I worked for a Housing Authority dealing with rental assistance, Family Self Sufficiency and Home Ownership programs. Fraud is rampant, yet hardly any money goes for enforcement.
It is indeed rare when someone works their way off the programs; even when they're supposed to have goals fo self sufficiency, many just coast along doing the minimum in order to get as much as they can while still retaining benefits.
We had 3 generations of several families on housing assistance. Here's one example that bugged me a lot: when a person quits a job without good cause, they can't get unemployment benefits without at least jumping through some hoops and making 4 times what their weekly unemployment check would have been.
Not so for housing. You don't like your job, or just don't want to work anymore and up and quit... you get rewarded for it as the housing authority will then pay all of you rent and utilities (up to the maximum assistance amount for the family size).
I was covering the front desk one day when this lady came in to fill out a form. With her was her daughter and brand new grand daughter. Daughter was only a year or so out of high school. While there, mom instructed her daughter to fill out an application to get on housing assistance, saying, "time to get your own assistance now that you're having babies."
This is what the parents are teaching their kids. NOT to learn something and go out there and get a job, NOT to take a little responsibility for your own life. Oh no, just get signed up for housing and utility assistance, sign up for food stamps (SNAP), sign up for free medical care and every free food box, free cell phone, free clothes, etc, etc, etc, that you possibly can.... and to pump out more babies so the amount of your assistance goes up. Then sign up the kids for free clothes and school supplies and everything else you can get.
They also learn what jobs they can do to get cash under the table so they don't have to report their income, like delivering phone books, baby sitting, stealing metal and recycling it, dealing drugs, etc, etc. If you can think of it, they already have...
Oh, and not reporting their Baby Daddy lives with them and has a full time job. I saw that several times but couldn't prove it. One lady had something like 7 kids, all from the same father and showed the birth certificate to prove the children were hers. Dad is listed on the birth certificate. No follow up. No investigation for decades of fraud. Nothing.
) We spoke with him a while longer and then he made a curious statement about EVERYBODY getting their check from the government. We were a mite puzzled and asked what he meant by that. He went to say that everybody in the US got a check from the government. We informed him that we, as police officers, had to work for our money and it came from the city, not from the Federal government. He was convinced that everybody in the US of A got a check from the government; after all, his mom, his grandmama, his aunts and uncles and all of his brothers and sisters, they all got government checks.
