Hoosier Housing Costs Hit All-Time High

Jason Thiel

Corporate landlords are raking in profit hand over fist while renters are forced to choose between feeding their families or paying rent. Rent prices have increased 50% in the last decade, outpacing even the rate of general inflation during the same period. Massive corporate landlords are buying up huge swaths of real estate around the country and jacking up the rent. In 2022, corporate landlords like Greystar, which owns almost a 1 million units nationally, were caught using software like RealPage to collude to artificially raise rents and maximize profit.

Indiana is one of the most rent-burdened states in the country. Nearly 50% of Hoosiers are rent-burdened, meaning they spend more than 30% of their income on rent. And over half of all rent-burdened Hoosiers are severely rent-burdened, meaning they spend more than 50% of their income on rent. 

Despite being 20th in the nation on rent-burdening its workers, Indiana has the third-highest eviction rate in the US at 9%. And it’s even higher in some places like Indianapolis, where the rate is 14%. Landlords will look for any excuse to kick renters to the curb in order to keep profits high. It comes as no surprise that homelessness in Indianapolis is at the highest it’s been in the last 10 years, apart from 2021 during the Covid-19 pandemic.

In 2021, Indiana Republicans passed a statewide ban on cities legislating any part of landlord-tenant relations. This came on the heels of Indianapolis passing the mildest eviction protections, like requiring landlords to provide tenant rights info to renters and preventing landlords from retaliatory evictions if tenants report unsatisfactory living conditions.

Indiana Democrats are also doing the bidding of wealthy real estate and tech companies. While Hoosiers struggle to keep a roof over their head with a poverty wage of $7.25, the Democrats are greenlighting construction projects for expensive data centers all over the state. Democrats and Republicans joined hands in Indianapolis to allow a new data center to be built that will raise utility costs on land that should have been used to build quality affordable housing.

Neither party has done anything to address the massive affordability crisis facing working people in Indiana and nationwide, and they never will. They created this suffering in the first place, because both parties operate in the interests of the billionaires and the landlords. Hoosiers have taken a historic step to breaking the two party stranglehold by launching the Socialist Party of Indiana. We need to build this new party around fighting demands like statewide rent control, taxing the rich to fund a massive expansion of affordable housing, and capping utility costs.