Housing discrimination continues to shape Indianapolis, and you now have an opportunity to learn more about how.
Ivy Tech Community College’s Office of Diversity, Equity, and Belonging will host two conversations with the Fair Housing Center of Central Indiana about systemic barriers that still affect neighborhoods today.
The events will be at the downtown and Lawrence campuses:
- Downtown — 1-2 p.m. Feb. 4 on the fourth floor of the North Meridian Center, 50 W. Fall Creek Parkway N. Drive
- Lawrence — 1-2 p.m. Feb. 11 in the Lawrence Room F168, 9301 E. 59th St.
Register here.
The Fair Housing Center also will display an interactive exhibit — “Unwelcomed: A Fair Housing History of Sales & Lending Discrimination” — on each campus during the week of the events.
Erika Fotsch, the center’s director of education and outreach, said the conversations will demonstrate that injustices from the past continue to impact people’s lives.
[Indy’s lost Black neighborhood: How IUPUI displaced thousands]
The neighborhood surrounding Ivy Tech’s downtown campus is familiar with housing discrimination. The U.S. government considered the area “definitely declining” and “hazardous” for lending purposes in the 1930s and 1940s.
This process of categorizing neighborhoods was known as redlining, a practice that denied non-white areas access to mortgages. This came at a time when the federal government was trying to spur new home construction to combat the Great Depression.
In his book “The Color of Law,” Richard Rothstein detailed how Indianapolis adopted an ordinance in 1926 allowing African Americans to move to a white area only if a majority of the white residents gave their written consent.
Now, in the present day, housing trends that emerged because of redlining are still here.
That includes land contracts — where a buyer makes payments directly to the seller. Unlike a traditional mortgage, buyers don’t gain equity until the end of the contract.
Land contracts originally exploited Black residents, but a recent report from the Fair Housing Center says these contracts have “again reared their heads.”
And this time, the report says, sellers who use land contracts are targeting Hispanic home seekers with deceptive practices and predatory terms.
“Despite the passage of the federal Fair Housing Act in 1968,” the report says, “lending and sales discrimination continues to haunt our neighborhoods.”
Mirror Indy reporter Tyler Fenwick covers housing and labor. Contact him at 317-766-1406 or tyler.fenwick@mirrorindy.org. Follow him on X @ty_fenwick.
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