Indy Community Voices Inspires Visions of Equitable Housing
Testimonials from the slow-rolling eviction and affordable housing crisis in the Heartland.
Can we imagine a world where everyone is guaranteed safe and adequate housing? This underlying question guided Indy Community Voices: Storytelling for Tenants’ Empowerment, a panel discussion on Monday, November 6, as part of this year’s Spirit & Place Festival. A roomful of people gathered together at The Amp at 16 Tech to imagine a world in which the number of people experiencing or at risk of experiencing housing insecurity was no longer at a crisis level. To assist in this collective imagining were four women storytellers who shared their experiences with navigating housing insecurity, eviction, and homelessness as they survive in a city whose conservative state government has deliberately blocked even the tamest and toothless forms of tenant protections.
Indy Community Voices invited attendees to confront the reality in Indianapolis and across the United States: too many people are facing insecure and fragile housing, the problem is endemic, and far too many people are just one mental illness or instance of bad luck away from becoming homeless. Indy Community Voices was organized by Andy Beck, Community Designer and Equitable Development Consultant at The Learning Tree, and Dr. Patricia Basile, Assistant Professor of Geography at Indiana University.
One panelist told her experience of facing eviction after a landlord misapplied a $2 overpayment. Other women explained the link between stable housing and mental health, describing harrowing scenarios where various mental health challenges led to a job loss, which then led to sustained durations of homelessness. One expressed more than a few times her gratitude for her emotional support animal who was sleeping in her car, which was also their primary living space.
Regarding raw numbers, Indianapolis has the second highest eviction rate in the United States, second only to New York City, despite the Midwest capital city having a significantly smaller population. In Indianapolis, the type of person being evicted is overwhelmingly most likely to be an African American woman, oftentimes a mother. According to Eviction Lab, women make up 61% of all Indy area evictions, and African Americans account for 50% of all evictions despite comprising only 30% of Marion County’s population.
It is, in the words of Andy Beck, “a crisis,” one that stems from a disregard for equitable development and a cultural and political preference for a market in which the motivation for profit guides all behaviors. “One of the historic and ongoing problems with Indy’s development strategy is temporarily affordable projects,” Beck said.
“As we face huge deficits amid a housing disaster, every year affordable units expire and are flipped to The Market,” Beck continued. “Continuing with inequitable development practices is intensifying the crisis and putting an expiration date on communities. We need to correct that careless use of public funds and move more to equitable development practices. Permanently affordable projects maintain the community past the typical 5 or 30-year affordability commitment. They also make legitimate use of public funds for housing, instead of flipping those scarce public dollars to individual wealth building or adding to the profit portfolio of development companies.”
According to a recent report from the Common Sense Institute, there is a severe housing shortage throughout Indiana and Marion County. This shortage applies to both market-rate and affordable housing. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) defines affordable housing as “housing on which the occupant is paying no more than 30 percent of gross income for housing costs, including utilities.” While Indianapolis, like most of the United States, is experiencing a severe housing unit shortage as the private market struggles to provide access to safe housing for large sections of the population, it is the affordable housing shortage that has housing advocates like Andy Beck most concerned. “Creating more housing supply does not address the lack of affordable housing supply,” Beck stated. “Many affordable housing projects are built for families whose incomes are at 80% of AMI. Those affordable projects are too expensive for the tens of thousands whose incomes fall below that.”
Even if more housing is built for those who earn 80–100%+ of area median income (AMI), these housing units will remain out of reach for those families whose household incomes are at 80% or less of AMI. And there are many people whose incomes are well below 80% of AMI. Wages in Indiana have remained flat or have decreased when accounting for inflation and shareholder-appeasing price hikes, as state lawmakers have spent decades focusing primarily on the economic growth of businesses rather than families.
In Indianapolis, the official rate of people living at or below the poverty line is about 20%, but viewing poverty as an aggregate of a population can be misleading. First, while the overall published poverty rate in Marion County is 20%, nearly 50% of families are considered financially insecure. Secondly, there are many Census tracts in Indianapolis and Marion County where the poverty rate is actually 90%. Statewide, 210,000 renter households have incomes at 30% below AMI, and 352,000 are at 50% below AMI. Considering many affordable housing responses are directed toward those at 80% of AMI, nearly 600k households in Indiana cannot afford “affordable” housing.
This is a crisis with no end in sight. No one seriously believes market-based solutions exist (at least by how current markets have been designed). In fact, a compelling argument suggests our current housing and eviction crisis is actually the market performing in the way it was manipulated to behave. Indiana, a state deeply shaped by conservative visions of a free market utopia, regardless of the devasting impact these ideological preferences have on people's lives and well-being, is opposed to making any moves that could be perceived as “tenant friendly.” The Indiana Apartment Association spends millions each year lobbying (mostly Republican) legislators and fighting efforts (from mostly Democratic-led cities) to hold landlords accountable for unsafe living conditions, neighborhood destabilization, and ignoring the precious few tenants' rights that exist in this state. The result is an endless cycle of evictions in a state that is considered extremely favorable to landlords. Indianapolis courts alone will see 30,000 evictions by the close of 2023, and in multiple Indy Census tracts, over 1-in-4 renters (25%) will face eviction in 2024 as they juggle paying rent and other monthly expenses necessary for living.
Perhaps this is not the best way to structure a state.
“I believe we are living in an endemic housing crisis,” said Dr. Patricia Basile. “It is a crisis because it impedes people’s and communities’ possibilities to exist and thrive in this world every day, and it requires immediate and urgent attention and action.”
“But it is also endemic because it demands addressing the structural underlying causes behind it,” Dr. Basile stated, “which include barely non-existent permanent, community-controlled, radically affordable housing, huge gaps between costs of living and income, lack of a social welfare system, lack of free health care for all, lack of free childcare for all, structural racism and inequality, wealth concentration and hoarding, historical and ongoing dispossession and displacement of communities of color, to name a few. And it has been going on for more than a decade.”
Currently, Indianapolis has a housing deficit of 61,238 units, but many of these needed units would go to those who can afford market-based rates if they magically appeared overnight. However, when factoring in projected population growth, Indianapolis will need to build another 115,000 housing units within the next five years to provide a minimally adequate housing supply. But again, most of those units will likely go to those buyers who can qualify for mortgages at 80–100%+ of area median income. Federal policies currently privilege subsidies to support and underwrite housing for the middle to wealthy classes, but far fewer incentives exist to fund housing for the economically precarious. And, when they do support “affordable” housing development, these developments are still unaffordable for those struggling the most. Wait lists for housing vouchers, which would bring truly affordable housing into reach for millions, average eight years. Families with incomes of 30–70% of AMI will be left to fend for themselves.
Given that our state leaders have made it clear they care little about the plight of poor families and local Indy leaders are mired in an attempt to reorganize the ethically questionable Indianapolis Housing Agency, if we are going to impact our current housing crisis, it probably means doing it for ourselves and working collaboratively to achieve community-led responses. That means stories like those provided by the four panelists serve a critical importance.
“One topic that the panelists brought up was affordable rentals that cost over $1000/month,” Beck stated. “Another piece of Equitable Development practice is building for Extremely Low Income (30% of Area Median Income) residents. This means shifting production to rentals because low income residents are not rich enough to afford affordable homeownership. Those projects were probably built to be affordable to residents making 80%-100% of the area's median income. That is an easier project to finance but also leaves our housing crisis intact by not addressing residents most affected, one or two steps away from homelessness.”
While the evening ultimately proved cathartic and informative, several moments allowed the participants to witness the power of storytelling.
Through their stories, these four women shared justifiable anger at an exploitative system and those individuals who benefited from it and spoke truth to power. At one point in the evening, one of the women turned to an audience member, Rabbi Dr. Aaron Spiegel, the executive director and president of the Greater Indianapolis Multifaith Alliance, which has spent time organizing around our current housing crisis. The panelist recognized Dr. Spiegel as one of the organizers of a recent conversation about the homelessness crisis in Indianapolis, to which she was invited to attend.
“I don’t mean to come across as disrespectful,” she cautioned as she held the microphone, “But the expert you asked to speak about homelessness was from Arizona and had just written a book. Why do we need someone to talk to us about what it’s like in Arizona when we have plenty of people here who know what it’s like?”
“And also — why was I the only one who looked like me in the room?” she asked while gesturing to her Black skin. “Instead, there were a bunch of people who didn’t really know what it’s like, people who all look the same. I think you could have done better.”
(Editor’s note: this was a talk by author Gregg Colburn about his book “Housing is a Homelessness Problem,” which shows that the main determining factor for homelessness in US cities is the lack of affordable housing (not mental health, drug addiction, or other outside factors). Feel free to view the talk here.)
It was not a call out but a call in — an invitation to receive needed, albeit likely discomforting, feedback on the importance of representation and inclusion from someone whose lived experience makes them an expert in housing insecurity. While many organizations and collective impact groups desperately need to hear honest and unfiltered feedback from the people they claim to serve, too few organizations receive or are open to receiving the gift of an uncensored opinion.
This exchange highlighted another way of sharing stories of experiencing economic oppression and fragility. When we listen to those whose lives have been profoundly shaped by forces of housing dispossession and position these perspectives as experts, we begin to move away from the dominant narratives that suggest housing policies should be left up to those who benefit from our current approach. Indy Community Voices showed a different, community-organized approach to justice. This approach can venture into the unruly and unpredictable but is ultimately necessary if we hope to learn from the experience of those commonly silenced.
The conversation excelled in doing what Spirit & Place events do best: centering often overlooked perspectives and inviting dialogue across differences. Attendees were given a glimpse of a promising form of tenant power that could prove helpful in tackling a housing supply crisis that most of our elected officials have retreated from addressing in any meaningful way. If we are to ever live in a world where no one is forced to do without adequate and equitable housing, we must first learn to imagine what such a world might be like. To do that, we’ll need stories like these to help inspire our imaginations.
Editor’s Note: To discuss equitable development and community design, please contact Andy Beck at andy.beck@thelearningtrees.com
