Indiana Low-Income Housing, Part 2: Ailing Single Mom Struggling to Keep Her Home, Health

Every housing voucher recipient finds themselves fighting to stay housed for a different reason.  For one Lafayette resident, serious, ongoing health issues have taken away her ability to work for an income—and to make long-term plans for herself and her children.  In the second of a three-part series, Indiana Public Broadcasting’s Emilie Syberg has a profile of one single mom for whom even a small crisis can have a major impact.

SHATAMARA MCNEELY: That’s some of them, not all of them.

ES: Okay.

MCNEELY: This is furosemide. It’s an iron pill.

ES: And what does that do?

MCNEELY: Helps me build up blood. My red blood cell count. I don’t make a lot of blood. I’m anemic.

In a two bedroom apartment in Lafayette’s Romney Meadows housing complex, sunlight fills a small kitchen. There are neatly stacked dishes drying next to the sink, two little boys eating bowls of cereal and blowing bubbles in their milk, and bottles of medication lined up in a row on the kitchen table.

MCNEELY: “My name is Shatamara McNeely. And I’m 25 years old. And I currently receive section 8 voucher program.”

McNeely has two sons, aged seven and two, and says she experienced hypertension during both of her pregnancies. But her health took a significant turn for the worse after the birth of her youngest son, leaving her unable to work.

MCNEELY: “I’m waiting on a heart transplant. It’s enlarged. Like, I have the heart of a 92 year-old right now. They just said chronic congestive heart failure.”

McNeely is from Chicago, and moved to Lafayette at the end of 2014. When she moved into her apartment at Romney Meadows, which provides low-income housing, she wasn’t living there with a housing voucher; her apartment itself was subsidized. Since moving to Lafayette, McNeely has worked on and off at McDonald’s and at Allorica, a telecommunications business, but she says her medical issues have largely kept her at home. After a heart episode landed her in the emergency room in June 2016—a crisis she says she’s lucky to have survived—she applied for disability.

MCNEELY: $726. I’m forced to live with 726 a month. 

ES: A month. 

MCNEELY: Yes. 

ES: For everything. 

MCNEELY: Yes. 

McNeely budgets carefully – she has to on 87-hundred dollars a year. Her disability payments have to cover rent, utilities, a car payment, a phone bill. Also the co-pay on her prescription medications and bi-weekly doctor’s visits. She receives benefits from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program – commonly known as food stamps — and if all else fails, she can make up the difference with financial assistance from her sons’ fathers. But because of her heart, she’s in a holding pattern.

MCNEELY: “I barely eat and sleep. I rarely know what a normal life is. I don’t have the average life of a twenty-five year old.”

When McNeely applied for housing assistance, her disability helped move her up the waitlist quickly, and she received her voucher in a matter of months. McNeely says Romney Meadows, which the city’s mayor has singled out as a hub of crime, isn’t as bad as people make it seem. She has weighed moving back to Chicago to receive medical care from her previous doctors, but she likes Lafayette. The cost of living is cheaper than in Chicago, and McNeely – who’s had two family members killed there — feels she and her kids are safer in Lafayette.

MCNEELY: “The violence in Chicago was just getting worse and worse.”

 She’s used to being a “go-to person”, she says, and putting money in the bank. McNeely imagines going back to school, working again, and buying a house she can leave for her sons, in case something happens to her.

And McNeely says even her situation might not be as bad as some – so she doesn’t want to keep using her voucher forever.

MCNEELY: “I think there should be a time limit on stuff like this. At least, I’m giving myself a time limit.  There’s probably somebody out there who really needs it more than me, who don’t have any type of income or nothing coming in.”

For now, her life is staying at home and raising her kids – because that’s what her circumstances will allow.

MCNEELY: “Say I’m almost potty-trained, I’m not even all the way two yet. I’m learning my colors, I know my body parts, I can count to four.”