Cleveland, where the Republicans hosted their convention this year, is one of the poorest cities in the country and a place where the effects of this reform can be seen most plainly. What has happened to welfare in Cuyahoga County, which includes Cleveland and its inner suburbs, is reflective of its fate elsewhere in the nation. Currently, the county’s TANF-to-poverty ratio (the fraction of poor families with children who are actually receiving help from the program) sits at 22 percent—right about at Ohio’s, and the nation’s, average. (In some states, it is dramatically lower, such as Georgia, where it is just six, and Texas, where it is five.)

What’s happened to poor people as a result? Since 2013, we’ve spent considerable time in the city trying to find out. Each year, we catch up with several families who, in 2013, had spent at least three months living without money income exceeding $2 per person per day. To deepen our perspective, we also spend time trying to understand what’s going on for the city’s poorest, more broadly speaking. Earlier this month, one of us—Kathryn—spent a day talking to supplicants at a west-side food pantry. She spent an afternoon walking the streets of one neighborhood, striking up casual conversations with residents as they took out the garbage or sat on their porches. Yet the toughest experience was when Kathryn went for a ride-along with bailiffs assigned to the Cleveland Housing Court as they went about their daily rounds, evicting a family from their west-side apartment mid-meal.

Prior to August 22, 1996, families such as that one—families with little or no cash income—were entitled by law to a check from the government, thanks to AFDC. The program had many flaws. Yet it provided a cash floor that could have eased the hardships of folks at the end of their ropes.

TANF ought to be able to help—albeit temporarily, as the name implies. Yet many of the people we have studied have never received it. One woman, a high-school graduate and a mother of two, told us she doesn’t think it’s worth it. She believes that in order to meet the program’s requirements, she would have to work full time at a make-work job, leaving her no time to find legitimate employment.

Others have tried to get it and failed. When one mother we know lost her job at Walmart after her only means of transportation failed, she initially refused to apply for TANF out of pride, insisting that she was a worker, not a leach on the government. Finally, after months of fruitless job search, plus a list of health diagnoses a mile long, she broke down and applied. Since then, she has been sent away three times, all for no legitimate reason we, as TANF experts, can discern. Now, she, her daughter, and her fiancé are tripled-up with friends in a house that lacks heat and running water but offers a free roof over her head.