WBEZ | social services

Tracking the sequester’s impact on Illinois' poor and working class

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 16:56:00 -0500

Sequester causes longer waits for low-income housing

Sheryl Sieling is the Director of the Housing Choice Voucher Program at Cook County Housing Authority, a program provides rental assistance for low income families in Cook County suburbs.

The program doesn’t have enough resources to provide rental assistance to everyone who qualifies. So they keep a waiting list. But since the sequester, very few people are getting taken off that waiting list and put into housing.

When Seiling hears people talk about the sequester, they are usually most worried about longer waits at airports. But she says that doesn’t compare to the wait her clients have had.

“Everyone who is on the waiting list right now has been waiting since 2001,” said Seiling.

Sieling said in lieu of assistance, clients live with family or in substandard housing. She mentioned one woman who has three kids and has bounced from one homeless shelter to another.

“I can’t imagine how they function. I can’t imagine the stress,” said Seiling.

She said when families want to check on their status, there is really only one thing she can tell them: “We have to just keep waiting,” she said.

U.S. airports are now seeing furlough days because of the sequester. But some social service agencies felt the pinch weeks ago.

Over the next few days WBEZ will bring you portraits of how poor and working class people, and the agencies that serve them, are being impacted by the government spending cuts.

Penny pinching at the Public Defender's office

When I first reached Jonathan Hawley, he was driving around trying to find a backup battery because his office’s old one died. Picking up computer batteries is not normally part of the job for the Chief Federal Public Defender for the Central district Illinois. But because of the sequester, Hawley had to layoff three people, including his computer specialist.

Another problem: The computer battery cost $500.

“We have nothing budgeted for unexpected expenses,” said Hawley. “So whether it be a computer breaking down, a chair breaking. Any penny we spend that we cannot currently predict, has to come out of the pay of the employees here.”
Eventually Hawley found an extra battery at another office.

He said for now, his public defenders office is actually lucky. They have 10 planned furlough days compared to some other public defenders offices, that have as much as 30. But he said if an expensive case came in the door, where had to pay for an expert or cover travel, his office could easily end up in the same situation.

“Which is sort of self defeating,” said Hawley. “You get a case that needs extraordinary resources, the only way to do that is to reduce your staff, which is one of your key resources.”

Hawley said when a public defender takes furlough days the entire court system slows down. He also said the U.S. Attorney’s office, the people who he goes up against in court every day, don’t have any furlough days scheduled.

“If you are talking about a level playing field, it doesn’t sound very level,” said Hawley.

Without a capable public defenders office, Hawley said the court will be forced to pass the cases to court assigned private attorneys, which he said could cost taxpayers more in the long run.

Cuts to Senior Services

Casandra Schmoll is the executive director of the Henry County Senior Center in Western Illinois, near the Iowa border.

When she first got the news that the sequester meant she’d have to cut 9 percent of her budget she sat down with a big spreadsheet and tried to figure out what cut would be the least painful.

“They told me to go from the least important person to the most important person,” she said.

In terms of day to day services, she decided she was the least important. She gave herself furlough days. But that wasn’t enough.

Her employees make minimum wage, living paycheck to paycheck. Cuts in hours would be hard for them. Not to mention the seniors who depend on them everyday.

“It was the toughest decision I have ever made in my entire life,” Schmoll said.

In the end, she decided to cut back their senior transportation services. Before the sequester transportation services ended at 3 p.m., now they end at 1 p.m. That means fewer seniors getting rides to doctor appointments and grocery stores.

They’ve also cut back on Friday meal delivery. In two of the towns they serve, the senior center will skip delivering meals every other Friday.

“Some people, that’s the only hot meal they’ll get till Monday again,” she said.

As difficult as the cuts have been, Schmoll says it’s given her a chance to see some real kindness. Neighbors help deliver meals and some drivers transport seniors beyond the time they’re being paid.

But what has touched Schmoll the most is the older women who have been donating an extra dollar, despite their own tough financial situation, for the meals they eat.

Shannon Heffernan is a WBEZ reporter. Follow her @shannon_h and share signs of the sequester in your community.

Rustbelt city wants immigrants, skilled or not

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 11:27:00 -0600

Lifelong Dayton resident Monica Schultz, 36, brings me to the East End block where she grew up. “This whole street was full of families,” she says. “Kids were running around playing, all within my age range.”

Now no kids are in sight.

Schultz points to a half dozen abandoned houses, including one right next door to her family’s place. She says the city has boarded it up a few times but stray cats keep finding their way in.

“We had a flea infestation problem,” she tells me. “People walking by could see the fleas or feel the fleas or get the fleas. All of the yards in the neighborhood here were becoming infested with fleas.”

Schultz says the city can’t keep up with houses like this. “It’s one of many that need to be bulldozed,” she says. “But it’s on a list.”

Dayton’s population has been shrinking since the 1960s. Most of the area’s factory jobs are long gone. To save the city, Schultz has embraced a new idea: Help immigrants and refugees lay roots in Dayton.

Schultz, who owns a small marketing firm, helped lead community meetings that generated a 72-point plan called “Welcome Dayton.” City commissioners approved the plan this fall. The points range from better immigrant access to social services, to more translations of court materials, to grants for immigrants to open shops in a dilapidated commercial corridor, to a soccer event that supporters envision as a local World Cup tournament.

Schultz tells me the plan could revive a Dayton entrepreneurial spirit that sparked inventions ranging from the cash register to the airplane. “You would have small businesses,” she says. “You would have coffee shops and you would have bakeries and you would have specialty grocery stores.”

Dayton is among several rustbelt cities suffering from population loss and brain drain. To create businesses and jobs, some communities are trying to attract immigrants, especially highly educated ones. Dayton stands out for the attention its plan pays to immigrants without wealth or skills.

The plan even addresses people without permission to be in the country. One provision calls for police officers to quit asking suspects about their immigration status unless the crime was “serious.” Another point could lead to a city identification card that would help residents do everything from open a bank account to buy a cell phone.

City Manager Tim Riordan, Dayton’s chief executive, says welcoming all types of immigrants will make the area more cosmopolitan. “I think there would be a vibrancy,” he says. “We’d start to have some international investment of companies deciding they ought to locate here.”

Foreign-born residents so far amount to 3 percent of the city’s 142,000 residents. For a mid-sized U.S. city these days, that’s not many.

But Dayton’s immigrants and refugees are increasing their numbers and, Riordan says, they’re already making a difference. He points to a neighborhood north of downtown where some Ahiska Turks have settled. “They were refugees in Russia," he says. "Here they’ve bought houses. They’ve fixed them up. And, sometimes when I talk to hardware store owners, people will come in and they’ll buy a window at a time. ‘I’ve got enough money to put in another window.’ It’s slow-but-sure change.”

Not everyone in Dayton is on board with the plan.

In a corner tavern on the East End, a 62-year-old bartender serves the only customer what she calls his last can of beer for the night. It’s a Friday, just 11 p.m., but she’s closing. “The owner can’t pay me to stay any longer,” she tells me, speaking on condition I don’t name her or the bar.

The bartender says the tavern could be on its last legs and tells me what happened to three other East End bars where she worked. They all shut down. She says that’s because many of the neighborhood’s Appalachian families, who arrived for manufacturing jobs after World War II, have moved away.

“NCR closed down, Dayton Tire and Rubber closed down, GM and Delphi and Frigidaire,” she says, pausing only when her customer slams down the beer and bellows something about a “last paycheck.”

The bartender tells me she doesn’t like how Riordan and other Dayton officials are handling the exodus of families who’ve been paying local taxes for generations. “Why won’t he try to keep those kinds of people here?” she asks. “He wants to welcome the immigrants to come in here. What can they do? Where are they going to get the money to fix up anything? What jobs are they going to get to maintain what they fix up here? There are no jobs here. None.”

It’s not just locals like the bartender who have doubts about “Welcome Dayton.”

Steven Camarota, research director at the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington group that pushes for strict immigration controls, acknowledges that attracting immigrants would increase the size of Dayton’s economy. “But that’s different than arguing that there’s a benefit,” he says. “Growing an area’s gross domestic product, but not the per capita GDP, doesn’t mean anything. It wouldn’t be very helpful. In fact, there might be problems with that.”

Camarota says the low-skilled immigrants would put downward pressure on wages for workers on Dayton’s bottom rungs.

But Italian-born economist Giovanni Peri of the University of California, Davis, says low-skilled immigrants would bring what Dayton seeks—and more: “One, they will increase the variety of local restaurants, local shops. Second, they will provide a variety of local services, such as household services, care of the children, of the elderly. Third, they will also develop and bring an atmosphere of diversity and higher tolerance.” Peri says these low-skilled contributions would all help Dayton attract immigrants with more resources.

The willingness of many immigrants to perform manual labor for low pay, Peri adds, could create jobs for longtime residents. He points to landscaping companies: “They will need people who mow the lawn but also they will need accountants, salespersons, a manager and drivers.”

Dayton’s approach—welcoming immigrants with and without skills—is the “optimal strategy,” Peri says.

Whether a city’s immigrant-integration plan can actually attract many people is another question. About an hour east of Dayton, the city of Columbus launched an immigrant-friendly initiative in 2002 and saw its foreign-born population grow fast. But that city’s economy is much more robust than Dayton’s. It had already been attracting immigrants for years.

The results of “Welcome Dayton” could depend on how it works for city residents like a 25-year-old mother whom I’ll call Ana López. (She doesn’t have papers to be in the country so I agreed not to use her real name.) López says she came from the Mexican state of Puebla as a teenager at the urging of a friend who had arrived in Dayton earlier.

López says her first job was in a restaurant with a big buffet. “We didn’t come to take work away from anyone,” she tells me in Spanish. “Rather, there are jobs nobody else wants.”

Now López and her husband have three kids, all U.S. citizens. The family has managed to buy a house. And it’s found a congregation, College Hill Community Church, that provides simultaneous Spanish interpretation through headphones.

But Dayton hasn’t always been hospitable. López says police officers caught her brother-in-law driving without a license and turned him over to federal officials, who deported him.

Looking at the “Welcome Dayton” plan, López says providing the ID cards and removing the police from immigration enforcement could make a difference for families like hers. “These families would tell their friends and relatives to move to Dayton,” she says.

That’s exactly what city leaders want to hear.

Quinn avoids specifics about proposed social service cuts

Fri, 25 Feb 2011 10:52:00 -0600

Ill. Gov. Pat Quinn said cuts to state-funded drug and alcohol rehab centers won't be as deep as originally feared. Quinn's office had proposed major financial cuts to social services. But Quinn said the cuts aren't final yet.

"It's a dialogue. It's an ongoing process. It's a day-to-day process," Quinn said. "We want to make sure that we get through this fiscal year on to the next fiscal year."

Quinn wouldn't say just how deep this year's budget cuts will go.

The state has informed some addiction services their government funds will end March 15th. Advocates say the cuts would end services for 55,000 people and would mean layoffs for 5,000 workers.

State antiviolence effort raises eyebrows on West Side

Fri, 11 Feb 2011 00:15:00 -0600

Some community leaders on Chicago’s West Side don’t like the way Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn’s administration is doling out funds in a $31 million program to combat Chicago-area youth violence.

They wonder why aldermen are involved and why the pastor of Ald. Deborah Graham (29th) is getting the biggest grant in the city’s Austin neighborhood.

Quinn’s office and a state agency called the Illinois Violence Prevention Authority are overseeing the program, called the Neighborhood Recovery Initiative. Barbara Shaw, the agency’s director, says 205 community groups will receive funds to provide everything from jobs to mentoring and counseling.

“This is a very important program to provide a range of very important services that our young people need,” Shaw says. “Smaller agencies, larger agencies, the faith-based community—[we’re] really trying to pull together the variety of organizations to be a part of being there for kids.”

The state’s first step was choosing a lead agency last fall in each of 23 city neighborhoods and suburbs targeted for help.

Here’s the thorny part. Instead of putting out an open request for proposals, the state asked individual Chicago aldermen to recommend the lead agencies. Shaw says that saved time and will help get the services out faster.

But an alderman’s role in Chicago’s Austin neighborhood has led to some stark accusations. “It’s business as usual,” says Mary Russell Gardner, who’s running in the 29th Ward aldermanic race. “Award my friends that helped me, and Kibbles ’N Bits for everyone else.”

Gardner, who is trying to unseat Graham, is making hay about a $290,000 grant for youth mentoring—the biggest chunk of $1.2 million slated for Austin in the antiviolence program.

The group selected for that grant, Kingdom Community, Inc., has close ties to Graham. It’s run by her pastor, Rev. John Abercrombie of Truth and Deliverance International Ministries.

Graham responds that her opponent is making a stink about nothing. The alderman recommended Circle Family HealthCare Network as Austin’s lead agency. Graham insists it was Circle, not her, that chose Kingdom Community for the mentoring.

“I had no input on who the sub-agencies would be—none whatsoever,” Graham says. “I had no idea that they had been selected before the press release came out.”

Who chose Kingdom Community for the big grant? Andre Hines, Circle’s chief executive officer, says the decision was made by a community committee her agency formed. That committee chose most of the Austin groups Circle will oversee in the state’s antiviolence program.

Hines isn’t claiming Kingdom Community will do a better job on the mentoring than any other Austin group would have. “The only thing we can do is look at who applied and select the best candidate based on those applications,” she says, insisting the process was fair.

Kingdom Community isn’t the only antiviolence grant recipient in Austin that’s raising eyebrows. Learning Network Center, a group chosen to help parents become community leaders, is led by Luther Syas, who circulated signature petitions to get Graham on the 29th Ward ballot.

Hines says she had no idea Syas had any ties to the alderman.

Austin resident Steven McCullough, who until last year led a large West Side social-service provider called Bethel New Life, says he takes Graham’s word she didn’t pull strings for either her pastor or the petition circulator. But McCullough says there’s still a problem: “It doesn’t look good.”

McCullough, now chief operating officer of a citywide group called the Safer Foundation, says the state has no business letting local politicians steer social-service contracts. “What it can lead to is a situation where an organization is perceived to be favored over another organization that delivers similar services or even a higher quality of service,” he says.

McCullough says a transparent process would serve the public better.

The ultimate losers, McCullough adds, may include Graham. If her pastor doesn’t come through with excellent youth mentoring, he says, “a lot of fingers will be pointing at her.”