A Short History of Housing and Community Development in Indianapolis

[The text below was adapted from a speech I gave recently at the 2009 Taylor Symposium at IUPUI regarding the American Promise and its relation to housing]

Most decades over the last century contained significant housing and community development milestones for Indianapolis. In general, what we can see from this short history is a community that is bigger than just a city, that has a history (both good and bad) of racial issues tied to housing, that recognizes the importance of civic engagement with the private sector, and that has worked aggressively to find solutions to housing market failure:

•Flanner House was started in 1889 to help minorities migrate from the South to the North

•In the 1920s, zoning ordinances were established, including residential segregation ordinances restricting minorities from moving into all-white neighborhoods. The National Association of Real Estate Boards emphasized homogeneous neighborhoods and restrictive covenants that limited housing choice and opportunity.

•In the 1930s, a state housing law was passed that allowed the establishment of local housing authorities. Further, Lockerbie Gardens, a federal public housing project under the WPA and located just a block or two from here, was started in 1935 and finished in 1937 with 748 units created predominantly for minorities.

•In the 1940s, Flanner House created a self-help housing program utilizing a sweat equity concept and the Indianapolis Housing Authority was created in 1947. In the 1950s, the city council voted to prohibit federal money for public housing, effectively shutting down the creation of public housing units in Indianapolis.

•In the 1950s, the concept of suburban shopping malls and strip centers began to catch hold as a type of real estate. The 1950s also saw the first steps towards a significant expansion of the interstate highway system that ran through the 1970s.

•The 1970s saw the formation of Uni-Gov, a controversial measure that expanded the boundaries of the City to match the boundaries of the County among other things. Indianapolis also took on the mantle of Amateur Sports Capital, an issue that was integral to the formation and expansion of the IUPUI campus.

•The latter part of the 1970s began civic efforts to revitalize downtown. This included government, entertainment, commercial, and residential investments.

•The latter part of the 1980s and beginning of the 1990s saw the establishment of a Mayoral Housing Taskforce that led to the creation of a "community development" framework including the Indianapolis Neighborhood Housing Partnership and roughly a dozen community development corporations tied to specific neighborhoods within the traditional city boundaries in Center Township.

•The 1990s recognized the rise of homelessness as an urban issue and led to the creation of the Coalition for Homelessness Intervention and Prevention on whose Board I serve. This effort expanded significantly at the turn of the current century with the establishment of the 10-year Blueprint to End Homelessness and the creation of a local housing trust fund.

•The last decade also saw initiatives to address abandoned housing and of course we are now in the middle of a foreclosure tsunami that threatens the concept of home ownership as a goal for policy makers.

•Most recently, we are seeing significant federal funds for all types of purposes, but for the first time in a long time we are seeing one of those purposes being housing, including foreclosure mitigation, public works, and other community development initiatives.