Anita Beaty, who provided the national study with its Georgia figures, says she sees evidence of the study's findings in the faces of men, women and children who seek her help at the Metro Atlanta Task Force for the Homeless. Beaty says no one keeps track of exactly why 81,100 families gave up welfare in the past five years. The major fiasco is that 15 percent of people who were in shelters nine or 10 years ago were working. So what we're looking at is shelters being used by necessity and default as housing for minimum wage earners. Donna Taffar, who runs a homeless shelter in Forest Park called Calvary Refuge, says her 18-family facility is always at capacity.
Some residents stay as long as a year and a half.
It's not easy and likely won't get any easier as their ranks swell. Meeting the criteria buys those families three more months of welfare. Those families were the first of tens of thousands who are scheduled to lose their welfare checks by 2005. Linda Johnson, statewide coordinator for the Department of Labor's GoodWorks initiative, will try this year to find work for about 1,800 welfare recipients who have been unemployed for up to eight years and will soon be cut off from welfare. Of course, the challenge will get a little greater as the economy weakens and plant closings and things occur as they're occurring now.