INDIANAPOLIS — A new plan aims to address key housing issues in Indianapolis. The Anti-Displacement and Inclusive Growth Policy Agenda, released on April 21, identifies four priority housing issues in the city and makes 11 concrete policy recommendations to address those issues.
Among other recommendations, the Policy Agenda calls for making the city’s new 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.
The Policy Agenda was developed as part of ‘ForEveryoneHome: City Solutions for Housing Equity,’ an initiative of Grounded Solutions Network. Indianapolis is one of three cities — along with San Antonio, TX, and Winston-Salem, NC — selected for ForEveryoneHome. Grounded Solutions designed the initiative to engage and support cohort cities’ lower-income residents and communities and help counter the impacts of past policies and practices like redlining, race-based restrictive covenants and predatory lending.
With that goal in mind, the Policy Agenda starts by describing a history of discrimination that has left Indianapolis a city divided by race and ethnicity and emphasizing the impacts of that divide.