As unemployed lose benefits, more seek welfare benefits

One morning in July, Lisa Carstarphen climbed out of her husband's car and walked into the beige brick building that houses the offices of Camden County's social services, wondering how at age 46 she ended up there.

Two years ago, she was laid off from her $35,000-a-year job at Comcast. Now, with her unemployment benefits exhausted, she was broke. She stepped through the building's glass doors into a crowded, fluorescent-lit room to wait her turn to sign up for welfare.

As a child, she had accompanied her mother to the welfare office and swore she would never end up the same way. But here she was, surrounded by dejected faces, just as in her youth.

Memories of nondescript jars of peanut butter and big blocks of government cheese came rushing back, and Carstarphen struggled to keep it together.

"It was like going back in time. But I had no choice. My refrigerator was bare," she said. "For someone who has worked their whole life, it's awful to ask for a handout. When my husband picked me up later, I busted out in tears."

For the first two years of the recession, welfare caseloads followed the same steady decline of the decade and a half after President Bill Clinton's transformation of welfare from a social-assistance program into what is essentially a job-training program for low-income families.

But over the last six months, caseloads have begun to creep up, the product, experts say, of the continued sluggishness of the job market. Unemployed workers who have run out of unemployment benefits, like Carstarphen, are being pushed into the system.

"Once you took it away from the concept of an entitlement, it no longer was a safety net for people," said Carl Van Horn, director of Rutgers University's John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development in New Brunswick. "There's going to be people who were never on welfare but in this dire circumstance might now have to get on welfare."

Between February and June, the number of people receiving welfare through the federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program has climbed 2 percent in New Jersey to 98,856 and 3 percent in Pennsylvania to 217,884.

Camden County has hovered near the top of New Jersey's welfare rolls for years, fueled primarily by the city of Camden and its decades-long struggle to bring jobs back to the once-bustling manufacturing center. Since the beginning of this year, those numbers have only grown.