Meet Darlene Steele!
As wages in the local job market have not seen increases to match the tides of inflation, gas prices, and rent hikes, a lot of SGF tenants have felt the pressure of not making ends meet. Other components that also affect a person’s path to any kind of housing are poor credit scores, former evictions, and backgrounds with felonies or misdemeanors. We at STUN are interviewing a variety of tenants living in the Springfield area, asking them to provide their experiences with poor living conditions, housing insecurity, and barriers to housing. And there’s no better way to begin our Tenant Story Tuesdays than sharing Darlene’s story!
Originally an Arkansas native, Darlene has been living in SGF for most of her life. “I have been a tenant all my life and the experience has not always been a happy one,” going on to say that she has been housing insecure for the majority of her time living in SGF due to aspects like not making enough income, being able to work enough hours to make the income to afford rent, and dealing with eviction after living in a place for nearly six years. “Once you get an eviction,” she continues, “it’s pretty difficult to even begin to approach renting under your own name, much less finding a place that will even talk to you about it.” In many situations, evictions bar people from renting again, since landlords perform background checks on prospective renters, which also checks and investigates evictions into one’s rental history.
Because Darlene is also a parent, figuring out how to care for her children wasn’t always easy when they were still in grade school, especially when one is forced to move from place to place. That type of housing insecurity — as a parent never knows they will be in the same place tomorrow — created a lot of stress not just for Darlene but for her children too. With other nuances and barriers affecting her life, Darlene’s living situation became more complicated near the end of last year. “In the last 10 years, I have been technically unhoused for the better part of them although not usually without a place to be until last fall when I found myself at Safe To Sleep, a local women's shelter,” she says. “I had already heard about STUN but that only made it more clear that we need safe, decent, income-based, no-barrier housing. Even while in the shelter, I have been helping spread the love of STUN and fighting for the rights of tenants.”
For months, Darlene stayed at the local shelter, worked remote jobs due to her situation, and had her name on lists to get her into housing. Unfortunately, when unhoused people are put on lists for low-income housing, the wait usually takes months, even years, before these individuals are given a spot. It wasn’t until April of this year that Darlene’s situation changed. While luck and timing had a helping hand, Darlene owes it to the kindness of a friend subletting his apartment on the north side. “Now that I am housed once more I continue to do this but we need more tenants to step up. I believe that landlord registration and rental inspections WITH teeth would be a huge game changer and would finally show that the City of Springfield cares about tenants, as they well should since we are the majority.”
Unfortunately, Darlene’s story is not uncommon for tenants living in any given city, though it’s her experiences with housing insecurity that has given her the ambition to fight for tenants’ rights in SGF. We owe Darlene so much for her courage, tenacity, and resourcefulness, and she shares her story to forge solidarity with so many tenants dealing with similar housing issues in her city. “ I would also like to see income-based, no-barrier housing whether that is new apartments, rehabbed houses, or rooms to rent. When the city of Springfield continues to cater to developers who build the housing we can't afford and who won't rent to us, it just increases the number of those who are without housing. We can't keep doing this. Housing is a human right.”