Where politicians - and thus programs and services - always get it wrong, is that they don't focus on housing/food security first. If those things aren't stable, people's lives will be chaos and they will continually lose whatever jobs they manage to get. If those things are stable, people will not only hang on to their jobs, they will accumulate experience, and perhaps begin to climb out of poverty by building careers or getting into a position where they can further their education.
Housing/food is the base of the pyramid. Then comes healthcare, transportation, and basic non-food necessities. And then, once someone is in the position of presenting themselves AS a human being, they can interact in a normal way in the community, and function normally in a job.
Right now it's just job search, job search, employment program, you're not really trying, push...push...push. And of course you will keep trying because of all the pressure and judgment and fear of imminent homelessness since you won't qualify for anything unless your disabilities are really extreme. But at the same time the people being pushed in this situation know why they probably won't be able to hold down jobs if they - by some weird twist of fate - manage to get one: lingering health problems that don't qualify as disabilities but still undermine work performance, bureaucratic overload that imposes a general disorganization and exhaustion that will continue to overlap with working life for a while, medications that don't jive well with the workplace since they make you fall asleep suddenly, etc.
These people are not "work ready" because the base of the pyramid isn't under them. Instead all the weight is of bureaucracy and people's judgments and contradictory demands are all pressing down from over *top* of them. This tends to push people toward homelessness, drugs, crime, mental illness, failure.
By the way, I have another DU post about another major Town Hall in the area where I attempted to speak about welfare issues. One of the things I wanted to "out" was how welfare applicants were all being threatened by constant police surveillance UP FRONT. Don't mistake this for prudent fraud checking, because the conditions they are asked to live under are impossible to meet, so it's basically a set up for arrest. Since California uses prison labor, you can guess the slave narrative that can come out of that.
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