January 17, 2012: Jason Song, reporting in the Los Angeles Times yesterday, revealed that since 2006, the number of homeless families who are CalWORKs recipients has increased 98%.
The increase shows how difficult it is for people on the lower rungs of the financial ladder to improve their situation in the current tough economy, experts say, especially because the average amount that Los Angeles County families get from the state has shrunk from $560 a month three years ago to $490 last October.
"The largest growth has been at that level of need where people are at the ledge of homelessness," said Michael Arnold, executive director of the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, above.
The LAHSA ($73 million annual budget; 100 full-time staff) is an 18-year-old joint powers authority of the City and County of Los Angeles that "designs, funds, and administers programs....that assist homeless individuals and families in their transition to permanent housing..."
If some of [CalWORKs] safety-net programs are cut [in the proposed Brown budget], it will push a lot of people to homelessness," Arnold said.
Or, as Glendena Stephens, a caseworker who has been with the [Los Angeles County] for 45 years, put it: "The rents are so high and the grants are so small, it doesn't leave them with hardly anything. I've never seen anything like it."
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