As unemployed lose benefits, more seek welfare benefits

One morning in July, Lisa Carstarphen climbed out of her husband's car and walked into the beige brick building that houses the offices of Camden County's social services, wondering how at age 46 she ended up there.

Two years ago, she was laid off from her $35,000-a-year job at Comcast. Now, with her unemployment benefits exhausted, she was broke. She stepped through the building's glass doors into a crowded, fluorescent-lit room to wait her turn to sign up for welfare.

As a child, she had accompanied her mother to the welfare office and swore she would never end up the same way. But here she was, surrounded by dejected faces, just as in her youth.

Memories of nondescript jars of peanut butter and big blocks of government cheese came rushing back, and Carstarphen struggled to keep it together.

"It was like going back in time. But I had no choice. My refrigerator was bare," she said. "For someone who has worked their whole life, it's awful to ask for a handout. When my husband picked me up later, I busted out in tears."

For the first two years of the recession, welfare caseloads followed the same steady decline of the decade and a half after President Bill Clinton's transformation of welfare from a social-assistance program into what is essentially a job-training program for low-income families.

But over the last six months, caseloads have begun to creep up, the product, experts say, of the continued sluggishness of the job market. Unemployed workers who have run out of unemployment benefits, like Carstarphen, are being pushed into the system.

"Once you took it away from the concept of an entitlement, it no longer was a safety net for people," said Carl Van Horn, director of Rutgers University's John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development in New Brunswick. "There's going to be people who were never on welfare but in this dire circumstance might now have to get on welfare."

Between February and June, the number of people receiving welfare through the federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program has climbed 2 percent in New Jersey to 98,856 and 3 percent in Pennsylvania to 217,884.

Camden County has hovered near the top of New Jersey's welfare rolls for years, fueled primarily by the city of Camden and its decades-long struggle to bring jobs back to the once-bustling manufacturing center. Since the beginning of this year, those numbers have only grown.

Out of a strip mall in South Camden, county and state social workers operate a virtual fix-it shop for displaced workers on welfare. Motivational seminars, job leads, and guidance counselors with a direct line to the local community college are housed under one roof.

Nidia Sinclair, a middle-aged social worker from Panama who strolls through the office in bright embroidered dresses, says the task of getting people off welfare and into the workplace has never been harder, and her clients know it.

"It's a work-first program, but the problem is, with the economy the way it is, there's no work," she said. "The frustration level is very high right now."

For those out of work and entering welfare for the first time, the experience can be deflating. It involves endless forms and rules and long classroom sessions, which often include drug addicts and former convicts with little work history.

Ernesto Miranda Jr., 40, commutes daily to required job-training classes at the Camden center from a motel room in Bellmawr, where he has been staying for the last three weeks.

A former bookkeeper in Mount Laurel, he lost his job when he was sentenced to a year in prison on a child-endangerment charge. He was arrested for smoking marijuana while caring for his teenage daughter and her friend, he said.

Miranda said he was frustrated by the attitudes of many of his classmates.

"I've been working since I was 16 years old, and all I want is a job. But most of the people in here have a different objective," he said. "I don't want to play around. I need to find a place to live."

The stigma surrounding welfare is a barrier to many people signing on to TANF, even when they need it, said Cathleen Palm, a child advocate in Pennsylvania.

While the number of people collecting other forms of public assistance, such as food stamps or Medicaid, has increased greatly since the start of the recession, TANF caseloads still remain below their 2007 levels in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Over that same period, food-stamp caseloads increased 58 percent in New Jersey and 44 percent in Pennsylvania.

"Even if they get desperate, people are more willing to get food assistance or medical assistance than cash assistance. They're still hoping to avoid that actual welfare," Palm said.

Melvin Coe, 45, of Pennsauken, said he had no choice.

His floor-cleaning business went under last year after months of clients' canceling their contracts, plus his wife divorced him. He ended up living at his church.

"There was a time I felt ashamed, that I could have done better, made more of my life. But when times like this come, you weather the storm, use the resources on hand, and try to move on," he said.

One morning last week, Sinclair's classroom had taken on its usual aura of controlled chaos as students laughed and texted.

In the front row, Carstarphen sat quietly in her usual spot.

She spends most of her time worrying about the $10,000 in debt she has accumulated since losing her job and where she and her children will go if they cannot come up with the back rent on their house in Camden.

Most of Carstarphen's family has no idea about her problems. She has confided in her younger brother and a friend, but at a family barbecue earlier this summer, surrounded happily by her aunts and uncles down from New York City, she couldn't bring herself to tell them.

"Nobody knows. It's just a low blow for me," she said.