My latest op-ed - A Vote For Stand For Children Indiana is a Stand Against IPS Children is being featured on MADVoters Indiana and I want to direct everyone directly on Madvoters.org - https://www.madvoters.org/post/a-vote-for-stand-for-children-indiana-is-a-stand-against-ips-children

Here is an excerpt:

Why is the house on fire?

Roughly 100 firefighters are convicted of arson each year in North America, with all of them being serial arsonists according to experts. Recently IPS Commissioner Angelia L. Moore argued in the Indianapolis Recorder that in regards to Indianapolis Public Schools:

“The house is on fire, and our children are inside. Are we going to stand outside arguing about whose water hose to use, who controls it, or where to aim it? Or are we going to come together to put out the fire and save our children?”

While I agree with Commissioner Moore’s declaration that IPS is indeed on fire, I believe she’s leaving out that the “arsonists” who started the fires in the first place now want to control the firefighting efforts. One of the lead arsonists, Stand For Children Indiana, funded 94% of Commissioner Moore’s current school board campaign. The real story is that Stand for Children Indiana’s advocacy against IPS and IPS families has brought $24 million in IPS budget cuts--with at least $20 million more to come--and loss of property tax revenue, control over its taxpayer-funded school facilities, and authority over student transportation. If this fire was literal instead of figurative, they’d be one of the 100 firefighters convicted of arson each year. Stand For Children Indiana was seeded 15 years ago by another notoriously exploitative education nonprofit called The Mind Trust to be a political arm to extend paternalism over Black communities. And for the last 15 years Stand For Children Indiana in partnership with The Mind Trust has worked tirelessly to manufacture crisis after crisis for IPS through its legislative partners in the Indiana Statehouse.

Read the full article on MADVoters.org - https://www.madvoters.org/post/a-vote-for-stand-for-children-indiana-is-a-stand-against-ips-children

The Timeline

The Great Flood of 1913

• March of 1913 storms brought catastrophic flooding to Indiana, Ohio and 11 other states leaving 650 dead and a quarter of a million people homeless. In Indianapolis, 7000 families lost their homes and key bridges on main thoroughfares were swept into the waters. Many lives were saved because the National Weather Bureau sent out strong warnings allowing families enough time to gather their belongings and evacuate to higher ground. Federal legislation in the aftermath fundamentally changes flood prevention projects and mandates in the United States.

  

  Credit: Indiana Historical Society

Wednesday August 12th 2026 - The Water is 61 miles away

• Storms bring high winds and torrential rain to Central and East Indiana. Indianapolis experiences localized stormwater flooding in some areas

• 61 miles away, Muncie, Indiana begins evacuations at 9:50am due to flooding and the city provides sandbags to support its residents’ efforts to protect savable areas.

That afternoon the Mayor of Muncie addresses his community alerting them that the storms have dumped more rain than the Great Flood of 1913, the county declares a flood emergency.

Flooded out towns and dramatic water rescues in boats are shown on the local news in Indianapolis.

• Both Hamilton County and Anderson, Indiana warn its residents about likely flooding and provide sandbags.

Thursday August 13th 2026 - The Water is 30 miles away

• At noon, 30 miles away, The town of Pendleton declares a state of emergency

• Yorktown, Indiana is underwater as the water continues to rise.

• 40 miles away, the Mayor of Anderson declares a state of emergency around 1pm and orders evacuations by 6pm.

• Flooded out towns and dramatic water rescues close to Indianapolis are shown to America on the national news.

Friday August 14th 2026 - The Water is here and is overtopping a dam

• 8:30 am - Hamilton County (11 - 22 miles away) declares a state of emergency

• 2:40 pm - The White River overtopping the dam at Westfield Blvd finally catches the attention of the mayor, unfortunately it’s not Joe Hogsett, it’s community activist Anderson York known as “the Mayor of 46th street”.

• 6 pm -Finally Ravenswood, Rocky Ripple, Nora and “Historically Flood-Prone areas put on alert by City of Indianapolis/ Indy DPW

• 8:21 pm - North Broad Ripple given only 69 minutes to evacuate via social media so IndyDPW can close the floodgates, trapping vehicles or anyone with mobility issues behind the wall. The floodgate actually closes after 11:30pm, likely because few saw the info online.

• 8:28 pm - Rocky Ripple (an included town surrounded by Indianapolis) has been advised by Indy DPW to stop making sandbags and evacuate. They ignore them and continue the fight to save their town.

• 9:57pm Marion County Emergency Management gives out bad shelter info and has to retract 1 of the 2 shelters posted for evacuation.

  

Saturday August 15th 2026 - Indianapolis is flooding

• 1:40am - Ravenswood is told to evacuate and it floods, floodgates/bridges in Rocky Ripple are closed by DPW a few hours later.

• 11:30am - Mayor Hogsett finally addresses the city

  

An awesome responsibility

To be clear the mayor of Indianapolis has an awesome responsibility, not only is he mayor of Indianapolis but he is county executor responsible for all the other included and excluded towns and cities in Marion county along with Indianapolis. Two of those duties are being public safety director over emergency services for Marion County and overseeing the department of works that manages the 37+ miles of levees, 2 dams, 1,500 miles of storm piping and 100,000+ valves, inlets and outlets that protect the city from stormwater and river flooding. After watching for 48 hours + as city after city and town after town in the Indy metro area fell to flood waters higher than the Great Flood of 1913 many in his position would have had the city services and community mobilized for action. That did not happen and according to multiple sources familiar with the operations of city departments, that even through the business day on Friday, Indy DPW did not prepare to protect the city from a flood. Most communication to the community was done via social media and at the last minute, door to door.

In ‘defense’ of Mayor Hogsett and his command staff it has been a grueling couple of weeks dealing with severe weather that’s become the new normal because of climate change and the resulting complaints from Eastside and Broad Ripple residents with serious stormwater issues. Then there’s Mayor Hogsett’s fight to keep wheel tax at its 1990s level and take money from the stormwater fund to help pay for the road repair funding. Yes you read it right, as multiple Indianapolis neighborhoods on the east and north side complained about stormwater flooding the past month, Mayor Hogsett planned to divert stormwater revenue to help pay for a road repair match instead even though there’s a substantial back log of stormwater projects. But Indy city council refused to let him do it and overrode his veto handing him his first big defeat in city government. After the defeat, Hogsett and much of his senior staff were seen preparing proclamations, having retirement parties for colleagues and a night on the town vs the vigilance needed to combat a historic flood of epic proportions. The tale that Nero watched Rome burn while playing a fiddle is a historical myth that emerged because of Rome’s inadequate preparedness for a fire. But today thanks to social media there’s a clear record of all the fun our city’s leadership was having together last Friday as floodwaters were overtopping dams in Indianapolis. Our city and county deserves better. Some of the community had already mobilized to support each other when the crisis was finally acknowledged and places like Rocky Ripple worked together through the night with outsiders to save their town with 15,000 sandbags. We also caught an unexpected break when White River eroded its way into a quarry in Carmel, Indiana diverting 9 billion gallons of water from crashing into overstressed Indianapolis’ levees and flood control infrastructure.

Better Planning, More Vigilance

For the long term Indianapolis has to stop subsidizing low density sprawl and make a point of supporting dense neighborhoods protected by wetlands. We have to get serious about investing in stormwater infrastructure and flood infrastructure. Increased precipitation in Indiana and intense storms like the one that somehow dumped water directly on to GenCon attendees inside the Indiana Convention center this month are the new normal. According to the 2022 Indiana Climate Change Impacts Assessment published through Purdue University we will see increased flooding risks that overload combined stormwater and sewer systems. The Great Flood of 1913 fundamentally changed America forever and also Indianapolis. We now have a system of levees, dams, and stormwater piping that stretch across the county that is too complicated for the community to understand but too vast for one expert to monitor alone. In a county of 1 million people protected by levees and floodgates designed to blend in, most residents have never consciously seen the infrastructure protecting them. Having a responsive local leadership to inform them in times of crisis so they can make decisions for their families and communities is critical to avoid a greater tragedy. Our local news media must do a better job reporting on our infrastructure challenges and what these budget proposals really mean for the long term and short term health and safety of Indianapolis, beyond the campaign rhetoric.

And we as a community must elect leadership that loves this city and sees the value in working alongside our communities in times of disaster and in times of abundance.

Massive Diesel Generators

MetroBloks plans to use 36 massive diesel generators to back up AES Indiana. Each of these diesel powered electrical generators are the size of a full-size SUV and need thousands of gallons of fuel storage. They have to be run at least once a month but in order for the Metrobloks data center to operate 99.999% of the time these generators will have to operate whenever AES Indiana can’t deliver a small city’s worth of power to the site. MetroBloks’ attorneys assured the community the Tier 4 diesel generators they specified won’t pollute more than a school bus, but that’s a lie. A modern school bus engine produces between 200 - 360 horsepower but each diesel generator MetroBloks’ specified produces nearly 3700 horsepower or roughly 2750 kilowatts. This will produce excessive localized diesel particulate matter that Martindale-Brightwood residents will be forced to breathe on their porches, at their grocery store, cashing their checks, or at the public library. Unfortunately Indianapolis neighborhoods are no stranger to air pollution. The American Lung Association just gave the metro area an “F” in smog and soot pollution(particulate matter). Coal-fired power plants and diesel engines produce smog and soot that can cause premature death and other health hazards such as heart attacks, strokes, preterm births, asthma, and cognitive decline. The Indianapolis-Carmel-Muncie area ranks 11th most polluted area in the United States for year round particulate pollution out of 211 US metro areas. This and other data center projects will push the Indy Metro area higher up the list in the future. But for this predominantly Black neighborhood that already has a source of diesel particulate pollution from the nearby Interstate 70, additional LOCALIZED diesel particulate pollution could be devastating. Noise will be another localized byproduct of the intermittently operating diesel generators, chilled water units, and rooftop HVAC units needed for daily operations. Both noise and pollution from the data center will disperse to less critical levels outside the neighborhood. Below is video with sound from Netrality’s data center complex along Kentucky avenue in Indianapolis. This cluster of small data centers next to White River has less than half the overall square footage and not even ⅓ the power requirements of MetroBloks’ data center proposal that’s in the middle of a neighborhood. But even this complex is noisy and has already run afoul of the Indiana Department of Environmental Management for operating its 7 smaller diesel generators without a permit.

False Narratives: From MetroBloks, the know-it-all IBJ comment section, and Lazy AI powered bloggers and podcasters

“Metrobloks data center will not contribute to pollution and noise. The diesel generators pollute less than a school bus!”

Fact: MetroBloks specified 36 - 78 liter, 18-cylinder generators, as big as a Cadillac Escalade ESV, each producing enough electricity to power 183 homes. A typical school bus engine is a 6.7 liter, 6-cylinder diesel. Both engines use similar pollution control technology and the massive generator produces massively more pollution than a school bus.

“Here’s a gigantic ‘gift development’ seemingly from nowhere and locals can’t see beyond their own myopic lack of area improvement. The site has been a blank slate for 40+ years.”

Fact: The site has been vacant for 40 years. Vacant lots don’t create diesel particulate matter, ozone, and the noise of 36 diesel generators, chilled water units, and rooftop HVAC units. This is never considered a “gift development” for predominantly White neighborhoods in Carmel, Fishers, or Noblesville. Black communities are once again expected to quietly give up more of their quality of life, health span and life expectancy for few if any jobs or tangible benefits.

“Everyone wants Ozempic. Nobody wants the LEAP District next door. Everyone wants the data. Nobody wants the data center. Everyone wants the roads. Nobody wants the tolls. The future ain’t free.”

Facts: Eli Lilly and Company’s LEAP district is controversial because of Meta’s 1500 acre data center project, not Lilly’s pharmaceutical manufacturing happening there. Because data centers don’t make Ozempic, and neither does Lilly, their competitor Novo Nordisk makes it. Data centers have powered the internet since day one with little controversy. According to the Data Center Map website the Indy metro area already has 56 data centers. All of them require a fraction of the power needed for MetroBloks’ data center and other recent proposals. Smaller data centers powering access to knowledge and connectivity via the internet have always been around us with very few issues until tech companies reinvented the scale and function of data centers to power AI for big corporations. The data centers we’ve all been using for decades of internet functionality are NOT the large incredibly polluting resource hogs being proposed here by MetroBloks, Sabey, Google, and Meta.

Voices of the Politicians

So where do Indianapolis public servants stand on protecting the communities they were elected to serve? Some openly side with corporations’ right to poison neighborhoods for profit, while others quietly do the same, throwing rocks at the community and hiding their hands.

Ron Gibson, the councilor whose district the Metrobloks data center will reside in, is a staunch supporter of the project despite over a hundred letters of opposition. Not a single letter of support has come from a resident. He walked out of multiple meetings with residents and clergy over their opposition to the project and was even caught lying on local radio show about the plans for diesel generators in Martindale-Brightwood. His home, over a mile and a half away from the site, won’t face the localized diesel particulate pollution as Martindale-Brightwood residents. I’d like to acknowledge the incident of violence at Councilor Gibson home attributed to this data center fight. While asleep in his modest 1-story home an assailant(s) fired 13 shots at his front door, shattering the glass security door striking the lower half of the wooden door. The sound of his front door being riddled with bullets woke up Gibson and his 8 year old son, but he made the decision to go back to sleep, not even determining whether anyone outside needed medical assistance from the shooting. Gibson says he wasn’t sure it was his house being shot up. He would get up that morning to find a piece of paper in a ziploc bag tucked half way under his welcome mat with the words “No Data Centers” written on it. He would send his son off to school and finally call Indianapolis metro police 8 hours after he heard the shooting. The police arrived in 15 minutes. No one was injured in the incident and so far no arrests or suspects have been announced. If you have any information about this incident please contact IMPD or the FBI.

Joe Hogsett, mayor of Indianapolis has had his spokesperson tell the press that his administration does not involve itself in zoning decisions after being asked by the community to intervene in this data center. But Hogsett’s staff at the Department of Metropolitan Development recommended approval for MetroBloks’ data center despite it violating their land use plan and transit oriented development guidelines. Indy Economic Development, an organization chaired by Mayor Hogsett negotiated tax abatements for this and other data center projects and sent a letter of support for MetroBloks. No matter how many times in the last decade whenever departments, agencies, and organizations under the direct control of Mayor Joe are caught doing tangible harm to the Black community in Indianapolis, Mayor Hogsett says every time “It wasn’t me” just like Shaggy’s 2000 hit song, and keeps going.

Vop Osili, a city councilor and 2027 mayoral candidate voted in January with Councilor Gibson against a resolution that narrowly failed calling for a moratorium on data centers until they could be regulated appropriately. 3 other Indiana counties already had such data center moratoriums. Councilor Osili said at the time that he’d already drafted a proposal “which provides guardrails, outlines prohibitions on where a data center might possibly go” but when Martindale-Brightwood leaders unexpectedly received a continuance the next week delaying approval for the data center another month, Councilor Osili’s proposal never materialized. He would eventually sign on to a letter from multiple councilors in February supporting the community and asking MetroBloks to withdraw, however the letter was only sent to the press, 30 minutes before the 1 pm hearing, after most of the media were already in the City-County Building assembly room. None of the councilors showed up to testify or stand with the community. Martindale-Brightwood residents wouldn’t learn of this “support” until after the data center was approved in the hearing. Osili wouldn’t publicly post the support letter until later that night, roughly 7 hours after the hearing. For hundreds of years this was a common tactic that got many generals and military leaders court-martialed for intentionally showing up for battle after it was over.Their performance didn’t go unnoticed either. I awarded these 6 city councilors the Most Performative Public Service award. Interestingly enough, Councilor Osili’s employer, international architectural firm Woolpert has designed more than 95 million square feet of data centers around the world for Meta and other tech companies. The architectural firm enthusiastically shared Vop Osili’s mayoral campaign announcement to their 47,000+ LinkedIN followers wishing him ‘nothing but the best’. Osili is a program director for Woolpert’s Indianapolis office and donor to their political action committee. Osili’s public position in an Indystar article that data centers are infrastructure like “power lines, telephone lines, and sewer lines” may have rubbed some the wrong way but echo company policy at his employer, Woolpert.

The Urban Experiment

So is the modern Negro too uppity appreciate diesel particulate matter? It would seem so and previous generations weren’t any different. According to Martindale-Brightwood’s Quality of Life Implementation plan, complaints and legal actions about the dangerous industrial pollution in their neighborhood began as early as 1930 but were ignored by the racist power structures of the time. Eventually parts of Martindale-Brightwood would become an EPA Superfund site and the neighborhood would be connected with higher rates of chronic illnesses and cancer. This may just be “politics” for some but it will very much be life and death for others in the community. Metrobloks’ experimental data center model to place powerful data centers in urban neighborhoods will be much like the Tuskegee Experiment because we already know the effects of diesel pollution are bad. Tech companies and politicians have underestimated the resolve of Black communities to fight the business interests attempting to endanger their health for a quick buck. What Indy politicians Black or White need to do is quit listening to and peddling disingenuous talking points and misinformation from corporate interests making profits at the expense of people’s lives and ask themselves a few simple questions. The question isn’t about whether any of us use the internet when data centers have powered the internet since day one. The real question is when Meta can lay off 8000 employees soon after breaking ground on a 1500 acre $10 billion data center campus north of Indianapolis, who are these new resource draining data centers being built for? Is this boom really all coming from tacky AI flyers and ChatGPT prompts or are multinational corporations driving demand so they can replace as much of their workforce as inhumanely possible? And how many of us do they get to kill to do it? The idea that this is just politics is a misnomer itself, when both Democrats and Republicans work together to poison their own constituents and make them pay for the privilege through tax incentives. This isn’t about stopping the rise of AI, it’s about ensuring communities are safe.

Non Violence Is Not Silence

Dr King preached nonviolence as Indianapolis community leaders and advocates do today but he also acknowledged that “riots do not develop out of thin air” and said “a riot is the language of the unheard.” Community advocates organizing and educating their communities about the issues affecting our lives are no more responsible for political violence, real or staged than the person who filmed the murder of George Floyd for the 2020 riots. Community advocates and activists will not keep the violence done to our communities a secret just like civil rights leaders of the past could not stay quiet. Indianapolis residents of all races, creeds, and colors have shown up peacefully to say we care more about safety for our families than corporate profit. Not just in Martindale-Brightwood but Franklin, Decatur, and Pike township as well. But are elected officials listening? Next year’s municipal primary is May 4th 2027 and one town in America has already voted out half its town council over these issues. Mayor Hogsett and Indy City-County Council have to ask themselves: Are they going to protect the health and lives of our constituents or not? The community is tired of the lies, semantic arguments, false friend and delay tactics being used and will tolerate it no longer.

No matter our political ideology, left, right, or center, we all can acknowledge Indianapolis has an affordable housing and homelessness crisis. A crisis, whose existence contributes to the loss of business and morality in Indianapolis. Sadly once again the downtown business community is being betrayed by the Mayor’s office and Indy Chamber of Commerce on addressing homelessness. While Mayor Hogsett’s administration failed repeatedly for 8 years to meet the goals it determined was critical for eliminating homelessness, the Indy Chamber provides them cover, manipulating its membership with false hope and half measures like Senate Bill 285.

In 2018 with community stakeholders at its side to address homelessness, the Hogsett administration committed to providing 1100 permanent supportive housing units by 2023, yet by late 2024 only 328 of these units existed. Homelessness continued to rise. In the meantime the Mayor’s office’s lack of oversight and support for our public housing agency has seen hundreds of Indianapolis Housing Agency units boarded up all over the city and the agency actively contributing to evictions and homelessness by not paying its Section 8 landlords. The Indy Office of Public Health and Safety’s botched reorganization of its eviction prevention program and delayed roll out of emergency shelters this winter show a dangerous pattern of incompetence in preventing and addressing homelessness. This department’s reckless approach for homeless camp closures in general and initial failure to use the Streets to Home initiative to house individuals in Fountain Square have further pushed homelessness downtown.

Yet the Indy Chamber refuses to hold the Mayor’s office accountable for undeniable failures driving homelessness in Indianapolis. They’ve thrown up their hands after having tried nothing and said we’re all out of ideas, send in the police. Maybe start telling the truth?

Lawsuits and Overcrowding

Support for Senate Bill 285’s homeless camping ban is just a disingenuous attempt by the Indy Chamber to make downtown business owners believe homelessness is being addressed, when clearly, it’s not. Assessing $500 fines, misdemeanors and 60 day jail sentences on impoverished people with nowhere to go is inhumane and criminalization makes it less likely they’ll be accepted as a tenant afterwards, keeping the homeless, homeless. It’s also so impractical that the Indiana Sheriffs’ Association oppose the bill because it would lead to jail overcrowding across Indiana. In fact our jail is already so overcrowded in 2026 the Marion county sheriff says “We cannot continue to operate like this’.

The addition of 175 ICE detainees caused overcrowding the Marion County couldn’t handle physically or fiscally and the sheriff’s department said it would be forced to ask for an additional $3 million for its budget if it continues. Senate Bill 285 specifically allows residents, business owners, and the attorney general to sue if it’s not enforced. If it survives expected legal challenges from the ACLU it will either lead to costly jail overcrowding or costly lawsuits against the city of Indianapolis, or both.

Real Solutions

Senate Bill 285 is an ineffective bill criminalizing homelessness that will be too costly to enforce and too costly to ignore. It will waste resources that should have been used to solve this crisis. The Mayor’s complicit silence in this, is deafening. Criminalization of homelessness just pushes vulnerable individuals struggling with mental illness, intellectual disabilities, and addiction to our criminal justice system. Jail doesn’t make them “better”, it makes them more scarred, more likely to be homeless for longer and more desperate. The Mayor actually completing his tasks and fully funding a Housing First strategy is the real solution to homelessness. Downtown business owners must demand real representation, real leadership and real solutions.

Never heard of housing tariffs?

Don’t worry because exclusionary zoning is rarely called a housing tariff but it does exactly that by driving up the cost of housing in neighborhoods across America under the guise of protecting property values. In the early 1900s zoning was originally meant to protect residential areas from industrial nuisances but quickly morphed into protecting neighborhoods from undesirable racial groups like Blacks, Jews, Italians and other immigrant groups. In 1911 the city of Baltimore enacted the first racial zoning ordinance to keep Blacks out of White neighborhoods and it quickly spread around the country until the U.S. Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional in 1917. Racial covenants still could be created in private contracts but were harder to enforce and by 1948 they were ruled unenforceable at all and made illegal by The Fair Housing Act of 1968. But by then they were hardly needed. Exclusionary zoning allowed towns and cities to segregate minority ethnic groups by exploiting the existing economic inequality without ever using the terms White, Black, Caucasian, or Negro.

Single-Family zoning became the weapon of choice in America for protecting neighborhood character, property values and keeping undesirable lower socio-economic groups out of your community.

Don’t want Blacks in your neighborhood?

Use zoning to demand all new housing in your neighborhood be built to house only one family at a time, no matter how many the lot can accommodate. This creates scarcity because there is a desire for more housing there but the zoning artificially holds down the number of homes available, keeping demand high and supply low. Manipulation of The Market. Even if your pre-WWII neighborhood already has duplexes and apartment buildings, use zoning to stop anyone from replacing them. Ensuring when a multi-family unit is demolished for any reason, it can only be replaced with a single-family home making housing even more scarce. In fact, make homeownership a requirement for any new build in the neighborhood. With the economic disparities between most ethnic groups and Whites that should do the trick by itself of keeping out Blacks and other minorities. And if that doesn’t work, you still have the historic financial discrimination that persist in the home mortgage market to keep out many middle class minorities that could afford to buy there. The proliferation of this weapon has been so widespread in America that 75% of land zoned for residential in most cities is zoned only for single-family homes. But like many of the weapons man uses to wage war on man, single-family zoning has proliferated to the point of causing injury to many people that were never meant to be in harm’s way. Even middle-class White families are having a hard time finding housing in many cities. After 100 years of exclusionary single-family zoning, America, including Indiana specifically, is in a housing crisis. A housing crisis affecting low-income and middle class people of all ethnicities that we couldn’t even build our way out of if we tried with the current laws. The current zoning in most cities would only encourage more unsustainable sprawl as housing units come online one single family home at a time. For the past decade I’ve been frustrated as Indianapolis’ affordable housing shortage escalated to crisis level watching city government and the nonprofit industrial complex mostly push fantastical initiatives designed to make owning single-family homes more attainable to lower income families. Completely ignoring the reality these homes are often, still too expensive and rare to house the volume of people desperately needing housing now. It’s a pipe dream that we could solve a housing crisis while continuing to ban the types of housing civilizations have been using for thousands of years in cities all over the planet. Is racial and economic segregation under the guise of protecting property values and neighborhood character that important to us? I would have to say yes it was. For all the talk from liberals in Democratic cities their zoning boards did little more than conservatives in Republican towns to increase the volume and density of new housing coming online, to say nothing about actual affordability. Until the data center fight exposed most of these planning boards don’t actually work in the best interest of communities, only homeowners were listened to by zoning boards, not individuals needing housing options. For all the talk about local control and local zoning boards they sure haven’t gotten it done to encourage housing volume and density at any affordability level. Even the occasional liberal success story of neighbors stopping a developer from building an ostentatious million dollar home in a gentrifying neighborhood comes only after the lots sat vacant for decades due in part because exclusionary zoning stopped anyone from building anything but a single family home there.

The truth is, Indiana municipalities were never going to get it done. The political will simply doesn’t exist in most Indiana towns and cities to look past NIMBYs and their battle cry to protect property values and neighborhood character and do what’s needed to house more people anytime soon. I support House Bill 1001 not because it builds affordable housing but because it reduces some of the “tariffs” designed to keep neighborhoods exclusive and expensive to artificially inflate property values. It even addresses ridiculous requirements and costs needed for elevators in multi-story apartment buildings bringing us inline with the rest of the world while maintaining safety and accessibility. After a century of disastrous single-family zoning and excessive red tape, Hoosier cities and towns need a reset to begin addressing this housing crisis. Exclusionary zoning “tariffs” do affect the price of all housing whether it’s affordable or market rate because tariffs like unregulated corporate greed are always passed down to the consumer. I wish this bill went even further and directly addressed transit oriented development zoning to encourage even more housing and slew of other issues. Systemically we have to go beyond allowing developers to game the system of subsidies and tax credits to maximize their profits but minimizing housing quality and volume. And we absolutely do have to intentionally fund affordable housing and actually fund community-led, community owned cooperative housing development on a philanthropic, city, state, and federal level. Indiana House Bill 1001 could make building dense housing more possible in this housing crisis but we still have to put in the work to create truly affordable housing.

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