Step-cousin broke his foot, now is totally destitute

This is the story I’m hearing from my mother, and I’m hearing this second hand so I don’t know all the details, but I find it quite a sad story. My step-cousin cousin moved to central Pennsylvania from Florida recently, and broke his foot falling down some stairs. This injury has left him unable to work. He’s applied for unemployment and was denied (probably because he voluntarily quit his job in Florida to move here), applied for food stamps and was denied. My mother heard about his plight and is trying to help him until he can get back on his feet (literally). She brought him some food she had in her pantry. Step-Cousins rent for his apartment is paid until the end of July, afterwards he may be screwed unless he can find some assistance. If worst comes to worst, he’ll stay at my mom’s place so he doesn’t have to stay on the streets.

This seems like kind of a crappy situation to me. Is America’s social safety really net so threadbare that my cousin can fall through the cracks like this? I wonder if there are any private charities that can help him.

Yes, it is.

Pretty much. By moving prior to getting hurt he won’t have the time in the current system for them to give him any help. I believe in Colorado you have to have been employed in the state for more than 12 months (its actually 4 or the last 5 calendar quarters) and earned at least 10,000 in wages to be eligible for unemployment. He might find some federal level help but anything less than that want to you pay into the system before you get benefits.

If this is the case I’m thinking he might have better luck applying for disability benefits than unemployment.

My understanding is that it’s a very long process to apply for social security disability. It can take years. And this is a temporary disability, not a permanent one.

Yes, Social Security disability takes years to process.

Can he work from home doing something?

I’m sorry your step-cousin is in this situation. Yes, the safety net is fragile and has giant holes in it.

Sadly, you can’t get SSDI for a broken bone because, AIUI, bones heal in less than a year. There’s a vast range of physical conditions for which you can’t get SSDI. A friend of mine had Stage IV non-Hodgkins lymphoma and couldn’t work for almost a year. She was turned down for SSDI because a cancer diagnosis alone, even stage IV cancer, isn’t a qualifying condition.

Yes, yes it is.

Especially if he’s an otherwise-able-bodied adult male with no dependents.

Private charity is basically his only recourse right now.

If I was him I’d be making plans to move my stuff to mom’s place by the end of the month. As tempting as it might be to stay until he’s evicted having an eviction on his record would make it just that much harder to rent again once he recovers and finds a job.

Or you could see it as a failure of the family, or of the mosque.

I attended a public meeting where people were opposing a charity project, and there were representatives from the elderly migrant Italian community there: “Why” they shouted, did we need an institution to care for single men? Where were their families?

And I’ve heard an elderly migrant Muslim man (country of origin unknown) making the observation that mosque just wasn’t as important to young people, because they could turn to the (Australian) government for unemployment and health relief.

Has your cousin or your mom or you looked for food banks in his community? I live in an area with under 100,000 people across a few cities and townships, and there are two independent food banks here. There are some qualifiers of course but they’re relatively “easy” to qualify for.

Even if you don’t have such a resource, churches will be willing to give you grocery gift cards.

Your mom should not be having to over extend herself to feed him and herself. At least try to get the basic need met (our food bank also supplies stuff like toiletries and paper goods) for him and your mom so they’re not over burdened by trying to stay fed.

Private charity most likely is his only recourse other than family help. It seems like he broke his foot without working very long ( or possibly at all ) in PA, so he wouldn’t be eligible for unemployment based on his work in PA. He could collect Florida unemployment while living in PA if he hadn’t quit his job in Florida to move to PA. ( for example, if he got laid off in Fl and then moved) There’s a chance he could collect unemployment from FL if he worked for at least a couple of months in PA, so he should look into it - but if he broke his foot before getting a job that won’t work. If PA even has cash assistance for single adults, whatever caused him to be ineligible for food stamps will most likely render him ineligible for cash assistance.

Families and mosques are also part of society. Yes, this is slightly facetious, but society has changed from the days of relying on your family and church. People move around more, away from their families, away from a church made up of people who know them and feel they are part of their communities. And government based efforts for those who fall through the cracks have been around for quite a while. The US is unique in the western world in how large the divergence is between changes in people’s geographic/community mobility and increase in available help through the government.

Yes, it did occur to me, reading the OP, that, for years, the “social safety net” in America and elsewhere was made up of family and community (which might mean neighbors or religious community) and not the federal or state government.

Such a system, where it’s assumed to be the job of family and community to take care of those who can’t take care of themselves, is superior in ways to making it the government’s responsibility. But it’s less workable nowadays, as @naita mentioned.

While that may true and my innate inclination is towards what you describe, I also think the government should be the backstop. Not everyone has family. Not every religious group has a lot of resources to care for their members. Having a government safety net makes sense to me if it can be constructed so no one falls through the cracks. It’s the larger community of the entire nation taking care of its own.

How is a family/church based system superior? It seems clear to me that a government system is superior.

If your primary assistance system is based on families or churches, you’re going to have unequal coverage. Some people are going to need assistance but not receive it because they happen to not have the right connections. Two people can be in identical bad financial situations and one has a well-off family and one’s an orphan. Or one’s a member of the community’s biggest church and the other is a member of some small religion (or an atheist). So one receives the financial assistance they need and the other doesn’t. How is that a good system?

The other problem with a family/church assistance system is social control. If a person needs assistance from these groups, there’s going to be a strong possibility of the groups attaching strings to the assistance. Pick whatever ideological position you disagree with. Now assume your parents and/or clergyman hold the opposite position. And they expect you to adopt their position if you want them to pay for your food and rent. They’ll tell you it’s for your own good.

I feel a government system where people receive assistance based on no criteria other than their needs to be far superior.

From years of reading the column about the Neediest Cases Fund in the New York Times, I learned that, at least in New York, some of the religion-affiliated charities, like Catholic Charities or UJA-Appeal provide support to everyone, not just those of their faith.

Up to a point.

Good freakin’ luck getting reproductive health medicine from a Catholic institution if you’re a woman.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not opposed to religious charities, I just think there should be secular options as well.

I said that it was superior in ways. I do not claim that it would be superior overall, at least not in the modern world.

Some of the ways in which it would be superior:

  1. You know the people you’re helping personally, and thus you know what they genuinely need or would benefit from, and are better able to tell whether they’re just trying to cheat the system.

  2. From the givers’ point of view: Giving and helping others are good for the soul. They help me feel better about myself and more charitable toward my neighbor. If it’s up to the government to give, they’re still doing it with my money, but it’s with money that they take out of my paycheck and use for a whole bunch of stuff that I’m unaware of.

  3. From the receivers’ point of view: The help comes with an indication that somebody cares enough to help me, and that I am part of a family or community who look out for one another.

  4. People helping their nighbors directly is more efficient. Under a government system, there’s a layer of bureaucracy that siphons off some of the resources that could otherwise go to the people needing help.

And, I don’t know how big of a deal the social control you mention is—probably a lot more in some families and communities and in others—but it can be a good thing as well as a bad thing.

Again, I’m not claiming that there aren’t problems, nor that a family/community based system is necessarily superior to a government system overall.

But I look at the flip side. Think about the other people; the ones who are disabled or unemployed or poor and don’t have these connections. Do we want to add the additional burden on them of having to face the fact that they are alone and have nobody in their life they can rely upon? The social isolation they endure is bad enough without making it a financial liability as well.

I can’t argue with this one. Maintaining a government system for providing assistance would be a heavy cost beyond the assistance itself. But I feel the advantages it provides make it worth the cost.

I feel it’s better to persuade people to improve their lives rather than coerce them. When you force somebody to do the right thing - even when it genuinely is the right thing - you aren’t really changing them. You’re just making them give in to the force you are applying on them. They’ll probably change back to their old ways as soon as you stop applying the force.

And you also have to deal with the corruption to yourself that comes from using coercion against other people, even if your cause is good.

Maybe it’s just my personal history that makes me overly sensitive to the problems of coerced behavior; I used to coerce people into doing the right thing for a living. I realize it can be necessary in some cases but I see its limitations.

I find this thread fascinating because the lack of a government safety net has forced people to turn for help from others within their communities–to use the term in the broadest sense–and I have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, that sense of community is important for almost all of us, especially now when there’s so much isolation, disenfranchisement, and alienation.

On the other hand, having lived for a very long time in a small town with strong church and community affiliations, those groups get overtaxed. Even in a large, well-funded church or other group. the number of people needing help can get overwhelming. When you’re faced with helping, say, the OP’s brother, the person who lost her home in a fire, and the uninsured family whose kid has leukemia, do you give smaller amounts to each or choose one and give more? Or ignore all of them because you gave so much last week/month?

How much time do you have to make and deliver casseroles or clean someone’s home?

And there are fewer charitable organizations to give rides or help in other ways than you might think. The OP’s brother would be hard-pressed, I think, to find a charity that would give him temporary housing, for instance, for a broken leg that keeps him from working.