MILWAUKEE — The snow and biting cold of winter in Wisconsin has yielded, for a strange, brief interlude, to balmy days and merely chilly nights. For those living on the streets of this Midwestern city, the break in the weather is a welcome respite.
Oddly, the bout of false spring is bad news for Sherrie Kay and other beleaguered managers of Milwaukee's homeless shelters, who have been besieged since early December by unprecedented numbers of homeless people, particularly women and their children.
Warm weather, it turns out, emboldens weary landlords, parents, siblings and friends to throw out the women--and their unruly gaggles of kids--who moved in weeks or months ago with little money and uncertain prospects. As spring comes to Milwaukee, many fear that the surge in homelessness could turn into a raging flood.
But although spring thaws may play a role, Kay and other homeless advocates express little doubt as to the underlying cause of the city's burgeoning crisis: It is, they say, the result of welfare reform, which is picking up steam in Wisconsin well ahead of virtually any other state.
"It's not the cold or the heat that makes people homeless," said Kay, who runs Hope House, a homeless shelter designed to house 63 people but which has been sleeping up to 90 per night since late November. "It's poverty that makes people homeless, and [welfare reform] is making more people poor and driving the poor deeper into poverty. Then they show up on our doorstep."
Shelter System Almost Full
In recent weeks, Milwaukee's three main shelters have bulged with a total of about 900 homeless people--roughly divided evenly between individuals and women with families. That represents a 30% increase from the same period last year, when homelessness had already begun to rise precipitously. The current numbers come to within 15 beds--mats on a church basement floor, to be exact--of the system's capacity.
Advocates say the experience of Milwaukee, where fully half of all Wisconsin's welfare recipients live, holds lessons for other states and cities intent on effecting a rapid transformation of their social services systems.
Even in the best of economic circumstances, they say there's danger in paring welfare rolls too quickly, outpacing the ability of caseworkers and information systems to communicate and implement changes, punishing failure to comply with new rules by cutting aid to families with an already precarious grip on housing. The combined effect, they warn, will be to put many more people out of their homes.
