Imagine you're a welfare mother eager to find a job and facing a time limit before your benefits run out. You somehow find a way to secure child care for your kids while you work. You even find a job you qualify for, but it's three bus transfers (and perhaps an hour and a half) from your home. Furthermore, you are using more than half your income on rent, which makes it hard to cover child care and transportation costs, not to mention food and clothing.

Help with transportation costs for welfare recipients, as requested by the Clinton Administration as part of its reauthorization proposal for the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act (ISTEA), is part of the solution. (This week the House authorized $150 million for this purpose.) But many welfare households are not just far from jobs -- they are far from convenient public transportation as well. What they really need is the option to move.

This year, the Department of Housing & Urban Development is asking Congress for funding to create 50,000 special welfare-to-work portable housing vouchers. Right now, most low-income rental housing assistance is linked to the landlord, not the tenant. But these vouchers would follow welfare families wherever they can secure housing.

Aside from its real-life impact, the portable housing voucher initiative is significant because it shows a federal agency breaking out of bureaucratic isolation and dealing with a problem that does not respect the traditional jurisdictional boundaries. All federal programs and services that affect welfare recipients and other low-income Americans should focus on giving them the tools to become upwardly mobile and self-sufficient. Actual families cannot compartmentalize their lives and isolate housing, health care, child care and employment. Nor should those whose jobs is to help them help themselves.