Editorial: Problems at housing agency demand quick action to correct

This month, nonprofit news organization Mirror Indy has been publishing stories about problems at the Indianapolis Housing Authority that have led to unnecessary evictions and frustrations among renters and landlords alike.

The federally funded agency is supposed to provide low-income families, seniors and people with disabilities access to affordable housing. But Mirror Indy writes that, instead of serving as a safety net, the IHA is directly contributing to a housing crisis in the city.

The stories detail at least two decades of agency mismanagement that includes IHA’s failure to pay landlords rent payments meant to keep low-income residents in housing. It’s a problem that was made more difficult early this year when the agency suffered a data breach that has required it to manually process rent payments for hundreds of landlords.

The result is tremendous frustration on the part of renters, many of whom are barely holding their financial lives together, and landlords, who are sometimes going months without payments. Some of those landlords eat the costs, hoping they will eventually be paid back; others evict tenants who are part of the federal Section 8 program.

Figuring out whom to hold responsible for the debacle might be the hardest part of all.

According to the series—which you can find at MirrorIndy.org—the IHA is an independent agency that was spun out from the city’s Department of Metropolitan Development in 1994. It’s regulated by the federal government, not the city, though for much of its life, the mayor chose the agency’s executive director.

That stopped earlier this year when the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development took over the agency, in part at the request of Indianapolis Mayor Joe Hogsett, who had previously pledged to ensure problems at the agency were fixed.

Mirror Indy reported that Hogsett declined to be interviewed for its stories, which is unfortunate given how important housing is to the city. According to the series, landlords file about 2,000 evictions every month in Marion County. And the number of homeless individuals in the city topped 1,700 in last year’s single-night census. The city is also preparing to spend millions of dollars to build a low-barrier homeless shelter, which IBJ’s Taylor Wooten has reported about on 3A.

But continuing problems at the IHA threaten to make the city’s housing and homelessness problems worse.

Melissa Bell, a diversion program manager for HealthNet’s Homeless Initiative Program, told Mirror Indy that landlords increasingly don’t want to participate in the program. They are “fed up and uninterested,” she said.

And one landlord told Mirror Indy that his tenants tend to pay their share of their rent more often than the government agency does. “It sucks when a resident is more responsible than the government agency that’s supposed to be supporting them,” he said.

We agree, and we appreciate Mirror Indy’s focus on these problems. We call on federal officials to overhaul the agency—quickly. Hogsett and Gov.-elect Mike Braun should put as much pressure as they can exert on the federal government to act. This has gone on long enough.•

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