, even if they're prescriptions. I don't know if they've done anything to food stamps yet. Childcare help... the rates the state pays for childcare are scandelously low. And the state will pay more to put an infant in full-time daycare than they would pay the mother for welfare to stay home with her baby.
People talk about welfare as an "incentive" to have babies out of wedlock. I hated the very idea of going on welfare. I resisted for 4 long, horrendously difficult months. I was so passionately committed to NOT having another kid on the state's dime that I not only didn't get pregnant again while on state assistance of any kind, but I went so far as to abstain completely from sex for more than 5 years prior to my marriage. Incentive my ass.
I've known many single mothers. And not one of those I knew, not ever, had a child "so she could get more money from the state." If you'd suggested that to any of us, we would have laughed in your face.
Funny thing... Abortion rates are on the rise.