 Kensington
is the poorest district in the state of Pennsylvania. The
median income of this neighborhood has continued to go down. After
the factories shut down and people lost their jobs here, welfare
and drugs became the two major sources of income. If you want to
feed your kids in Kensington it's pretty much one or the other.
Now they are implementing welfare reform and the welfare rolls are
declining by half. Most studies have shown that people who are leaving
welfare work sporadically for minimum wage, and a lot of them become
homeless. So that leaves drugs. Or prostitution. Or some other criminal
behavior that allows you to make a living.
Families on welfare now
face a five-year lifetime limit. After two consecutive years, you
have to be working twenty hours a week to get benefits. They've
made a lot of people drop out of college to meet the work requirement,
because in Pennsylvania education doesn't count towards your twenty
hours a week. The mayor, not always known to be sympathetic to our
situation, published a front page editorial saying that Philadelphia
simply doesn't have enough jobs for all the people on welfare right
now, and that welfare reform is a "train wreck waiting to happen."
But the big push is to cut people from the rolls at any cost. There
are a lot of arbitrary reasons they can cut people off now. The
welfare department actually gets financial incentives to cut people
off.
In one welfare office
they had a bulletin board which read "any job is a good job."
They had clipped an ad for go-go dancers out of the newspaper and
posted it on the board.
The welfare office is
where we do a lot of our local organizing, where we do our outreach.
This is where we try to inform people, try to open their eyes to
issues that some people try to hide. The media and the government
officials try to hide the issues like child care.
 Once
welfare reform was implemented, we realized that a major change
was coming. The people in this neighborhood were put in a situation
where the only way to make a living was to break the law.
Every day this neighborhood becomes more volatile. And everyday
there are more police on the streets. By setting time limits
for welfare without guaranteeing enough jobs for all the people
that needed them, the government set the stage for upheaval.
As the economy races along downtown, life is getting harder here
in Kensington. The only benefit to this neighborhood is that
people with money can afford to come here and buy their drugs.
About a year ago they
introduced "Operation Sunrise," the largest police mobilization
in twenty years, to "take control" of this area. They
actually quoted the Police Commissioner Timoney in the paper as
saying that they were focusing on taking control of the areas most
affected by welfare reform. Why would they do that? Because they
know people are going to be desperate, and when people can't feed
their kids by legal means they're going to do whatever it takes.
Next to the welfare office,
you can see the Child Psychiatry Center and Episcopal Hospital.
The Child Psychiatry Center is the newest building around here,
built in ‘94 and ‘95. It’s a day program for kids
who need a high staff to student ratio, because they have seen so
many traumatic thing in their lives. They’ve seen people shot
or whatever else you can imagine. It’s a direct result of the
increase in poverty in this area. It's sad that we invest resources
in these kids only once they've already been hurt.
Episcopal Hospital, across
the street, is the last major employer in the area, and its emergency
room is probably the major source of medical care for people in
this area. Unless you're on welfare, pretty much you don't have
health care around here. It looks like Episcopal is going to close;
it's already cut a lot of jobs and closed down departments. In 1996
the governor cut 250,000 people across the state off of welfare,
and that really affected the amount of people who could afford to
pay for medical care here, so the hospital got thrown into a precarious
financial situation.
Next: Bushville:
Housing for Families
|
