Future of Indy’s eviction-fighting program unclear as funding ends

A pilot program that has sought to put Indianapolis renters on a more even playing field with their landlords in eviction cases faces an uncertain future with the end of federal COVID-19 funding.

The Tenant Advocacy Project, launched in 2021, is one of the few tools city officials have to fight Indianapolis’ high frequency of evictions, and organizers want to see the program continue. But the expiration of American Rescue Plan Act funds at the end of this year will require Indianapolis leaders to make tough decisions come fall when the city crafts its next annual budget.

At stake is whether tenants facing evictions will be represented by attorneys and have access to advocates to help them with resources.

That kind of help is important in a system in which landlords are almost always represented by attorneys. Even with the advocacy project in place, many tenants go unaided when they stand before a judge because the program’s attorneys are so swamped with cases.

Rabbi Aaron Spiegel leads a team of 30 court watchers with the Greater Indianapolis Multifaith Alliance. Mostly retirees, the watchers sit in on eviction hearings, in part to provide tenant support and hold township judges accountable. They recently began collecting data. Over the past three months, the group has observed more than 500 eviction cases. In most, renters defended themselves against paid attorneys representing landlords.

“We already knew this anecdotally, but now we know it for sure: Tenants are rarely, if ever, represented by counsel. Landlords are always represented by counsel,” Spiegel told IBJ.

The township courts quickly move through what can be life-changing decisions. The hearings rarely last more than five minutes, Spiegel told IBJ, and sometimes are over in less than two. Often, tenants don’t even speak before the township judge.

The Indianapolis pilot advocacy program that began during the pandemic aims to provide tenants with representation and resources. Leaders of the program say about $2.6 million a year will be needed to keep the advocacy available—and they say the money is worth spending, even if tenants only receive a few more days to either move out of their homes or come up with rent to stay.

An Indiana University assessment of the program suggests it helps tenants avoid evictions.

The Tenant Advocacy Project operates out of the Office of Public Health and Safety. Legal aid organizations Indiana Legal Services, Indianapolis Legal Aid Society and Neighborhood Christian Legal Clinic contract with the city to provide attorneys to tenants facing eviction.

The attorneys work to seal eviction records, create repayment plans with the landlords, secure more time for a tenant to remain housed and, in cases where housing conditions are unsafe, help renters voluntarily move out or negotiate a payment reduction.

The Tenant Advocacy Project staff includes 10 peer “navigators.” They help explain legal terms and encourage those being evicted to talk to legal-aid attorneys. Navigators also provide other types of assistance, such as emotional support and temporary child care.

On a Monday morning at Center Township Small Claims Court, Judge Brenda Roper called up names of plaintiffs and defendants and their attorneys, when available. On that day, one landlord had three eviction cases. Some tenants didn’t show up.

Minutes before the morning session was scheduled to adjourn, the tenant from the final case of the session sat in a narrow hallway scrambling to finish paperwork. A navigator with the city program ushered her from a small desk into a room with an attorney. With five minutes to go in the session, the attorney represented her before the judge, who then scheduled an additional hearing date, giving the renter a few more days to live in her home before a judgment.

“Being evicted is a very stressful and traumatic situation,” Andy Beck, program manager, told IBJ. The navigators are there to help Indianapolis residents facing eviction feel more comfortable while the attorneys negotiate before township judges.

The effort has spent $3.75 million in federal funds so far. That cost has mostly covered staff salaries for attorneys, paralegals, social workers and navigators.

“We are hopeful that we can work with the City-County Council to help continue funding this program,” said Andrew Merkley, director of the division of homelessness and eviction prevention. “But we also know that we’re going to need to go out and find some additional funding sources to really bolster the program.”

IBJ reached out to the Indiana Apartment Association to gauge its members’ experience with the tenant advocacy program and learn whether the group supports city funding for the project, but the group did not respond to several messages. IBJ also contacted several attorneys who represent landlords in eviction cases, but none wanted to talk about the city program.

High eviction rate

Indianapolis’ eviction rate is double the average of 34 cities studied by the Eviction Lab at Princeton University. The lab, which collects data and creates interactive tools to help understand the impact of evictions, recorded 26,630 evictions filed in the past 12 months in Indianapolis, as of March 1. That’s about 16 eviction filings for every 100 renter households; the average eviction filing rate in the 10 states and 34 cities the group studied is 7.8%, or nearly eight filings for every 100 households.

Tenant advocacy groups say Indiana’s landlord-friendly policies contribute to the high number of evictions.

State law prohibits localities from interfering with landlord-tenant relationships, which means cities can’t pass their own tenant protections. The law, approved in 2020, says a local unit “may not regulate, through ordinance or otherwise,” any aspect of the landlord-tenant relationship, which includes the tenant screening process, rights and responsibilities of the parties, and fees charged by landlords.

Lawmakers introduced and approved the language just after Indianapolis Mayor Joe Hogsett’s administration introduced proposals that would inform tenants about their rights and allow city attorneys to fine landlords accused of retaliatory practices, like filing an eviction against a tenant who reported a problem to the city’s code enforcement or the health department. At the Statehouse, just hours before the City-County Council was set to take a full vote on the city measures, lawmakers added an amendment to an unrelated bill to void the measure.

Gov. Eric Holcomb went on to veto the bill, allowing Indianapolis to begin putting the measures into effect. But lawmakers overrode the veto in 2021.

Indiana also is one of just six states that don’t allow tenants to withhold rent if repairs are necessary or living conditions are subpar. And when renters see that landlords aren’t “holding up their end of the deal,” Beck said, they struggle to understand why Indiana law requires them to continue paying rent.

To help tenants while still following state law, city leaders have focused on programs that provide information, legal assistance and rental assistance. The city’s rental assistance program, IndyRent, was also born out of federal COVID-19 relief funding that has run dry.

Initially, IndyRent doled out about $1 million a month through an online application process. But to slow the rapid pace of spending, Indianapolis officials in July 2022 switched the program to be available only to renters with an active eviction filing.

With COVID money running out, rental assistance of that scope is unlikely to be sustainable, Merkley told IBJ, because the program would need to rely entirely on local funding.

“Unless there’s another influx of, you know, millions and millions of dollars,” Merkley said, “if we were to implement some type of rental assistance program, it would be much smaller in scale.”

Weighing the costs

The Tenant Advocacy Project needs $2.6 million annually to continue—an increase over COVID-era costs—because it needs more attorneys to cover an increasing caseload, Merkley said.

Spiegel, who leads the Greater Indianapolis Multifaith Alliance, seconded the need for more legal aid at township courts. Most of the time, he said, renters have to get legal advice from advocacy project attorneys in the hallways rather than be represented by them in a hearing because the organizations that provide the assistance are overwhelmed by the volume of need.

“We could use 200 more attorneys,” Spiegel said. “We just don’t have enough.”

Merkley would like to see Indianapolis eventually shift to a public defender model for eviction cases, where no tenant has to stand without representation. In Indiana, public defenders are used almost exclusively in criminal cases.

But without that change—which has not been seriously debated in Indiana—he hopes simply to keep the Tenant Advocacy Project going.

The Hogsett administration has demonstrated the capacity to retain a program initially funded with federal dollars. The city’s Peacemakers program, which was launched following a pandemic-fueled increase in crime nationally, was shifted into the city budget beginning this year.

Hogsett wanted to keep the program going, City Controller Sarah Riordan said, and a drop in violent crime over the past year—a 19% decrease in murders and a 7% decline in non-fatal shootings—gave officials hope that it was working. So she worked with agencies and departments to save money elsewhere to fund the program.

Peacemakers received $4.5 million this year in local funds. It was federally funded with a portion of the $37 million used for gun-violence-reduction efforts spread over its first three years, beginning in 2021.

“It is a different funding amount from the annual allocation in Mayor Hogsett’s three-year anti-violence plan as those dollars paid for both staff as well as additional programming,” city spokeswoman Aliya Wishner told IBJ. “The city hopes to continue moving programs from ARPA dollars into the city-county budget during the 2025 cycle, as funding allows.”

In all, the city received $420 million in COVID-related federal money, an unprecedented amount that allowed the city to launch the Peacemakers initiative, the Tenant Advocacy Project and scores of other programs, including one that will distribute $45 million in anti-violence grants to community organizations and another that put $4.2 million toward additional public safety measures downtown. Now, the process of converting those programs to different funding or axing them is unprecedented, as well.

Whether the Tenant Advocacy Project will receive local funding for 2025 is unclear, Riordan said. Members of her team are meeting with Office of Public Health and Safety staff to discuss funding needs, she said. The formal process in which city agencies outline their wants and needs will begin next month. The mayor will present the first draft of a budget in August.

Budget proposals for city and county agencies then run a gamut of City-County Council committee meetings and public hearings, to be altered or approved as-is. The final budget typically receives a vote in October.

Folding the Peacemakers program into the city budget helped Riordan and her team think about how to move forward with other beneficial programs funded by the American Rescue Plan Act. She and her staff will begin evaluating how much those programs need and whether a program’s scope could be tweaked to make it affordable or eligible for local funding.

Is the program effective?

Those who work in the Tenant Advocacy Project every day say it’s sorely needed. The dollars go toward legal representation for Indianapolis’ most vulnerable tenants. About three-fourths of the users of IndyRent, the eviction-based rental assistance fund, are minority women with children, Merkley said, a makeup likely in alignment with who is being evicted.

The Tenant Advocacy Project helps “to bridge that gap for these minority communities who are overwhelmingly being affected by eviction,” he said.

In addition, when a person is evicted, the fallout involves more than just losing a place to live. The eviction can disrupt neighborhood relationships and force students to change schools.

“I see our work in our project of keeping people housed affecting a lot of other things in the community,” Beck told IBJ.

The Indiana University Public Policy Institute examined the Tenant Advocacy Project by studying the outcomes of a small sample of 2022 eviction filings. Although the assessment didn’t offer a determination on the program’s efficacy, it said just over half of the 2,207 eviction cases tracked were dismissed or avoided altogether. It also recommended that the program seek more staff and work in tandem with IndyRent—both costly recommendations.•