This is a seven-and-one-half year demonstration program aimed at dramatically increasing employment, earnings and job retention among the working-age residents of family housing developments, a large percentage of whom are on public welfare (70 percent in inner-city areas) or at risk of dependency. It supports the planning, development, implementation and evaluation of locally-based approaches to providing saturation-level employment opportunities and supportive services. This comprehensive community initiative incorporates a combination of state-of-the-art employment, training and supportive services; financial and other incentives (occasioned by the welfare reform and new public housing policies); and vigorous efforts to rebuild and strengthen the community in support of work.

The evaluation design combines experimental and quasi-experimental methods for studying the effectiveness of a place-based comprehensive social intervention utilizing randomly-selected sets of treatment and comparison sites. The study will employ administrative records data as well as survey data covering a wide variety of outcomes to help examine whether the program's impacts vary across sites and whether certain program strategies are likely to yield better results. The evaluation will include comprehensive cost and benefit-cost analyses.

Number in sample and sampling method not reported.

Financial disincentive/sanctions: Sites may have disincentives such as reduced welfare grants or limits on public housing tenure for failure to participate in employment services.

Financial incentives: Site will change the incentive to work so that income is increased rather than reduced as a result of employment.

Time limits: Sites may use time limits as an incentive to participate in employment activities.

Program operations: Program operations will be studied to identify the most successful components in various sites.

Social/Support Services: Efforts might build on existing assets of the communities, such as informal social networks, in order to increase residents’ knowledge about work opportunities, to convey and reinforce program information on lessons on how to prepare to work and look for work, etc.

“All seven cities in the demonstration were successful in bringing these important public institutions into a new partnership with residents. They recruited other partners as well. At the same time, Jobs-Plus collaboratives, like most such enterprises, have suffered significant “growing pains.” It has not been easy to develop procedures for governing the collaboratives and sharing authority, define roles for the different partners, integrate or coordinate services across agencies, and in general, jointly make the decisions necessary to get a Jobs-Plus program up and running. However, substantial progress has been made on all these fronts, and all major partners have remained committees to the demonstration as it enters its third year”(ES-3).

“By mid-1999, Jobs-Plus had become a highly visible presence in each of the eight housing developments” (ES-4).

“All sites have launched employment and training activities that generally encourage residents to take jobs as quickly as feasible” (ES-4).

“Sites’ plans for financial work incentives are nearing completion. These primarily take the form of changes in rent rules to reduce the degree to which rent rises as earnings grow. These particular approaches differ across the sites” (ES-4).

“Progress has been slowest in defining and implementing a community support for work component. Peer support groups that focus on employment issues have already been formed in some sites as one step in this direction. Involving residents in the provision of services and outreach to other residents is another common strategy. With the design and implementation of the two other components of Jobs-Plus further along, the sites are now turning more attention to ways of broadening and deepening their community support for work efforts” (ES-4).

Interim Impact Findings:

“Although the sites are still designing and implementing some features of their Jobs-Plus programs, all have been serving residents and placing resident into jobs. The sites report that, by the end of March 1999, they had enrolled nearly 1,200 residents into Jobs-Plus and had placed more than 400 into jobs” (ES-4).

Baltimore:
Jobs-Plus in Baltimore has been operating at the Gilmor Homes Housing Development in the Sandtown-Winchester neighborhood of West Baltimore since April 1998, when its office opened and program intake began. The program has made a number of different efforts to create jobs and internships for residents. In addition, using Jobs-Plus and other funds, the program has the capacity to place a sizable number of residents in work experience slots with collaborative member organizations or in subsidized employment with private companies for transitional jobs that can lead to permanent positions. A Case Manager works individually with Jobs-Plus enrollees on assessing their readiness for employment. For its financial incentive component, Baltimore has proposed a plan of reducing the per-centage of countable income used to calculate working families’ rent from the traditional 30 percent to 20 percent, although consideration is being given to dropping the percentage still further to 10 percent.

Chattanooga:
Chattanooga’s Jobs-Plus program, located in the Harriet Tubman Homes Development, uses a wide variety of techniques, including systematic canvassing of the housing development, small-group meetings in residents’ apartments, and special events, to reach out to prospective enrollees. A notable feature of the program’s front-end activities is a structured five-day orientation, which gives participating residents an opportunity to meet with the program’s Job Coach and with the Counselors who serve as case managers to Jobs-Plus members.

Four of the 12 Jobs-Plus staff members are outstationed to the program from other agencies, and six are Harriet Tubman Homes residents. Some residents have used the option of a one-week employment readiness course that is offered by a group of four Harriet Tubman Homes residents, who have formed their own business to deliver this kind of “soft-skills” training to Jobs-Plus members and others who want and need preparation for the world of work. Job search help is offered individually rather than in groups. Chattanooga currently is implementing the HUD regulations that apply to all residents of HUD-funded housing developments who participate in TANF-approved education and training programs.

Cleveland:
Cleveland’s Jobs-Plus initiative struggled to find new ways to implement a program that would increase employment among Woodhill Homes Estates residents. Despite the hard work of staff, providers, and residents, there was general agreement that the achievements were fewer than hoped for.

At the end of the period covered by the report, contracts with VGS, North Point, Cleveland Works, and Edutech had ended, without prospects for renewal. As discussed in the report, throughout the program period, these providers tended to use the development as a base for enrolling residents in their own programs rather than serving them through a larger Jobs-Plus initiative. As also shown in the report, the underlying cause of these patterns was the slow pace at which Jobs-Plus assembled the components that would have established a cohesive identity for the program. Besides the lack of full staffing until late 1999, the program was without case management and a financial incentives plan. With these critical pieces missing, it appeared unlikely that the program could take root at Woodhill Homes Estates within the time frame required for the demonstration. Preferring the flexibility of a more open-ended time period to the constraints of the demonstration schedule, staff and CMHA agreed to withdraw from the study but to try to maintain some of the Jobs-Plus services that had been brought to the development during the program period.

St. Paul:
After a difficult period in mid-1999, the collaborative began moving forward. Several factors seemed to be responsible for this momentum, all of them occurring around the end of October 1999. At this time, a consultant was hired to provide technical assistance for the RLT, and his work was well received, but it remains to be seen to what extent his recommendations will be adopted. In addition, although the hiring process — which began in earnest in October —was lengthy and painstaking, many believe that the hiring of a Program Manager will have a positive impact on the work of the collaborative and the results achieved by Jobs-Plus. Finally, HUD’s approval of the rent incentives package is enabling the program to proceed with signing up new residents, while maintaining the progress made by current beneficiaries of rent incentives. The hope is that a resurgence of energy will mark collaborative work, that it will be sustained, and that it will help to nurture positive change in Jobs-Plus and, ultimately, in the Mt. Airy community.

Los Angeles:
Although Jobs-Plus at Imperial Courts has experienced both a slow start-up and a high degree of turnover among management and staff, it has managed to begin developing and implementing all three program components. The program has managed to sustain itself, although observers generally agree that it could move ahead decisively only after the arrival of the new Site Coordinator in July 1999. As staff work to build momentum for Jobs-Plus, they have several assets to draw on, including the rent incentives beginning in June 2000. The upcoming months will reveal whether these incentives draw more residents into becoming active participants in Jobs-Plus.

Dayton:
Dayton’s program is moving ahead at a steady pace, and now that the financial incentives have begun, momentum may increase. Over the period covered in this chapter, Dayton has tried a number of interesting approaches to providing services. For example, besides including a strong representation of residents on the staff, the program is using the Building Captain system to further engage residents in employability efforts. Dayton makes a special effort to serve youth and to address issues of family violence, and more generally there are signs that its case management services are well regarded by residents who use them. The low levels of participation in education, training, and job preparation services may need further attention. In addition, ongoing coordination with the One-Stop Job Center will be needed to maximize the value of this important resource.

Seattle:
Several observations emerge from the summary of Seattle’s first year of program implementation. First, Rainier Vista’s households form a diverse community with a range of work-related skills and job placement challenges. Even with Seattle’s currently robust economy, flexibility and resourcefulness are needed to design useful employment and training services for this population. For this reason, service providers balance formal procedures with informal, individually tailored interventions.

Second, when the rent incentives became available to Rainier Vista households enrolled in Jobs-Plus, the program witnessed a surge in demand for services. Third, even as initial employment and training services are provided to an expanding clientele, more attention will need to be paid to the question of job retention and wage progression.

Finally, the resident Leadership Team’s organizational development has the potential to institutionalize community support for work that can be sustained well after the demonstration program’s technical assistance is completed. The Community Shares service exchange system is an example of using the innovative community support for work approach, but this program element will need time to develop.

• The link between employment and housing among welfare recipients is not well understood.
• In some cities, welfare recipients living in public housing are indeed harder to employ than other recipients - but not everywhere.
• Welfare recipients in public housing were indeed the most likely to have substantial employment barriers, while those in unsubsidized private housing were the least likely.
• Those in public housing developments or Section 8 subsidized housing fared worse in finding jobs and leaving welfare than recipients living in unsubsidized private housing.
• Findings from other cities show that this state of affairs is not true everywhere.
• Welfare-to-work programs can be more effective for recipients in public housing than for those in other types of housing.
• The program’s success varied by housing status: Its effects (impacts) on employment, earnings, and welfare were consistently larger for welfare recipients living in public housing - and to some extent for recipients with Section 8 subsidies - than for recipients with no housing subsidies.
• This pattern of differences in effects by housing status was not limited to Atlanta.
• Policymakers should look beyond mainstream welfare-to-work programs to help recipients in public housing succeed more in the labor market.

• The collaboratives succeeded in implementing a Jobs-Plus program in each site, although progress has been slower than had been hoped.
• Driven by shared interests and the promise that Jobs-Plus holds, the local partners continue to work together despite numerous difficulties.
• The collaboratives continue to influence the design and operation of Jobs-Plus through a variety of formal and informal channels.
• A number of sites improved interagency service coordination for Jobs-Plus through a variety of institutional adaptations.
• Welfare agencies have modified the rules governing Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) to allow participation in Jobs-Plus to satisfy welfare-to-work participation requirements.
• Coordinating the provision of Jobs-Plus services with that of a local one-stop career center may not negate the need to offer some on-site services at the housing development.
• Residents were much more than "token partners," but ensuring that they were involved in productive ways was a complex effort.
• The collaboratives generally lacked adequate structures for ensuring that the programs were accountable for their progress and performance and that collaborative partners were accountable for their commitments.
• Operating Jobs-Plus well requires that the housing authority transcend its traditional mission of housing management.

• "Even without rent reform, changes in welfare rules and the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) have made work substantially more rewarding for public housing residents over the past decade. Jobs-Plus builds upon these work incentives by introducing flat or fixed rent steps, rents based on a lower percentage of income, lower ceiling rents, rent credits, and escrow accounts. However, whether it pays for a resident to go to work depends not only on the rent rules but also on how much in welfare and Food Stamp benefits she stands to lose, whether she receives subsidized child care, and whether she receives the EITC. Thus, effectively communicating and marketing all available financial supports for work is an important feature of Jobs-Plus.
• Across all housing developments and for a range of family circumstances, the Jobs-Plus rent rules give residents more incentive not only to accept employment, but also to choose full-time over part-time jobs and to advance into higher-wage jobs than they had under the traditional rules.
• Jobs-Plus rent rules may encourage some residents, particularly second earners in two-parent families, to reduce their work hours. And under some plans, residents' incomes may fall over time unless they can increase their earnings to match the higher rent steps.
• Public housing authorities (PHAs) could gain or lose from Jobs-Plus rent reforms. Whether their total rent revenues increase or decrease will depend on the generosity of the rent reductions, the extend to which Jobs-Plus increases employment and earnings, and how many residents were working prior to reforms.

Case studies illustrate how rent-based incentives developed by one Jobs-Plus site, in combination with other non-housing financial incentives available to tenants, would affect the net income of three prototypical resident families who pursue three common employment scenarios. DeSoto Bass Courts in Dayton, Ohio, has implemented an incentives plan with two flat-rent steps. In the year-long initial step, the participating tenant’s rent is set at about one-third of the authority-wide flat rent. In the final step, rent increases to about half the authority-wide standard and remains at that level for the balance of the demonstration. The figures below compare what each of the prototypical tenants’ net monthly income7 would be under traditional rent rules and under the Jobs-Plus second-step rent rules. As the Dayton case studies illustrate, Jobs-Plus rent policies increase the financial reward for housing authority residents to work more hours and, in many cases, to take better-paying jobs. Although the amounts differ, similar patterns hold across the demonstration sites. Because most Jobs-Plus sites began implementing their financial work incentives only in 2000, the evaluation of these policies is still underway. When completed, it will provide an important account of what it takes to put the different strategies into operation, how residents view and react to the alternative approaches, and how the incentives affect residents’ employment and earnings.

"Enhanced financial work incentives targeted at public housing residents have the potential to increase employment and net income and, even more broadly, to change how families in public housing perceive the real financial rewards of work. Future publications from the Jobs-Plus demonstration will assess whether these ambitious goals are achieved."

• On some, but not all, measures of school and behavioral outcomes, a substantial proportion of children living in public housing exhibited negative outcomes. As expected, older children and boys were at greater risk than younger children and girls.

• When compared with data on other children receiving welfare in selected states, children in the Jobs-Plus developments were shown to be at only slightly greater risk of experiencing negative school and behavioral outcomes.

• Few associations were found between measures of the Jobs-Plus children’s well-being and their parents’ employment or welfare status.

• Parents’ mental health and experience with domestic abuse were associated with negative aspects of children’s schooling and behavior. However, contextual factors of the housing developments, such as the proportion of parents who had jobs, were not related to children’s outcomes.

• A significant proportion of residents (29%) moved out of the Jobs-Plus developments within two years of completing the baseline interview in 1997. The tendency to move varied considerably across the five Jobs-Plus developments, ranging from a high of 44 % in Dayton's De Soto Bass Courts to a low of 16% in Los Angeles's William Mead Homes.
• Expectations of moving out ran very high among Jobs-Plus residents. Counter to the expectations, fewer than half of those intending to move were able to make that transition during the two-year follow-up period for this paper.
• On average, the typical "mover" had lived in a Jobs-Plus development for less than six years, and compared to residents who stayed, was less likely to report employment barriers, and was more likely to express dissatisfaction with the social and physical conditions in the development and the neighborhood at large. Movers were also more likely to report having experienced episodes of crime and violence.
• Economic self-sufficiency (that is, having access to savings and not receiving public assistance), concerns about keeping children engaged in constructive activities, and experiences of violence are key predictors of the probability of moving out.

• Employment-related services and activities are widely available in the form of job readiness and job search assistance and education and vocational training opportunities, as well as support services such as transportation and child care assistance.
• Financial incentives have been implemented to encourage residents to find and keep jobs by limiting the increases in rent they would normally face if they increase their income by working.
• Community support for work was the slowest component to develop. It has since coalesced as institutionalized outreach by residents who are trained and hired to go door-to-door to distribute information about specific job openings, education and training opportunities, and Jobs-Plus's services and activities, and to relate residents' concerns back to the program staff.

• Jobs-Plus encountered unexpected delays in program implementation, skepticism among residents, crime and safety problems, and wide variations in residents’ employment histories and service needs.
• Residents were widely aware of Jobs-Plus, and over half of those targeted enrolled officially in Jobs-Plus and took up its employment services and financial incentives. Almost two-thirds of targeted households were connected to the program in these ways.
• Jobs-Plus was able to draw participants from both currently employed and unemployed residents and from those who were currently welfare recipients and those who were not welfare recipients.
• Residents were involved in Jobs-Plus in complex ways that the quantitative data cannot capture. For example, as a place-based initiative, Jobs-Plus could offer assistance in a variety of informal and ad hoc ways outside the program office.
• There was considerable variation across the sites in the extent to which the Jobs-Plus programs were able to get residents to join the program. This cross-site variation was attributed primarily to organizational factors, including differences across the sites in securing stable program leadership, adequate professional staffing, local housing authority support, and welfare agency cooperation in recruiting and assisting welfare recipients.

• Outreach workers added to Jobs-Plus's credibility among the larger tenant population.
• Recruitment of outreach workers had to be selective and ongoing.
• Formal program oversight of the community support for work component was essential
• Maintaining outreach workers' independence from the housing authority was challenging but critical to their effectiveness.
• The Jobs-Plus community support for work component offered residents new possibilities for civic leadership development.

• The Jobs-Plus sites adopted either flat rents or lower income-based rents to allow working residents to keep more of their earnings. Some sites also used bonus savings accounts or rent credits as further inducements for job retention.
• Flat-rent plans were easier to implement than income-based plans, although both were feasible. Bonus accounts and rent credits, as structured for Jobs-Plus, were burdensome to administer.
• Vigorous and varied marketing campaigns were needed to meet the considerable challenges of building residents' awareness of the rent incentives. Engaging resident volunteers and housing management staff in these efforts was key.
• At sites where the incentives plan included rent steps, alerting residents to rent increases proved to be a particularly difficult aspect of the overall education effort.
• Jobs-Plus staff publicized the EITC and sometimes advised or assisted residents in applying for it. However, they rarely emphasized taking full advantage of all available financial work supports as a way for residents to maximize their incomes while working.
• Across the demonstration sites, the use of rent incentives was substantial. Nearly half the households targeted by the Jobs-Plus program took advantage of this benefit.
• Rates of incentives use varied dramatically across the sites. High take-up rates in some sites demonstrate the feasibility of reaching most intended recipients, while much lower rates in other sites underscore the challenges of doing so.
• Rates of using rent incentives were highest in sites where housing management staff were deeply involved in marketing them and in trying to make certain that residents took advantage of them.
• Residents had many different reasons for not availing themselves of rent incentives.
• Among residents who used the rent incentives, most (68 percent) did so for more than a year, with the benefits amounting to a substantial income enhancement.
• The Jobs-Plus rent incentives may have done more to help to sustain and strengthen the work effort of residents who had jobs than to stimulate nonemployed residents to seek work.
• Rent incentives helped people who typically had very limited and often volatile incomes to purchase basic items and some durable goods and to build savings.

• Despite the extra hurdles of serving tenants who hailed from different cultures and who faced relocation, Seattle Jobs-Plus succeeded in engaging a majority of residents in work-related services or supports.
• A culturally sensitive strategy to reach immigrants fostered the program’s appeal to residents but also made it harder, at first, to recruit U.S.-born tenants.
• The program staff’s commitment and creative approaches to resident empowerment and community-building, combined with the support of the housing authority, helped residents play an unusually influential role in decisions affecting Jobs-Plus and HOPE VI.

• For all sites combined, Jobs-Plus produced positive impacts on residents’ earnings, whether or not the residents continued living in their developments.
• These overall effects were driven primarily by large and sustained impacts in three sites (in Dayton, Los Angeles, and St. Paul) where the implementation of Jobs-Plus was stronger and more complete. A fourth site (Seattle) had strong early earnings effects that ended when residents were displaced by a federal Hope VI renovation project. The program had no earnings effects in two sites (Baltimore and Chattanooga) that did not fully implement Jobs-Plus.
• These impacts were more likely to translate into higher earnings in the housing development as a whole in sites where fewer residents moved out. However, the program’s effects did not spark changes in broader social conditions.
• In the stronger implementation sites, Jobs-Plus had positive earnings impacts for many different types of residents, striking earnings effects for immigrant men, positive but smaller impacts on residents’ employment rates, and no impact on residents’ welfare receipt (because rates were dropping precipitously among all welfare recipients).

• Before the HOPE VI relocation and demolition process was fully underway, Seattle implemented a strong Jobs-Plus program with good results. In the first year of full program operations, residents’ earnings were about 7 percent higher than they would have been in the absence of Jobs-Plus. This effect grew to nearly 11 percent (a gain of $1,050) in the following year.
• Seattle’s positive earnings impacts were comparable to the early impacts of three other Jobs-Plus sites that implemented relatively strong programs.
• Under HOPE VI, the responsibilities of Seattle Jobs-Plus expanded to include assisting all residents (including elderly and disabled residents who were not in the Jobs-Plus target group) with social service and relocation needs, which competed with the core employment focus of Jobs-Plus.
• Seattle Jobs-Plus’s positive earnings effects disappeared around the time the site’s HOPE VI resident relocation process was fully underway. In contrast, the other Jobs-Plus sites with strong programs had sustained and growing earnings effects.
• In Seattle, as in all the sites, the estimated effects of Jobs-Plus on employment rates are less striking than those for earnings. Although Jobs-Plus increased employment rates for some residents, for many others it achieved its earnings effects by improving employment retention, hours worked, or job quality.

• Take advantage of informal, ad hoc ways available to a place-based program to engage and assist residents wherever they live and “hang out.”
• Offer individualized assistance to residents as well as standardized group services on-site, and develop referral partnerships with local service agencies to address residents’ various employment needs, cultural backgrounds, and eligibility for different categorical services.
• Form partnerships with local ethnic organizations to develop specific outreach and employment services for the various languages, cultural practices, and immigration-related problems of residents in multicultural communities.
• Recruit residents to help with program outreach and service delivery in order to draw on their social networks and knowledge of local conditions and needs, to win the trust of the community, and to attract participants to the program.
• Designate a program staff member to coordinate residents’ outreach and service activities, and provide training for those responsibilities.
• Use employment-related support services, such as monthly bus tokens or passes, as a “hook” to bring working residents regularly into the office to ask them about their employment and help them with career advancement.
• Arrange for the management office to send the program monthly updates of incoming residents, and have a program staff member attend move-in interviews with new residents and annual lease renewal interviews with current residents, in order to orient and enroll them into the program.
• Have the housing management office inform the program of job gains and losses among the residents and incidences of domestic violence, substance abuse, and other problems that can undercut their employment, so that the program can follow up.
• Arrange for the local welfare agency to identify welfare recipients who reside in the housing development or neighborhood and who might be recruited by the program.
• Have the local welfare agency recognize participation in the program’s employment activities as a way for welfare recipients to fulfill their work requirements.
• Consider substituting participation in Jobs-Plus as the mandated work activity for welfare recipients, thereby requiring recipients to visit the program office to enroll and to check in regularly to receive their benefits.
• Colocate welfare-to-work caseworkers with the program staff at the housing development or in the neighborhood, and integrate them into the program’s efforts to recruit welfare recipients, to develop and implement individual service plans, and to monitor job retention and career development needs.
• Arrange with the Workforce Investment Act (WIA) One-Stop Center for program staff and participants to have on-line access through the program’s computers to the One-Stop’s database of employment openings.
• Train program staff in the procedures for processing applications for local WIA funds and programs so staff can help residents assemble paperwork before going to WIA offices.
• Make arrangements to ensure the safety of residents when traveling to and from the One-Stop Center.

• In deciding whether to implement rent incentives plans that involve gradually increasing steps, do not count on residents' income levels keeping pace with higher rents that the plans impose, especially in the short term.
• For ease of administration, consider the advantages of flat-rent plans and plans without rent steps, which involve calculations that are somewhat simpler than calculations for income-based plans with steps.
• In formulating plans for changes in rent rules, recognize that these incentives may not necessarily exercise a strong influence on whether residents go to work, which depends on many factors, but that they also have the potential to strengthen work efforts in other ways -- for example, by making it more advantageous for additional household members to work or by encouraging people to stay employed.
• Do not expect that official announcements and flyers about the availability of rent incentives will suffice to catch the residents' attention. To publicize these benefits adequately, devote energy to ongoing marketing campaigns with multiple strategies that involve personal interactions between staff and residents in groups and one-on-one. Involve resident volunteers to help get the word out and to counteract suspicion of the housing authority.
• Recognize that many housing managers command the respect of tenants and that their personal efforts to promote rent incentives can be a key asset to marketing campaigns.
• Incorporate efforts to educate residents about the incentives plans into other events, such as annual rant reviews.
• Under incentives plans that involved rent steps, be ready to offer on going clarifications and reminders to prepare residents for periodic rent increases.
• Make outreach and education on rent incentives part of a broader effort to help residents take advantage of other financial work supports-- including the EITC, food stamps, and child care subsidies-- that can help make low-wage work pay.
• Given the modest sums involved in most bonus accounts and rent credit payments and the expenditures of staff time needed to monitor employment status, consider requiring only quarterly or less frequent tracking to determine whether residents qualify for these benefits.
• To improve the operation of a rent incentives plan, provide housing managers with the training needed to meet the challenges associated with a role that expands their responsibilities beyond property management.

• Clearly specify from the outset the community outreach worker's role and responsibilities.
• Select the right residents for the job.
• Ensure that the outreach workers receive compensation.
• Make the program staff ultimately accountable for the performance of the outreach workers.
• Retain certain program responsibilities with the professional staff.
• Maintain an appropriate distance from the housing authority, and cultivate the support of the resident advisory council.
• Address crime and safety problems jointly with efforts to deploy outreach workers.