When she moved onto Thirteenth Street, Arleen was receiving W-2 T, owing mainly to her chronic depression. She received the same stipend in 2008 that she would have when welfare was reformed over a decade earlier: $20.65 a day, $7,536 a year. Since 1997, welfare stipends in Milwaukee and almost everywhere else have not budged, even as housing costs have soared. For years, politicians have known that families could not survive on welfare alone.1 This was the case before rent and utility costs climbed throughout the 2000s, and it was even more true afterward.
