Janice Prude

My name is Janice Prude, and my husband Sam and I have rented our house in Swansea Mobile Home Park in Swansea, Illinois for over 15 years. The people who own this place, they just don’t keep it up to par. 

Janice sits and looks at the camera. She is wearing a red head wrap and a black and white shirt. 

I’m told it’s Homes of America, but I don’t really know who is owning this place. We try and call management, and no one answers. Everything they say they’re going to do, they don’t follow through. They leave us hanging, but they want their rent.

There are so many empty trailers with people squatting in them. But it’s not just people squatting. They got rats and racoons and moles and all kinds of rodents. And there is a stink about the place. It smells like sewer. I know of three trailers that had sewage back into their places. The whole sewer system is a mess. We’ve had a couple of gas leaks where we had to evacuate the premises.

In our house we weren’t able to use the kitchen sink for over five months because the pipes were backed up. The guy said he’d come back and snake it, but we didn’t see him for months. We had to pour the dishwater into a bucket and haul it outside to dump it. 

This company needs to do what they’re supposed to be doing, and we need stronger laws to make them.