Merri Young, a longtime West Indianapolis resident, has regularly used dirt and grass clippings to fill the many potholes in the alley behind her house.
But it’s gotten so bad in recent years behind her home on Belmont Avenue, with so few people driving in the alley, that the 66-year-old has all but given up. In fact, the alley has become a dumping ground for drywall, linoleum and other construction materials, a sight not uncommon in alleys throughout the city.
“I’ve got one of those magnets that’s on wheels,” Young said. “I had to run a magnet over the alley every other day. My sister had nine flat tires within six or seven weeks. It was getting stupid. That’s when I was like, ‘We gotta get that fixed.’”
So the Indianapolis City-County Council’s decision this year to approve $2 million to fix alleys was welcome news to Young and others like her. Not much has been said, though, about how the money will be spent and who will benefit.
Many advocates worry that money is just a drop in the bucket of what is needed, and community groups are working to ensure their parts of the city do not get left behind.
The requests already are flooding in. In the last two weeks of November, Request Indy received about 250 requests for street and alley repairs. The Department of Public Works noted 34 chuckhole repair requests as “alley issues.” All remain unaddressed.
The Indianapolis Department of Business and Neighborhoods Services, which is in charge of the repairs, told Mirror Indy it was working to finalize program details.
Director Abbey Brands revealed some of what the city hopes to accomplish — and what information officials will use to make funding decisions — in August when she testified at a Metropolitan and Economic Development Committee meeting.
Brands said alley issues have long been a problem for both her department and the public works department, as neglected alleys can become hotspots for illegal dumping and make residents financially responsible for some cleanups.
She said the agency’s Alley Improvement Program would determine which alleys are the most problematic, clean them and repair potholes and regrade them.
“Ultimately, we want to encourage greater use of those alleys,” she said. “We want to restore an essential piece of quality of life back to many neighborhoods who used to be able to rely on these alleys, and now they can’t because there’s mattresses everywhere.”
The fact of the matter, though, is that Indianapolis’ alleys long have been ignored. The problem will take time and money to fix.
Consider this: Out of the $373 million spent on major transportation and infrastructure projects within the last year, only a single major alley project was funded. The city allocated $297,409 for an alley and street reconstruction in the Chatham Arch neighborhood in the northeast corner of downtown Indianapolis.
3-foot monster pothole
Young has lived along Belmont since the late 1970s and been plagued by potholes just about all of that time.
The worst, she said, was 3 feet deep at the end of the alley, behind a former post office now serving as a recording studio. Try filling that with grass and dirt.
“I was dragging my feet on getting the alley repaired, because no one was using it because it was so bad,” Young said.
Flooding after rain also is a frequent problem. Young said the alley is about a foot higher than the lowest part of her garage. The poor quality of the alley has compounded that problem by letting rain through degraded edges, flooding about four feet inside the garage.
Young said she and her family have reached out to the city multiple times, including contacting city officials directly and through the former Mayor’s Action Center, now called Request Indy.
None could offer a solution to her alley problem, she said.
“They have done that alley once in the 45 years that I’ve lived here,” Young said. “They graded it and put a little bit of stuff down back in the ‘80s.”
She was finally able to get some help when she approached a public works crew filling in potholes along Belmont. The workers directed her to their supervisor, who told her he would be back in two weeks.
After two weeks, the crew returned and filled the potholes along the alley and formed a small berm to try to prevent water from moving into their garages.
Water continues to enter her garage, but Young is one of the lucky few who have been able to get even a partial solution to problem alleys.
“I can’t put anything on the floor of my garage near my door,” she said. “Everything has to be up on pallets. I’ve got four feet of my garage I really can’t use.”
2 major issues with fixing alleys
Brands told city-county councilors that city agencies face two major impediments to fixing alleys: acquiring funding, and determining where alleys are a public right of way and where they become private property.
Brands said alleys are not defined as part of the city’s transportation network, so funding sources are scarce and not routinely part of the city’s annual budget for road repairs.
And compounding the problem, sometimes Indianapolis alleys actually are on private land even though they’re used by the public. City ordinances restrict the use of public services on private property except under certain circumstances.
According to Brands, the Department of Business and Neighborhoods Services will use multiple sources of data to identify problem alleys, including its own records of illegal dumping cases, neighboring street pavement condition indexes, city-county data on capital improvement projects performed in the area and reports from Request Indy.
Community organizations, such as the West Indianapolis Neighborhood Congress, see Request Indy as an opportunity to more effectively represent the needs of local residents and make a difference in where the alley funding is spent.
They are encouraging their members to report their own troubled alleys in order to increase the chance of receiving a piece of the funding.
“Alleyways are a big deal to us. A lot of our cars are parked along the alleyways, and we have a lot of small garages and parking pads,” said Jonathan Howe, the neighborhood group’s treasurer. “When I go out behind my house to take my trash out, it shouldn’t look like a warzone or like it got hit by a meteorite.”
Pothole visible on satellite maps
Some alleys across West Indianapolis have become navigable only by the most careful and patient drivers. One alley by Howard Street has a pothole the size of a person that can be seen from satellites. A photo of the hole taken earlier this year, essentially its baby picture, can be seen on satellite maps.
Across the street, residents have attempted to fix large alley potholes on their own, filling at least one hole with pieces of cement blocks and other debris. Despite the makeshift fix, several other large potholes created by attempts to drive around other large potholes dot the alley.
“This is an opportunity to really help some of these working class communities,” Howe said. “A lot of us, we are the workers. We have trucks. We are parking at the end of our yards. We are using the alleys for business and for our houses. The fact that they haven’t been maintained — it just doesn’t make any sense.”
The lack of funding sometimes makes folks in neighborhoods across the city feel like they’re pitted against each other, competing for scarce resources.
Young, for instance, says she does not have much hope that the new funding will be used in her neighborhood.
“We won’t see a dime of it,” she said. “It’ll go to Herron-Morton, Garfield Park, Fountain Square, places like that where their alleys are already in better condition than our streets.”
A map of the 2023 Indianapolis Department of Public Works construction season shows a vast majority of transportation and infrastructure projects within the last year have occurred outside of West Indianapolis.
About $53 million were spent on a handful of projects in West Indianapolis, including a major revitalization project along West Morris St. But more than half of that amount, or about $27.2 million, was allocated for a single project, the construction of the future Elanco Animal Health, Inc. headquarters on Oliver Avenue.
Howe, though, said he hopes the data collected by the city will help buck the trend West Indianapolis residents feel is happening with other allocation decisions.
“I just hope we don’t get in a situation where it becomes a competition where these more well-off parts of the city are able to lobby and get a major chunk of this,” Howe said, “and we’re just left stranded getting two alleys done just so they say, ‘We did it.’”
To report an alley, go to request.indy.gov, and then select “streets and alley repair” under requests. You can report an alley anonymously by logging on as a guest, or you can register to track your requests.
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