The welfare cliff

Norma Fajardo lives in the Old Colony housing development in South Boston with her 3-year-old son. Late in 2008 she got off public assistance and started working part time at the Little Sisters of the Poor, a nursing home in Somerville, as a resident needs administrator. Fajardo has an associate’s degree from Bay State College and a will to work. After about a year at Little Sisters she was offered a promotion to a full-time job. Great news, right?

Except the extra hours bumped Fajardo’s pay over the income limit for a child-care voucher, which subsidizes her son’s care while she’s at work. Child care is the single most expensive item in the budgets of low-income mothers. Fajardo says she already pays $120 a week, more than a third of her income. It would go up to $300 if she lost the subsidy, and the extra pay she’d get for working full time wouldn’t cover it.

Social scientists call what Fajardo is experiencing “the cliff effect,’’ whereby small increases in income trigger crashes in public support, making it harder to get ahead. Fajardo just calls it “very frustrating.’’

Like Fajardo, the majority of erstwhile welfare recipients are working — but often in jobs that don’t pay enough to live on. In Massachusetts, a single mother working full time at the state minimum wage still lives almost $2,000 below the federal poverty level — and that threshold is already artificially low because it encompasses Alabama and Oklahoma and other states with a low cost of living. In Massachusetts, according to a breakthrough policy tool developed in 1998 by the Crittenton Women’s Union, the real cost of living for a single mother with a toddler in Boston is $48,706, more than three times the poverty threshold.

This eye-popping number is not for luxury living. The Women’s Union budgets assume no meals eaten out, no money left over for savings, and in Boston, no car. But the number gets more realistic if the family receives public support services: food stamps, housing vouchers, day-care subsidies, and the like. It is a ratio, a delicate balance between wages and subsidies that stretch from opposite ends — and sometimes meet.

Lately, though, one side of the equation is eroding badly. State funds for child-care subsidies have been cut repeatedly, and there are now 20,000 children on waiting lists. The state’s rental voucher program assists 75 percent fewer families than it did in 1990. Without such support systems, life for many low-income workers simply does not compute. Few Americans remember that when Clinton first proposed eliminating welfare, his plan included vast expansions of healthcare and day care — expansions that would make it pay to go to work. Those never materialized, but millions of poor mothers did lose their welfare checks.

The worthy aim of welfare reform is for people to become independent of public payments and able to stand on their own. The best way to do that is with a job, paying a wage that real families can live on. But failing that — and so many full-time jobs are failing that — the public sector needs to fill the gaps. Charity and the kindness of friends and family can only go so far. Fajardo is motivated to change. She deeply wants to get out of Old Colony and find an apartment of her own. “People have an idea of what project people are — and some people do meet that stereotype,’’ she says. “I don’t want my son growing up in the projects.’’ With her education, her job, and the Women’s Union guiding her quest for independence, Fajardo may well be one of the successful ones. “I know it’s going to get easier,’’ she says. But why do we make it so hard? Correction: In last week’s column, I confused Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., the writer, and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., the jurist. Renée Loth’s column appears regularly in the Globe.