You do not know what you don’t know. I have been working with families who are experiencing homelessness for more than two decades and I thought I had a good understanding of their challenges, but no one ever talked about what happens when their family income goes up. In recent years we have been seeing more and more problems linked to this. Maybe this is new because when we first started working together, the children of the families I know well were young, but we have been together for a long time and all of a sudden, I am now hearing horror stories. For example, a single mother with four kinds of cancer scraped together the money to buy a burial plot and she lost her Husky insurance, the Connecticut version of the nationwide Medicaid programme that provides free health insurance to low-income people. How does this make sense?
We now know that the problem is called the ‘benefit cliff’. It refers to the fact that if people who are receiving public benefits, such as housing subsidies, Medicaid, food stamps (now known as SNAP – Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program), welfare for families with children (now known as TANF – Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) or disability benefits (SSDI –Social Security Disability Income or SSI – Supplemental Security Income) earn too much additional income, save too much money or have too many assets, then their benefits are reduced or cut off entirely. While we recognise that people with enough money to support their families don’t need assistance, the income-earning and asset limits are far, far too low, and kick in far too quickly. It is not well-off families who are losing their benefits; it is families who, even with additional income, can barely afford to pay rent.
Mothers and Others for Justice (MoFJ) is a grassroots New Haven advocacy organisation. The group was started by women living in an emergency family shelter run by the non-profit Christian Community Action. These women came together in the 1990s to advocate against changes that were being made in the welfare reform system under President Clinton. The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) of 1996, also known as the Welfare Reform Act, was a bipartisan effort to instil greater ‘individual responsibility’ in people receiving benefits. PRWORA formalised a shift away from providing long-term support, towards a system of short-term aid that was supposed to push people, as indicated by the name, to take individual personal responsibility and find work.
Since then, MoFJ has expanded the issues that they advocate such as the need for affordable housing, an end to ethnic and racial disparities in healthcare and laws to reduce gun violence. The group believes that the voice of the people most impacted should be heard, and their recommendations should be used in the making of public policy. To that end, MoFJ inspires, trains and mobilises people living in disadvantaged communities to speak out on the need for system change.
For the last three years, we have been up in Hartford, our state capital, trying to raise awareness of the impact of the benefits cliff on families. We have put up large, bold wall displays in prominent places highlighting people’s stories, data and recommendations. Some examples are as follows:
“This policy is keeping me in poverty! I am disabled but still, I would like to be able to work part time but then they reduce my benefits and I am worse off financially. I cannot afford to be worse off and so I am stuck between a rock and a hard place.”
“My 19-year son got a job at Home Depot and I was happy for him. His manager liked him and during Christmas, he got a lot of hours but I have a Section 8 housing subsidy and my rent went up so high that I had to ask my son to not work so many hours. But, it didn’t matter, because after the holiday, they cut his hours way back but they didn’t restore my reduced rent as quickly as they raised it and we were in real trouble. There is no affordable rent and young people can’t move out of their parents’ apartments but they are not working to pay their mother’s rent. They are young and they want to have a car and to save money to move out on their own and so we have a lot of tension in our house and there is no solution in sight.”
“I have a disability but I work really hard so that people don’t know that I have a neuromuscular disease that is very debilitating. I am not physically able to get a job and I am grateful that I am able to receive government benefits but the benefit cliff always hangs over my head. We can’t make ends meet for my large family and so we are always looking to supplement our income in ways that won’t affect our food stamps. My family signs up to do a lot of studies where we can receive a gift card rather than a check. We accept any invitation to a meeting where they are serving food and my kids know what to do. One of them collects recyclable bottles, and we all look to see if we can bring home left-overs and work the crowd to see if there are any other events coming up. Don’t get me wrong. My family contributes greatly to any event we go to. We participate in the conversation, help clean up, and volunteer to do childcare; we are good citizens. But at the end of the month, I still have trouble feeding my family and that compromises our physical and mental health. Tempers run short and life is challenging enough without adding the stress of being hungry.”
MoFJ, along with our state partners, believes that expanding asset limits and passing a child tax credit are some steps that would help ease the benefits cliff and improve the quality of life of many of the hard-working citizens of Connecticut. We want to help people to be able to work and not be penalised for their efforts.
Merryl Eaton is a longtime social justice activist. She is Director of Advocacy and Education at Christian Community Action and works closely with Mothers and Others for Justice (MOFJ), a grassroots advocacy group working to address the lack of affordable housing, healthcare disparities, community safety and other quality of life issues.
Image credit via Marija Gabaliene Unsplash