A Foreshadowing of Ugly Scene to Come

Friday, the anti-welfare revolution hits the streets of Los Angeles, and it won’t be pretty.

That’s the day the county’s general relief grant, received by almost 90,000 of our poorest residents, will drop from $285 to $212 a month. This is not much to live on in today’s economy, even when supplemented by food stamps, which amount to about $100 a month.

General relief is the last safety net for those not eligible for federal and state welfare aid. It is the bottom of the welfare barrel.

Reducing the grant is historic as well as painful. For the reduction offers us a preview of the impact of the proposed dismantling of the nation’s welfare structure--the famous Newt revolution that’s also supported, in part, by President Clinton.

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Claudette Shull, 48, is too preoccupied with survival to care about the greater implications of this historic drama.

She is a general relief recipient I met Monday at the Courtland Hotel on skid row, an unusual enclave of decent housing in a dismal, dangerous neighborhood.

The year-old Courtland is one of 14 inexpensive and well-maintained skid row hotels built and operated by the Single Room Occupancy Corp., a nonprofit company started and subsidized by the Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency to provide quality, cheap housing on skid row.

As we talked in the Courtland’s library, Shull told me about her unexpected journey from the ranks of the employed to relief.

She had worked 14 years as a bill collector, she says, her last job as a temp for the Thrifty drugstore chain. When Thrifty moved from Los Angeles, Shull was laid off.

Unemployment insurance ran out. She still could not find work, so she signed up for relief.

Shull told me it was a galling experience because she had once been a bill collector for the county welfare department’s fraud section. “I couldn’t take the stress,” she said. “People would come in and threaten you. I thought this little bit of money isn’t worth getting killed over.”

The county couldn’t verify her employment when I called. But it’s been my experience that the county has a hard time finding anything. So I go along with Shull.

And when it was her turn to ask for help, she applied in a crowded welfare office near downtown and waited to talk to a social worker. “He was rude and crude,” said Shull. “The day I applied was the most humiliating experience I’ve ever had.”

At the time, she was living in a $475-a-month apartment just east of downtown in a dangerous neighborhood controlled by drug dealers. When she moved to the Courtland, her monthly rent dropped to $184.

Our conversation finished, she returned to her room to prepare for a noon interview at the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising, where she hopes to learn a new trade and get off the relief roll if she can put the financing together.

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Claudette Shull’s prospects, and those of thousands like her, depend on the outcome of the welfare revolution.

The Gingrich revolution, also known as the “contract with America,” wants to turn these programs over to the states, funding them with block grants of federal money. President Clinton, a former governor, is marching down the same path, although his proposal offers more protection for the recipients than the GOP plan.

The shift from Washington to state capitals probably means much less money will be available to welfare recipients. As a result, expect thousands of people to be bumped off aid for poor families, the elderly and disabled.

These people will apply for relief. As the rolls grow, county treasuries will be even more hard-pressed than they are now, facing inadequate revenues for running jails, courts and hospitals as well as providing relief. It was Los Angeles County’s current budget shortage that forced the supervisors to cut the grants this year.

To prevent bankruptcy, Los Angeles and other counties will be forced to tighten eligibility even more. Just this year, the Legislature and Gov. Pete Wilson made this easier with a law authorizing counties to drop many recipients from the rolls for much of the coming year.

Claudette Shull can probably survive in this atmosphere. She’s quick, bright and presentable, with work experience. For people like her, general relief is just a way to get by a difficult period.

But how will other relief recipients make it? Most won’t. The majority are on the streets. More than half are black and almost 30% are Latino and thus face the additional barrier of discrimination. About 40% are mentally ill. Almost half are drug addicts, alcoholics or both.

General relief is their last safety net. Take it away and you’ll see many more of them in your neighborhoods, in the alleys, on the streets, in front of convenience stores. Even if you have no sympathy for these poorest of the poor, the sight of people starving on the streets isn’t exactly what we expected of America as it reaches the 21st century.