CROWDED OUT BY THE WELFARE STATE?

Hull House closes.

The organization, first formed in 1889, has provided foster care, domestic violence counseling, child development programs and job training to 60,000 children, families and community groups each year.

Those clients will be referred to other social service agencies, Saunders said.

Anne Sheahan, spokeswoman for the Chicago Department of Family and Support Services, said her organization got word Monday that some Hull House child care sites closed, and the rest will close Friday. The department had funded those Head Start programs.

"We are working to identify new providers to pick up those services," Sheahan said.

Estela Coronel, 31, said she was told Monday her 41/2-year-old daughter Suzette's Hull House child care facility would close.

"More than mad, I'm sad because of (Suzette)," she said. "She loved to go to school. She woke up yesterday and said, 'Mommy, I'm ready to go.'"

On Jan. 19, the agency announced it would close this spring. But by the following day, Saunders said, the board realized Hull House did not have enough funds to pay employees beyond January, and the decision was made to close in a week.

With government funding taking a hit and the need for services climbing, Hull House's revenue dropped from $40 million in 2001 to just $23 million in June.

"We could not possibly raise enough money to sustain the organization," Saunders said.

Hull House's 300 employees learned Friday that they would soon be out of work, said Tamara Faulkner, a social worker with the organization's Family Works program.

The article -- and a Chicago Sun-Times editorial -- strongly suggest that tight state budgets contributed to the closure of the historic agency

The causes of Hull House’s demise are many, including a long history of quality services but poor financial management that didn’t plan for the rainy day that invariably came, several people in the human services world told us.

But a major factor contributing to Hull House’s closure, and to the devastation seen in the human services field across Illinois, was the weak economy and the state’s budget problems.

Since 2009, state support for human services — provided primarily by nonprofits like Hull House — has dropped by nearly $600 million. And under budget projections released by the governor’s office earlier this month, human services could lose an additional $350 million in state support starting in July.

Making matters worse, the state drags out payment for services already provided. As of Friday, the state backlog of unpaid bills was $4.7 billion, with many dating back to September. That represents 163,000 unpaid bills to human service, housing and day care providers, schools, hospitals and other state vendors.

Louise W. Knight of The Nation sees the limitations, as well as the advantages, of social service agencies working in parallel with government to achieve some goals.

Sadly, because government funding will always ebb and flow, this model has serious limitations. But Hull House in its first decades offered a different kind of model: that of a settlement house as an engine for social justice activism. Notably, at a time before the charitable tax deduction, the house was funded entirely by private gifts, some small, and some from wealthy donors who were committed to, or at least tolerant of, the left-leaning, and even radical aspects of its work. And that model remains a potentially invaluable legacy in this economically polarized age.

In particular, she suggests that better-off people might gain by, well, getting to know How The Other Half Lives, rather than Paying Taxes and letting Somebody Else do the work.

The great insight of the settlement movement was the power of social ties to realign the energies of prosperous people away from their class self-interests and towards efforts to support the reforms working people sought, which in Addams’s times included a livable wage and the eight-hour workday.Underlying that insight was the recognition that materially comfortable people often held dangerous misconceptions about working class people as undisciplined and without ambition and that working people held prejudices of their own about the selfishness and greed of the wealthier classes.

[Hull House founder Jane] Addams urged her audiences and her readers to “mix on the thronged and common road, where all [can]…at least see the size of one another’s burdens.” She often pointed out that “most of the misunderstandings of life are due to partial intelligence, because our experiences have been so unlike that we cannot comprehend each other.” To those possessing some economic security, she had an important message: “We are under a moral obligation in choosing our experiences since the result of those experiences must ultimately determine our understanding of life.”

Today, we have all kinds of nonprofits, including non-residential settlement houses, foundations, religious organizations, and research, government and university programs focused on solving (or sometimes studying) particular social injustices. To inform us of these efforts we can turn to a rich array of magazines, newspapers, websites, books, TV and radio shows, and documentaries. Thus we have a situation in which specialists are doing the work while the rest of us read and listen to words upon words about what they are doing. But learning about these entirely worthwhile efforts does not transform us because we encounter them only through our minds. Our bodies stay in our chairs. We make no human connections, except at an imaginary remove.

The problem with relying on voluntarism, argues Ross Douthat, is that the Welfare State crowds out the human connection.

Every tax dollar the government takes is a dollar that can’t go to charities and churches. Every program the government runs, from education to health care to the welfare office, can easily become a kind of taxpayer-backed monopoly.

But sometimes the state goes further. Not content with crowding out alternative forms of common effort, it presents its rivals an impossible choice: Play by our rules, even if it means violating the moral ideals that inspired your efforts in the first place, or get out of the community-building business entirely.

That assertion does not apply to Hull House -- Mr Douthat had the recent flap over mandatory provision of contraception in mind -- but the more general argument, to the point that where the government provides the social services, there is less incentive to make private contributions, might apply to Hull House.