“While Indiana has a reputation of being an affordable place to live with a low cost of living, Indiana actually has the single highest rate of severe housing cost burden in the entire Midwest, with the lowest-income populations,” said Andrew Bradley, policy director of Prosperity Indiana.

“That has real significant impacts for individual families but also for the state when it thinks about how it wants to keep its population and grow its economy.”

In terms of affordable housing, it’s more than just ensuring someone has a roof over their head. A report from the National Low Income Housing Coalition finds that affordability is often the ticket to increasing economic mobility, safety and health.

“Affordable housing is literally a foundation for economic security and prosperity not only for your families but also for communities in the state at large,” said Bradley. “Having affordable and available and safe housing is necessary for good health outcomes. It’s important for educational outcomes and also overall economic outcomes.

“We do a lot of advocacy work to make sure that not only are we producing new, affordable units of housing, but also the current existing stock of housing is available and safe and stable.”

Rep. Cherrish Pryor, D-Indianapolis, acknowledges these findings as well as disparities affecting property value for renters and buyers. House Bill 1326, which was proposed during the 2022 legislative session, would have prohibited discrimination in lending and appraisals based on an applicant’s race, sex, religion, familial status or country of origin. Pryor also pushed for discrimination in housing to be a major discussion topic during the interim study committee process.

The bill was passed to the Committee on Financial Institutions and Insurance but did not receive a hearing. Pryor’s recent press release regarding this cites the controversial critical race theory discussions as a “non-issue,” one that may have pushed her legislation to the side during the 2022 session.

“Some of the things that we can do was to require cultural competency training for appraisals,” said Pryor. “We are also trying to get more minority appraisers as well, and then putting in place penalties and fines if someone does under-appraise a person’s property.”

An example of an under-appraisal came from one Black Hoosier homeowner in 2021, who suspected that the appraisal received for her home’s value was too low. To test this theory, a white friend of hers put up the exact same listing, and the price of her appraisal more than doubled. This bias is one that Pryor and other Indiana housing organizations hope to eliminate.

One specific group is the Fair Housing Center of Indiana, which aims to educate about housing biases and encourage advocacy and community outreach. Amy Nelson, the group’s executive director, supports efforts to improve housing equality, especially efforts from lawmakers.

“In so many ways, the state has taken items out of the toolkit that is available to so many cities across our country that simply aren’t available here,” Nelson said. “We have an affordability crisis. We have a substandard housing crisis. We have an eviction crisis, and we have a housing discrimination problem.

“And that’s really because there’s just been a series of bills passed by the General Assembly, all of which have favored the industry to the detriment of renters and other housing consumers.”

“We’re never going to solve the problem if we, as a legislature, don’t step in,” said Pryor. “I don’t think that there’s a single solution to this problem. But I think [it is] supporting the legislation that I have, making sure that the individuals that [Hoosiers] come in contact with are aware of the legislation, and having them call their legislators … to make this a priority.”