Bad credit loan people tenant unemployed

Mi-ike!" she rasped. She stood so close it was all he could do to keep from backing away. She talked with such a loud lisp he thought she might be retarded. She was missing half her teeth, and her skin looked almost plastic. If she weren't so big in the butt, he would have guessed she was smoking crack. That's the thing he had noticed about addicts: Their butts were the first thing to go. As her sandpaper voice silenced the room, even the receptionists stopped to stare. "I need a coat, Mi-ike! You're my caseworker now, Mi-ike!" Michael Steinborn felt his loathing for his job surge to new highs. "She's a mile a minute with the 'Mikes,"' he thought. "My new best friend."

Since inheriting her case months earlier, he had known her only as a computer code. She hadn't answered his appointment letters. (Typical.) She hadn't complained when he docked her check. (Not typical.) Now here she was in shirtsleeves in January, with the wind-chill factor 24 below. Coats weren't part of Michael's job on the front lines of Milwaukee's famous welfare experiment. That's what the office had its high-priced "community outreach" team for. But given days to produce, the outreach team had produced only excuses. "They haven't gotten you a coat?" he asked. "Look at me, Mi-ike--does it look like I have a coat?" There was a thrift shop down the street. Michael promised her a coat. He was halfway out the door when he spotted the hole in the scheme: He only had $4. He climbed back up the stairs, bummed a loan from a coworker, and ran four blocks through the snow. The drifts swallowed his office-worker shoes and buried his toes in ice.

The thrift store was out of coats. Them was another thrift store two blocks away, and another sprint left him surrounded by coats--blue coats and black coats, long coats and short coats, so many coats that he was losing his way when a voice came into his head. It was the familiar voice of self-reproach, his You Idiot! voice, and it reminded him that he wasn't there to make a fashion statement: just pick one, you idiot! He chose a blue ski jacket with a pink collar, nicer than anything he had expected. It cost $11. He had $9. The clerk made a show of contempt, but let the difference slide. It wasn't exactly a landmark in the annals of social work. But Michael allowed himself a frisson of satisfaction. The nail filers in outreach had sat around all week; Michael Steinborn, can-do guy; had gotten something done.

She lifted her arms over her head and made a sour face. "It's a little snug when I do this, Mi-ike!" The slapstick line came to mind: "Then don't do this!" But the coat had another problem. The zipper didn't work. Back he went, six blocks through the snow. Back to the sign that warned: "No Exchanges. All Sales Final." What was he supposed to say? Special exceptions for dumb-ass social workers with ice in their shoes? A bit of groveling brought a lined denim jacket and a zipper that zipped. "Mi-ike!" she said. "The other one was better looking than this!"

Mi-ike wasn't going back out in the cold. Mi-ike wasn't wearing a coat himself. He left his at home because his clients' kids kept wiping their Cheeto hands on it. Mi-ike was done talking about coats. "Okay, Mi-ike," she said. How about a bus pass? Four days later, in shirtsleeves again, she told Michael's supervisor that no one would help her find a coat.

A social worker! Michael Steinborn couldn't believe he was a social worker! Six months earlier, he was an unemployed jack of the building trades, drinking vodka for breakfast and wondering how he and his pregnant girlfriend were going to get by. Now he was a caseworker--er, "Financial and Employment Planner"--offering indigents career advice. He hated the grip of starched collars on his throat. He hated the office's new-carpet smell. Above all, he hated feeling responsible once again for the fiascos of ghetto life. Raised in the central city, the son of a small-time landlord, Michael had patrolled the ghetto since grade school, when his father first dispatched him to help collect the rents. "Son, take it from me," Ted Steinborn had warned, after another tenant had skipped out on a debt. "They'll take and take, and then they'll spit you out." Michael took pride in never ducking a fight and had his nose broken three times. The last thing he brought to his profession was a sentimental view of the poor. "I never wanted to be a sucker for a sob story," he said.

Yet as a caseworker, Michael was surrounded by sob stories, and like his father he believed some of them. He could carry on about his clients' bad-faith betrayals, but sometimes he felt he was lying, too, talking up the promise in their going-nowhere jobs. "People will call and say, 'I got a job!' I feel like saying, 'You're going to have a really fucked-up time living on $6.41 an hour.' But my job is to bullshit them, to say, 'Hey, that's great, it's a first step.'" Clients liked Michael. Clients trusted Michael. To an extent rare among the city's 150 caseworkers, Michael's career served as a tutorial on what conscientious casework can (and can't) achieve.

The 1996 welfare bill, a landmark in social policy now up for renewal before Congress, has been widely deemed a success. And on one level, the praise is deserved. After 60 years of federal control, Congress handed new authority back to the states, with fixed funding, work rules, and time limits of no more than five years for most recipients. The states responded by cutting the rolls and raising employment rates, each dramatically. Poverty plunged for its target populations--children, minorities, and single mothers. The late '90s economic boom gets part of the credit, and so does an unsung expansion of workers' aid, including child care, health care, and tax credits. But the timing and the depth of the employment surge puts the welfare law at the center of the trend.

If the welfare law has worked, however, it has largely worked as a deterrent, creating enough hassles that those with other options make other plans. Some states require a month-long job search before applicants can collect benefits. Some, including Wisconsin, route recipients through rounds of job-search and motivation classes so tedious they make the competent flee. It is much less common for the system to do what it often claims, to provide individualized services that get at the underlying issues in poor women's lives, like drug abuse or depression. With the rolls down 60 percent, there has been lots of talk about the "hard to serve" cases that remain, without much serving of them.

In part, that's because poor women themselves are resistant to the idea. "Personalized casework" means a stranger dipping into their business. In part, it's because lots of frontline workers, particularly in the big cities, aren't a whole lot more capable than their clients. Some, good and bad, have just come off the welfare rolls, and I've met more Bran one caseworker who returned to public aid. Even good ones like Michael often find themselves trapped in unsupportive bureaucracies. Some of the lawmakers reconsidering the law have now recognized that the bureaucracy needs to do more. But their solution--demanding that states ratchet up the number of clients routed through the current programs--ignores the quality of the programs themselves.

I spent seven years following a group of families through Wisconsin Works, or "W-2," the most lauded welfare program in the country and one now being emulated as far away as Israel. With generous funding, small caseloads, and the clout of the state's four-term governor, Tommy G. Thompson, W-2 is often thought of as a best-case look at the welfare bureaucracy. It wasn't a reassuring one. Behind the scenes, the celebrated program compiled a disturbing and largely hidden record of financial waste and human neglect. If the law is going to live up to its billing--"the greatest social policy charge in sixty years," said Thompson, in his current job as Secretary of Health and Human Services--the system can't afford to rest on a record like this.

"Our dismal performance"

Some social-work careers begin in flights of youthful idealism; Michael's began in 1998 at Ladies Night at a Milwaukee pickup joint. He was out with a high school friend, Jose Arteaga. Growing up together in the inner city, they used to have long, philosophical talks about how the ghetto had gotten so screwed up. Now at 30, Michael was poor and screwed up himself, and Jose was a rising star--director of case management--at Maximus, Inc., one of the five private groups running the Milwaukee welfare program. Jose had an inspiration: Michael should come aboard as a caseworker. Yeah, Michael thought. Right.