Elena Smith

My name is Elena Smith, and my sister and I rented a home in Lake Suzanne Mobile Home Park in Shiloh, Illinois in December of 2022. Homes of America had just bought the park, but we didn’t know anything about them. We just knew a few things didn’t work. But they said they would fix things, and it was what we could afford.

Slowly we learned everything that was wrong. The lights didn’t work in the kitchen. There was mold in the bathroom on the ceiling and around the tub. The insulation was very, very bad, and the heat didn’t flow into my sister’s room at all – it was freezing! The A/C never worked.  There was just a dribble of water – no water pressure. The water heater was undersized, and we kept running out of hot water.

Then they would turn off the water with no notice for a day and a half or two days. A couple of times they did this mid-summer. Imagine living in a metal box with no insulation in the southern Illinois summer, the thermostat reading 90+ degrees inside, with no A/C, no water, and you have to walk down the block to the Circle K to use the toilet. I literally had an emotional breakdown. 

We eventually just had to get out. I am a forty-year-old artist and writer, and I am a natural caretaker. I really loved my neighbors in Lake Suzanne. They are genuinely good people, and they don’t deserve to live like that.  That’s why we need stronger protections.