Indy Releases Plan to Tackle Housing Challenges
Indy’s Soldiers and Sailors Monument serves as the city's cultural heart. (photo courtesy of Cody Bailey/Visit Indy)
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As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe NowThe city of Indianapolis has released a new plan that aims to address key housing issues. The city says the Anti-Displacement and Inclusive Growth Policy Agenda identifies four priority housing issues and makes 11 policy recommendations to address the issues.
The agenda was developed as part of ‘ForEveryoneHome: City Solutions for Housing Equity,’ an initiative of Grounded Solutions Network. Grounded Solutions created the initiative to engage and support cohort cities’ lower-income residents and communities as well as help reverse the impacts of past practices like redlining, race-based restrictive covenants and predatory lending.
“For too long, Indianapolis residents have been suffering from the city’s high eviction rate, loss of affordable housing, poor housing conditions, and displacement pressures,” said Jennifer Green, executive director of Partners in Housing. “These housing challenges disproportionately affect Black and brown residents.”
Among the recommendations, the city says the agenda calls for making the Rental Assistance Program permanent, establishing a housing preservation network to identify affordable housing units at risk of loss and develop strategies for their preservation, implementing a performance-based rental property inspection program, and requiring lasting terms of affordability for a portion of units in any housing project that receives city subsidies in areas where displacement pressures are growing.
“I look forward to working with City leadership to adapt the recommendations of the Anti-Displacement and Inclusive Growth Policy Agenda to further our affordable housing goals,” said Mayor Joe Hogsett. “As our city continues to grow and thrive, we must elevate all of our neighbors – across all zip codes – and continue to find innovative ways to spur equitable housing strategies that will lay a foundation for future generations.”
The city says the agenda describes a history of discrimination that has left the city divided by race and ethnicity and emphasizing the impacts of that divide: “The neighborhoods around and to the north of Interstate 65/70 tend to be predominantly African-American and Hispanic. Those to the south tend to be predominantly white. This spatial separation matters because place matters — the neighborhoods that we live in shape our experiences, our opportunities and our collective future.”
You can connect to the full agenda by clicking here.