WASHPO: In District's Ward 8, economic recovery is a world away

By Dana Hedgpeth

Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, June 13, 2010; A01

While much of Washington starts to emerge from more than two years of recession, Angie Walker feels as if she's in the middle of a depression, stuck, without knowing quite how to get out.

Companies are beginning to hire, but Walker, who at 46 is struggling to find a full-time job, hasn't noticed. April found her driving 28 miles round trip from Southeast Washington to Inova Fairfax Hospital, where a temp agency had sent her for a kitchen job, pay $11.88 an hour. She was working about 24 hours a week but needed more.

With a high school degree and years of kitchen experience, Walker can get jobs. But they're almost always part time, low paying and temporary, leaving her among the 8.8 million Americans counted as underemployed.

Walker lives in the District's Ward 8, where she and many of her neighbors lack the beefy résumés with technical skills and college degrees that snag jobs in a slowly recovering economy. Often they're hobbled by poor transportation, lack of reliable day care, brushes with the law, substance abuse and isolation from the world of internships and job referrals -- problems that won't be fixed by classes in résumé writing or 9-to-5 dressing.

"Any chink in the system can make it hard for them to achieve," said Ed Lazere, executive director of the D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute, which studies issues affecting low-income District residents. "It is a complicated web to fix."

A few miles across the Anacostia River, Congress has spent close to $600 billion on job creation and benefits for the unemployed since the downturn began. But fear of driving up huge deficits has begun to overshadow worry about jobs, and lawmakers are talking about when to trim back.

The change in tone isn't helpful in Ward 8, where unemployment, estimated at 25 percent, approaches 40 percent when counting the underemployed and those who have given up looking. Those numbers can be overwhelming, considering unemployment was 5.9 percent in April in metropolitan Washington and 11 percent in the District.

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