 Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Yulia Panfill. I'm the director of the Future of Property Rights Program at the Think Tank New America. And I'm so excited that you're able to join us for the launch of Displaced in Indianapolis. This is a study that analyzes where within Indianapolis evictions and foreclosures are the most acute. Who is most impacted and why? It's part of a larger national study that also looked at Winston Salem and the Phoenix Metro area and developed a national index that ranks more than 2,200 counties on their severity of housing loss. In Indianapolis, this has been a year-long collaboration between New America Indianapolis, New America's Future of Property Rights Program, and the Institute for American Thought at IUPUI. And couldn't have been possible without the help of dozens of local experts, advocates, journalists, and municipal leaders who are all working to prevent housing instability and loss across the city. I know that housing loss is a hot topic right now as we brace for the predicted tsunami of evictions and foreclosures as a result of the COVID-19 crisis. And in that sense, it's critically important that we understand which parts of the city are the most vulnerable and why, so we know how best to target assistance. But I wanna stress that housing and security is not new here. It predates COVID, and if we're going to solve this problem, then we need to understand what's driving it historically and develop long-term solutions that go beyond just eviction moratoriums. So with that, I'd like to welcome you to our event and orient you a bit to the flow of today's discussion. We'll start with two of our report authors, Tim Rabustelli and Abby Chambers, who'll have a conversation around the report findings with Oshia Boyd, the editor of the Indianapolis Recorder, and Dan Grossman, the editor at Nuvo. We'll then transition into a second conversation with local and national experts to react to these findings. That conversation will feature Andrew Bradley, Policy Director of Prosperity Indiana, D Ross, head of the Ross Foundation, and our very own Molly Martin, head of New America Indianapolis, and Future of Property Rights Fellow, Malcolm Glenn. And we encourage you to submit your questions via the Q and A and chat functions. We'll try to get to as many of them as we can during the conversation. Thank you again for joining us, and I will turn it over to Tim to take us through some of our findings. Thanks, Yulia. And before I jump in, perhaps Dan and Oshia can introduce themselves as well. Thank you, Tim. Good afternoon, everyone. Again, my name is Oshia Boyd. I am editor of the Indianapolis Recorder newspaper and Indiana Minority Business Magazine in Indianapolis, of course. So this issue of housing is very important to the recorder. Before COVID ever, though instead of COVID, we actually had the idea to do a package around affordable housing back in probably May. And then we decided to hold it off as we kind of saw that COVID was gonna have an impact on housing. And rightfully so, when we held it off, we realized that evictions were going, there was gonna be this tsunami as everyone is talking about evictions. Luckily, they were held off again, but there's still this anticipation of what's gonna happen next. So I'm going to introduce my colleague, Dan Grossman, from Nuvo, and he's gonna tell you a little bit more about Dan and what he does at Nuvo. Yeah, hi. Thanks, Oshia. And as Oshia said, I'm Dan Grossman, managing editor at Nuvo, which after covering Central Indiana for 30 years as an alternative weekly, is now a nonprofit and publishes exclusively online. In July, we published Evictions Court Diaries by Abby Chambers, a researcher on this project. And in that piece, she describes some of the research she's involved in as a PhD candidate at IUPUI in American Studies and some of the fraud things that go on in Evictions Court. And of course, this is right up Nuvo's alley because we're very interested in deep dive reporting, especially in this time of COVID and protests in the streets and all these things that are kind of coming together in a bad way to make it harder for people to make a living, pay the rent and such. So publishing that piece was basically our entrance into a New America's orbit, because of course, Abby is one of the researchers here today. She's one of the researchers in the project displaced in Indianapolis. And another of the researchers here today is Tim Robostelli. And I'm going to introduce him. He's a policy analyst for the Future of Property Rights program at New America. He received an MA in international relations from New York University and has written for the Washington Post, Politico, The Hill, Slate and CNN, among other publications. So I'll turn it over to you, Tim. Thank you very much, Dan. And I'll just say a quick thank you to Molly Martin as well for organizing this fantastic event. Norma, if you could just please share your screen with a short slide deck I have to provide a bit of context to the discussion that we'll be having today. Next slide, please. So as Yulia mentioned, our report Displaced in America looks at housing loss at a number of levels throughout the United States. Nationally, we looked at evictions and mortgage foreclosures at the county level from 2014 to 2016. And based on data availability, we were able to get about two thirds of US counties, about 2,200 US counties to be included in this study. And we also developed something that we call a housing loss rate, which looks at combined loss through both evictions and mortgage foreclosures. And we think that provides a more holistic view of displacements in the area of analysis. We also did three case studies in the Phoenix metropolitan area in Arizona, in Winston Salem, North Carolina, and it's surrounding county. And then in Indianapolis, in Marion County, working with both New America Indy and IUPUI. And here we were able to analyze evictions and mortgage foreclosures at the more granular level, at the census tracker level to really get a sense of who and where displacement is happening. And so we combined those two mechanisms of loss, eviction and mortgage foreclosure, again, into a housing loss rate. And we were also able to obtain tax foreclosure data in Marion County as well. Unfortunately, that was in the case in every case study. So we declined to incorporate that into our housing loss index, but that still provided some insights as well. And as Abby will expand upon, she conducted about 30 interviews throughout Marion County to contextualize what our quantitative data was telling us. Next slide, please. So what you see here, I'll just quickly move through is our National Housing Loss Index. It ranks US counties based on their combined eviction and mortgage foreclosure rates between the years 2014 and 2018. At the top, you'll see Petersburg City, which is an independent city, a county equivalent in Virginia. You'll see that it has a housing loss rate of just over 12%, meaning that on average between 2014 and 2016, 12 out of every 100 households were being displaced. And within the housing loss index, which compares each county to the national average, Petersburg City has a housing loss index score of six, meaning that it was six times the national average. Now at the bottom of the screen to turn back to Indianapolis, you'll see that Marion County was ranked 35th out of about 70% of all counties for which data was available. And that's first in Indiana as well. It had a housing loss rate just under 5%, and that was about two and a half times the national average. Next slide, please. So the meat of our report was visualizing housing loss throughout, not only the country, but in our three case studies. And you see here the visualization of housing loss rates in Marion County, Indiana from 2014 to 2018. In our case studies, we were able to get a bit more larger data sets temporally. So the time period of analysis is a bit different in comparison to the national level. And so what you'll see here is that Marion County between 2014 and 2018 had a housing loss rate of 4.9% and that translates into roughly 15,000 households losing their homes each year. The eviction rate I'd like to point out was 6.8%, which is quite high in comparison to the national average and that evictions accounted for 75% of all indices of housing loss between 2014 and 2018. To the left is a static image. In our reports, you'll have interactive maps and I encourage you to visit our websites and to check those out. I'll just point out that the housing loss rate mapped onto Marion County in a bit of a ring around the periphery of downtown. We saw high rates of housing loss both to the west in Wayne Township and to the east in Warren Township. Next slide, please. And just to quickly break things down a bit further, this is looking at the mortgage foreclosure rate. Again, you'll see a similar geography to the housing loss rate with high rates of loss in the census tract surrounding downtown. The geography of loss here, there's a bit more higher rates to the northeast of downtown, both in Warren Township and the track with the highest loss rate is actually in Lawrence Township in the northeast of the county. Next slide, please. And then here is the tax foreclosure rate. Again, we weren't able to obtain data for tax foreclosures for every case study and certainly not every county at the national level in the United States. Again, what we see here is a more pronounced ring of loss surrounding downtown Indianapolis in the near northeast and the Crown Hill neighborhoods to the northeast and northwest of downtown. And while we weren't be able to do cross-county analysis, we feel that telling the story of tax foreclosures in Marion County was important, giving the attention that out-of-town investments, tax foreclosures, blights have played in Indianapolis and the discussions in the media over the last couple of years. Next slide, please. And that's it. So that's just to provide a brief overview of our mapping efforts within the context of this larger project. And now I'll turn it over to Abby Chambers, our superstar researcher in Marion County. Thank you, Tim. Hi, everybody, it's great to be here with you today. My role in this project was leading a qualitative data collection component in Marion County. I'm a social science researcher finishing a PhD in American Studies program at IUPUI. My dissertation is based on fieldwork and interviews with residents and city leaders about economic development in Indianapolis. And it describes how differing perspectives of development contribute to our continued struggles with economic inequities. Housing is, of course, something that creates and perpetuates inequity. Last year, I worked as a resident scholar with New America Indianapolis and became involved in the Displaced in America study as the boots on the ground researcher in Marion County. I interviewed 31 people, including government officials, housing advocates, real estate developers, community developers, lawyers, service providers, and residents. I collected their expertise and their stories of personal experiences to help us understand the housing-related issues that challenge our communities and our city. In these conversations, we talked about how often residents lose their homes, the mechanisms for that loss, be it eviction, mortgage foreclosure, or something else, the root causes of the loss, and what happens to people when they're forced to move. Some of the issues interviewees brought up are born out in the data that Tim just presented. For example, an attorney at a legal services agency talked to me about the foreclosure crisis, comparing what his organization is experiencing now to what it was like during the housing crisis a decade ago. He said it still feels like they're in a crisis situation, but it doesn't get as much attention as it used to, and there are fewer resources to dedicate to it, even though the demand doesn't feel to him like it's decreased that much. The Displaced in America study shows that what this attorney is sensing is indeed accurate. There's a quiet crisis of foreclosure still going on both in Marion County and nationally. People I interviewed, of course, talked a lot about evictions too, and many people cited the work of Matt Desmond and Eviction Lab when they talked about the high level of evictions in Marion County, which, as Tim just pointed out, comprises the majority of the county's housing loss. But people also talked about some of the harder to track aspects of housing loss, like where people go. When I asked this question, where do people go when they lose their homes? I got a lot of shrugging shoulders and even contradictory responses because this aspect of housing loss is not tracked. Some interviewees said they thought people moved out of downtown when they were displaced, but other interviewees said people move into downtown from surrounding townships. Some interviewees said people move east to west and rarely north or south when they're displaced. Now the data shows that this last point is a little bit true. Housing loss does seem to be more significant on sort of an east-west kind of diagonal axis rather than on the city's north and south sides with some exceptions. Likely what's really happening is that when people are forced to move, they go wherever they can find housing that they can afford. The affordability aspect is critical since housing loss affects low-income residents and especially low-income residents of color more than others. Additionally, a forced move can throw people into a crisis situation where they must secure some kind of housing within a very short period of time and they must do this with limited financial resources which limits their options dramatically. So when people are forced to move, it can mean they must leave an area where they had an established network of supports for themselves and their family. It can mean transferring schools mid-year, which is hard on kids, moving out of a walkable area, moving away from public transit lines, moving further from work. Too often, it means people have to sleep on couches in the meantime or even long-term or that families have to separate so everyone has a roof over their head. One finding that surprised me is that frequently people stay in hotels. This gives them little hope of being able to save money for a deposit on another rental unit because there's not a lot of extra money coming into the household and that hotel bill, like rent, is always due. For an unknown number of Indianapolis residents, hotels are standing in for traditional forms of housing. Finally, displacement combined with limited resources can mean families are forced to settle into substandard living conditions, tolerate overcrowding like a family of six living in a two-bedroom apartment, living with mold, dealing with major housing systems like electricity and plumbing not functioning properly. The story of housing loss in Marion County is one that's contextualized by housing environment that's inhospitable to low-income residents, especially those who rent. It leaves them a few options and little assistance, which is something I think we'll talk more about as we continue this conversation. So with that, I'll pass it back to Oshia. Thank you, Abby. We have so much to discuss and this is a lot. So let's go ahead and get into it. My first question is just kind of talking about the general study. You started your research before COVID-19 and then as you were in, I guess, in the throes of your research on set of COVID-19. So how did COVID impact your research or did it? Well, for me, luckily, I had actually completed data collection. So for the Marion County component, I was in the midst of analyzing the interviews and wasn't still trying to schedule with people or anything. So in terms of actually doing the research and trying to do interviews, luckily I had that part done. Sure, and I can speak a bit about how it sort of changed the way that we thought about this report. Obviously, as Yulia mentioned in her opening remarks, housing loss was a prevalent issue in Indianapolis and around the country even before the outbreak of COVID in February and March. What we found is sort of looking at historical data from 2008 and throughout the last decade. It's that the same communities that have historically suffered from housing loss are the ones likely to get hit again and again. So while this data isn't, no one can look into the future, but this data gives us a better idea based on past trends who will be hit when all the renter protections, when all the emergency rental assistance funds in the moratoriums run out come this fall and into next year. So it was a bit of a balancing act to say, here are the long-term trends and we need long-term solutions, but it can also help us better direct resources in the immediate crisis in this moment. Thank you, Dan. Thank you, I was surprising to me about your evictions data, particularly in Wayne Township and you talk about the number of census tracts in Wayne Township exhibiting the highest eviction rates between 2014 and 2018, and it was around 30%. Can you talk about where you're finding the highest rates in Indianapolis and what that's due to? Are there historical reasons for that? Sure, I can speak a little bit to the quantitative side of things and I know Abby will want to jump in with what she heard on the grounds. But yes, Dan, to reiterate your points, we perhaps surprisingly found some of the highest rates of eviction in census tracts in Wayne Township near Speedway and based on a bit of data analysis, drawing data from the US Census Bureau, some of these tracts had pretty average median annual household incomes and pretty high percentages of homeowners in the total population. So we were a bit puzzled by that. I know there's some reporting in the ND Star and elsewhere about a few bad actors and maybe I'll pass it over to Abby to talk a bit more about that and sort of this puzzle we're seeing in Wayne Township. Yeah, I found it was interesting that the data showed these high numbers in Wayne Township because in much of the field work and many of the interviews, it didn't come up a lot. So when I asked people, you know, where are people being displaced to or where is this a problem? A lot of people talked about the east side. They talked about 38th and post, 42nd and post. Not a lot of people talked about the west side and so that's a little bit of a puzzle. And Tim's right, the quantitative data in terms of looking at incomes or some of those other factors sort of don't align. Now the only thing that I did here, or I did here and then there were some local reports that Wayne Township sees a lot of evictions. So we sort of knew that fact, but as to why I think that's still a bit of a puzzle. So I find that interesting because I used to actually live in Speedway in Wayne Township and I actually live in Warren Township now. So you guys mentioned both of those townships as a troubled area, so I'm paying extra attention. What do, Tim, you mentioned bad actors and so you said Abby could talk to that a little bit. Are the bad actors out-of-town property owners that we're talking about who are these bad actors? I'm assuming they're the out-of-town property owners who come in and buy property. How does that impact the neighborhood, impact the city when you have people who aren't actually invested in the community but invested in property? I think those bad actors, they can be out-of-town property owners. It's sort of like if you imagine sort of a Venn diagram. The out-of-town people aren't necessarily bad actors, but they can be in-town owners, can be bad actors too. The issue with out-of-town property ownership, I think, is that when you don't have an owner living in a community, you have to imagine the investment is simply in the property. It's a financial investment. It's not necessarily an investment in that community so that individuals maybe not invested in helping to solve the problems that a community might be facing. And so that sort of puts holes in the fabric of a community where you have a property owner that maybe doesn't care as much as if they lived in that community. Those are assumptions, that's true, but I think that there's been enough reporting to show that it's something to keep track of. It's something to investigate. Yeah, Tim, anything else on that? No, nothing to add. Okay. You covered it well on that. Abby, I'd be remiss if I didn't ask about your experience in evictions court and how that kind of jibes with your experience working as a researcher for New America. So in that article, I say that as a social science researcher and a qualitative researcher, I try to understand the context of what people are experiencing. So in Marion County, when you're researching housing, you've really got to understand eviction and that means understanding eviction court. So I did go and observe evictions court in two different townships. And really what I saw kind of the overarching theme was the power imbalance between landlords and tenants. So landlords are typically represented in court by an attorney. The landlord who filed the eviction doesn't have to be present in court. The tenant does. Otherwise it's an automatic rid of possession. The tenants automatically evicted. And that right there is just a really clear imbalance because a tenant maybe has to take off of work. Some tenants have to bring their children to evictions court with them. And that process can just feel very overwhelming for somebody who has never been through it before. Even if you have, knowing that there's this imbalance, knowing that on the other side of you in the courtroom is an attorney who is well versed in these legal processes. So I know that there are efforts in Marion County to be able to provide legal services to tenants. Of course, that program just started. Of course, it could likely be expanded. But that would offer some legal balance for tenants. Thank you. So I have a two-parter here. So the first part is for Abby, the second part for Tim. So Abby, you talked a lot, you found interesting find about housing instability. Like poverty can be generational. Can you explain how housing instability affects generations? And then Tim, I'll pivot to you. We have a comment, a question from an audience member who is asking about, have you been able to tie tax foreclosures to generational housing title issues? So I kind of feel those questions may be connected. So I'll start with you, Abby. Okay. So yeah, the generational aspect, it is linked to poverty. I mean, we know that poverty does get passed down generationally unless there is some sort of stop, some sort of something to mitigate that. And of course, poverty and housing instability are linked. I think this really came out when I was interviewing a case manager at a homeless shelter. And she said she helped a woman who came in with her children. And that woman said she herself had been in that shelter when she was a child. So when you're raised in this environment of sort of perpetual crisis mode and instability, and there's nothing to help your own family when you're a child out of that situation, there's also nothing to help you out of it once you reach adulthood and you have your own family. So it just keeps continuing. And to turn to the second part of that question, sort of the dynamics surrounding generational housing and tax foreclosure. It's not something that we dug too deeply into in Marion County. I will say throughout the course of the larger research, what we heard surrounding issues such as heirs, property, historical discrimination in the legal system and inability of black households to access lawyers and individuals that can help them with probating wills. That disconnect, that inability to legally transfer ownership of property, housing, land, over generations is something that creates a host of problems. And the ownership splits in heirs property. So you could have an original landowner who owned the house in the 19th century. And today, hundreds of his grandchildren, dozens of the grandchildren could own the property. And those grandchildren, those descendants might have wanted to move away. There's not much value in the house anymore. No one wants to put their investments into it because there's this sort of weird ownership model. So that's something that while we didn't see in Indianapolis, it's something we saw elsewhere, that people move away, the property goes in a disrepair, no one's paying taxes, and eventually it's tax foreclosed upon. So given some of the racial discrimination, redlining, other issues that we've seen historically in Indianapolis, I wouldn't be surprised if a similar dynamic was occurring in Marion County. Thank you, guys. I've got one question, it's a follow up on the Wayne Township from Adam Lepin. And he is talking about the number of evictions and he's asking, quote unquote, are the concerns of Wayne Township based off tenant slash evictions or just based on the sheer number of evictions? I think it's the number of evictions that is alarming. Yes, the sheer number of evictions, we've seen places where filings have actually exceeded the number of rental households in some census checks. So that is alarming in itself. The rates as well, I'll point out, some exceeding 30% which are just astronomical in regard to evictions. So both I would say. I guess in particular with Wayne County and also with other parts of Indianapolis was bad data a problem, you alluded to it a number of times in the report, bad or missing data, what happens when you can't find the numbers you need? Sure, so I could speak about that all day given the process and the efforts that we had to try and collect data. I will say that in Marion County, we were able to find some pretty high quality data when it came to mortgage foreclosures, evictions and tax foreclosures. So we were lucky in Marion County. That's not the case everywhere in the United States and other counties. A lot of the data is difficult to access. It's of poor quality, there's missing data points, there's idiosyncrasies that you sort of need a bit of insider knowledge to decipher what you're looking at. When it did come to Marion County, some of the secondary data sets that we were hoping to get a look at, code violations, ownerships of properties. So we could sort of look at who those bad actors are, you know, if they're out of town landlords, if they're local one pops landlords. That's where the data sort of broke down a little. So a bit of that secondary analysis. That's where we had some struggles. And in general, this poor housing data gives us an inability to, you know, truly understand where this is happening, who it's happening to, to size up the problem and directs outreach resources and funds appropriately. I will add that that was one way, the code violations data was one way that COVID affected us because we did request that, but the person with the city was like, I'm working from home and it's a massive, like load of data and there's no way I could get you that from home. And he wasn't allowed to go into the city county building. So there's one way that COVID really affected our ability to get the data we wanted to get. And probably an unexpected way as well. No one for COVID for sure. So, Tim, I want to ask you something I found interesting in your research. You said you must look at Marion County social economic history to understand the current state of housing and loss and housing instability and loss. What role does that social economic history play in today's events when it comes to housing? Sure, well, I can mostly speak to that from sort of a racial equity context. So Indianapolis in the 19th century, it's similar to other Northern industrial cities, received a large influx of black migrants more or less from the South during the Great Migration and due to discriminatory policies and schooling, housing, politics in the economy, they were mostly clustered to certain neighborhoods, one that comes to my quick leaves along Indian Avenue. They were given low paying jobs. They didn't have an opportunity for home ownership. And after all that, during urban renewal, the development of IUPUI, the interstate through downtown, a lot of those communities were destroyed. So not only do you lose your housing, your stability, your sense of community, but it's increasingly difficult to find new adequate places to live, opportunity rich neighborhoods, we call them, places with good schools, places with access to public transportation, places with access to good jobs. So what you see is this historical discrimination sort of compounding until today where you have low rates of minority home ownership. You have minorities working in low paying jobs and where they can't afford the rent and they can't afford a down payment. So that's sort of, I think we've only scratched the surface when it comes to that, but we thought it was an important part of the story to tell within the Marion County case study. You also in the report talk about the quote unquote, habitability trap, sorry, tripped on my words. Because Indiana residents must pay a rent regardless of their housing conditions. So tenants who withhold rent payments are evicted a lot. Is that something you saw in your research? I'll let Abby tackle that one. I know she heard quite a bit about that through her interviews. Yeah, so the habitability trap is you're right, where tenants really, they don't have any recourse when they're living in a housing situation where the landlord isn't repairing things, isn't maintaining the housing up to standards. Like they're supposed to by law, but they're not. So we heard from an attorney in particular who said that there's nothing that stops the landlord from evicting a tenant who reports the landlord with code violation, with code enforcement. And then when that tenant is evicted because this report goes with the tenant, it doesn't stay with the housing unit, that case is just closed. So the landlord never really has to address the issues that the tenant raised. And now the tenant has been evicted. Once somebody has an eviction on their record, it automatically makes it harder to find more housing because a landlord can go and look up somebody's record and see that actually not even that they were actually evicted, but just that an eviction was filed. So the filing alone can make it hard for somebody to find new housing. And it seems like places that will accept tenants who have that eviction on their record are places that may not be maintaining the housing up to standard. So it is this trap where these tenants are just stuck in this cycle and forced into the substandard housing. Abby, it sounds like this also has something to do with wages, but those who earn low wages stay in housing that is really not habitable as you're finding. So kind of talk about how the wealth gap affects housing. And then can you pivot into how people who lose their home have this kind of spirals into other areas that affect their lives as well? Yeah, sorry, I'm taking a note. So I get both parts of your question. So when there's not a lot of cushion for somebody, they're making low wages, there's not a lot of savings. You have a medical emergency, you have your car breakdown. I mean, any number of things that just happened to us in life, that can throw somebody into a crisis mode. So immediately they have to make really hard decisions. If they're not already maybe living in crisis mode, they have to make decisions about what bills to pay, do I repair my car, can I take public transit? I've got to pay daycare, I've got rent, of course. Not paying rent then can lead to an eviction, which can make it harder for people to find new housing. And then again, because of the low wages, people don't have a lot of options. And then now maybe they've gotten eviction on their record. This whole situation just really limits people's ability to have control over what's happening in their lives because they don't have the economic resources and there really isn't a lot of assistance. There are a few things out there that people can try to tap. There are some organizations, community service organizations that may offer some funds. I heard a lot about trustees offices offering funds, but I also heard where those funds run out every month. So it's like a certain time of the month when apparently they get like this, their amount of money for the month, you might be able to get help. But of course, maybe you have to make an appointment, you have to go during certain office hours, you have to fill out paperwork. And each of these things offer more barriers where somebody is already dealing with the situation where they're facing a lot of logistical challenges and mental stresses. So it just keeps somebody in this crisis mode where it's just one thing after another dealing with one barrier after another. It's really an unhealthy situation for people. One of our viewers pointed out that Marion County just passed an ordinance preventing retaliation for reporting housing condition violations, but is that a complete panacea? No, I mean, it's a start certainly, but there's a long way to go. Well, panelists, we have actually come to the end of our conversation and we have not even scratched the surface, I don't think, of your report or of the issue with housing. So I would encourage everyone to go and pick up the reports online and dig into it and see what you found and read about the other cities too, because I think there's some interesting things in there that you'll find about housing in the United States, not just Indianapolis. So again, thank you guys for taking your time out to speak with us today. Thank you, Dan, for co-moderating with me. Thank you, Oshia, it was a pleasure. Anna, thank you, Tim and Abby for bringing us this information. Thank you. Thank you. So I think that may be my cue and I wanna thank Oshia and Dan and Abby and Tim and also welcome everyone in the audience. And I hope that you'll stay with us for the next 45 minutes because we're going to pivot from the report itself and talk about why it matters that we address race, honestly and explicitly when we talk about housing loss in Indianapolis and across the nation. So I hope you'll stick with us. I do first wanna start by thanking Yulia Panfill for her leadership of the Future of Property Rights Team and for bringing this important work to Indianapolis. And of course, thank Tim Robistelli for his exceptional work and Abby Chambers for her exceptional work on the ethnographic research. I'd like to introduce my panel too because I lucked out just as the last panel was absolutely fabulous, we have another fabulous lineup and I'm so honored to be joined by Malcolm Glenn who is not just a new America fellow but is in charge of everything including better.com. And I'll let Malcolm tell us a little bit more about his impressive work across workforce, poverty, property and innovation. We're also joined by Andrew Bradley who's the policy director at Prosperity Indiana and with the Hoosier Housing Needs Coalition. Andrew, if I got that wrong, please do correct me when you come on. Andrew has also done quite a bit of work over the years on working families, poverty and livable wage. And then last and certainly not least, Daris D. Ross who is the founder and president of the Ross Foundation and well-known to all of us here in Marion County in Indianapolis as an activist, philanthropist and someone really leading the charge and doing literal hands-on outreach to residents and for tenants' rights. So I'm gonna get to the fabulous panel in a moment but first I wanna set the stage a little bit. As I said, my name is Molly Martin. I direct New America Indianapolis which is a program based here working across Indiana and we focus our work on racial and economic equity. So the issue of housing loss certainly hits right at the heart. In a place like Marion County, in a place like Indianapolis that is 45% non-bite and more than 30% black. We have an opportunity, an obligation and a need to do something for our neighbors. While this should be a moral question and just a good person thing to do question it's also an economic one because Indianapolis lives or dies by the success of our neighbors regardless of their race. And anytime when we talk about race with New America Indianapolis I wanna remind everyone that race is not a monolith the race and ethnicity are different and we'll be doing our best to kind of navigate those waters. So not that I'm gonna come to you first. We live in a city here in Indianapolis that has a huge poverty crisis and the poverty crisis is worse for our black and Latinx neighbors. The median household income is lower in the state of Indiana as a whole. That's about 42,000 a year for Hispanic households about 32,000 for black households not much higher it's in the 50s for white households but there's a huge gap. The median household value is the median home value is lower in predominantly black neighborhoods. And this report that New America has released actually shows that the rate of housing loss through eviction or foreclosure is worse for black households than for white households and worse for Latinx or Spanish speaking households than for anyone else. So why does it matter? What's draw me a line Malcolm from this racial disparity to housing loss and what's the sort of work that you lead? Well, thanks Molly for setting that stage. And I think you're absolutely right. The very short version of I think what this conversation is gonna look like is that the trends have been bad. They were made worse in 2008 and they've actually gotten worse since then. But hopefully we can kind of step back and sort of do some stage setting as you mentioned. Thank you for your very kind introduction. I don't know if I do everything but I certainly do wear a couple of hats. As Molly mentioned, my name is Malcolm Glenn and I'm just absolutely overjoyed to be here in my capacity as a fellow for a New America's Future of Property Rights program and I'm super excited and really proud of the work that the team has put together for the displaced in America report that was recently released. But as Molly mentioned, I'm also the director of public affairs at better.com and Better is one of the leading digital home ownership platforms in America. And in addition to that role, I serve as a senior fellow at the Center for Workforce Inclusion where I look at what the future of work will look like. And I think the really interesting thing about all of those roles to Molly's point is that they're all really tied together and you cannot look at housing in a sort of vacuum but the reality is housing is deeply intertwined and interrelated and integrated with how families live, work and prosper or don't within cities. And where you live just determines so many things. It's really as simple as that. Earlier in my career, I worked in education reform and one of the really central tenants of our work was this phrase, your zip code shouldn't determine your child's destiny. The reality is that it does for so many families in so many places across the country, you are wedded to a certain quality of education based on where you are able to work and for reasons that Tim and Abby and Molly and folks will continue to get into. Many, many families are aggressively and intentionally limited as to where they can live for a whole host of reasons. Where you live determines where people are able to get access to jobs. We're on a webinar in the middle of the day and are able to largely do our jobs on Zoom but there are so many people who cannot do their jobs on Zoom who are not a part of this so-called computer knowledge, whatever you wanna call it economy. And so they need to think about things like am I a commuting distance away from where the jobs are? And do I live in a place where particularly with an unbelievable amount of uncertainty like we have today where I'm gonna be able to keep my job? And so there are a number of sort of open questions as to what certain sectors of work will even look like going forward when it comes to office work versus remote work versus essential work. And even notwithstanding those questions, the challenge is as to where you live and what that determines in your life are massive. And so why is this all relevant? I spent a number of years before I joined the roles that I'm doing now leading policy for underserved communities at Uber. And one of the most striking statistics that I took away from my time there was based on this longitudinal study over a number of years from Harvard University the greatest determining factor as to whether a family that is in poverty can actually work to exit poverty, to climb out of poverty is their commute time. And so to a point that Tim made earlier that means making a decision where you live based on access to public transportation determining whether you can afford a car if you're gonna live in a place where you need a car and in some instances two cars if you're gonna require multiple cars for the service of your family. So housing whether you're talking about renting or owning just plays all of these absolutely substantive meaningful roles in determining sort of the short-term economic situation for a number of people. And this has been touched on earlier and I think we'll continue to touch on it as the session goes on. But this matters not for individuals not just for individuals but across generations as well. And those disparities in housing are exacerbated when you look at the intergenerational gap between races depending on the numbers you're looking at the gap between black home ownership and white home ownership there's something between 25 and 30 percentage points that numbers grown since the 2008 crisis and based on what we've seen in the context of COVID it is likely to continue to grow. Before COVID started at the beginning of the year it was expected that by 2031 the decline in black household wealth based on the 2008 downturn would be almost 10 percentage points worse than the decline in white household wealth. And so that's kind of worth stating overall wealth is gonna be down as a result of 2008 across all racial groups. It will be down again as a result of COVID across all racial groups but it will almost certainly be significantly worse for black families than it is for any other racial group. And so we don't even know the full extent of what COVID is going to do in terms of exacerbating this housing crisis. But what we do know is that when evictions and foreclosure moratoriums start to expire it's gonna have really damaging downstream impacts on education in terms of exacerbating job loss and it's gonna make getting access to a whole host of goods and services that much more challenging for a group of folks for whom the challenges were already quite meaningful and substantive. So I am sure we will spend a lot more time talking about a lot of these issues as time goes on but as a means of sort of laying the groundwork and kind of zooming out I'll stop there and look forward to continuing the conversation. Thank you so much Malcolm that's so important to remember that especially for black and brown Americans the economic prospects and the professional prospects had been greatly diminished by a lot of systemic racism and systemic bias in the way things are built and then these setbacks come rolling through like housing loss or like this pandemic. Andrew what is this looking like here in Indiana and what are the sorts of policy levers that you think we need to be pressing to make sure that we address this overall but that we're also really honest with ourselves about the racial specific the race specific implications of all of this. Thank you so much Molly and thanks for having me be part of this conversation as well as to the other panelists and the folks at New America for putting this on. As you mentioned my name is Andrew Bradley and I'm policy director with prosperity Indiana. We are the statewide association for community economic development. So those are the folks throughout the state of Indiana who are strengthening our communities and improving people's lives. And just as you say, and as your panelists have said so far COVID really has just exacerbated some pre-existing conditions in the housing instability realm. And it's also really driven the importance of making sure that we take racial equity into account when we're coming up with policy solutions. So some of your panelists have addressed some of these points but I wanted to tack on a couple of additional data points and then talk a bit about some of the policy advocacy that we've been doing to answer the question of what would happen when the eviction moratoriums are lifted and we're starting to see that. So even before COVID started housing affordable housing was out of reach throughout Indiana and specifically in Marion County. And in part that has to do with the legacy of policies that Indiana has taken place. Marion County doesn't exist in a vacuum when it comes to policy decisions. So many of its choices are made in Indianapolis but at the state capitol and then of course at the US capitol at the White House as well. So for example, Indianapolis has the same minimum wage as the rest of the state at 725. And at that minimum wage affordable housing in Indianapolis as in the rest of the state can buy you an apartment at $377 a month. But the fair market rent for a two bedroom apartment in Indianapolis is $946 a month with a housing wage to afford that at $18 and 19 cents an hour. So imagine that almost triple the minimum wage in order to afford that affordable housing. And when it comes to COVID COVID's really been a triple whammy especially for people of color throughout Indiana and including Marion County. We've seen the data showing that people of color have been hardest hit by the actual public health epidemic by job and income loss. There've been over 150,000 first time unemployment claims in Marion County alone. And some breakdown of that data from the Federal Reserve Bank finds that 21% of the unemployment claims throughout the state have been for black workers whereas they only make up 9.4% of the labor force. So that's a really disproportionate impact that black workers have. And that also includes the type of occupations that have seen the most layoffs even in the most recent unemployment status you still see that accommodations and food and beverage and a lot of those low paying jobs that are kept low by policy decisions are really being affected. And that really translates to the housing market because we've seen some data from the housing industry showing that the folks that are continuing to still miss their rent are coming most from the 20 to $30,000 income range. And that is that low income service sector range that are typically held by people of color, by women, by low income renters. And when that's concentrated in places throughout the city just like what New America's data is showing then you're seeing really pockets that are being hit hard and especially people of color. Another statewide fact that I'd like to share with you, we crunched some census numbers and found that across the state of Indiana in terms of the proportion of households that are cost burdened by housing meaning that they spend more than a third of their income on housing, 40.4% of white cruiser households are cost burdened by housing but that proportion is 44.5% for Latino households and 51.4% for black households across the state. And then again, you imagine that's super concentrated in some of the specific areas that this report we're talking about today is covering. So again, that's all what was happening kind of as we enter into COVID and as we're seeing the job and income lost result in housing instability. So to combat that prosperity Indiana had gathered with some advocacy partners actually back at the end of the last general assembly session, folks before we're talking about the Marion County's policy about renter protections that's something that they put into place early this year. The general assembly had then passed a bill to undercut that through preemption and then the last moment, Governor Holcomb vetoed that just as COVID was coming into play. So really all it would take is for the general assembly to override that veto or simply to pass a new law in the next session and you would see those new eviction powers be reinstated the way that they would have been. So that's something that's kind of hanging over our heads in the next session. This group of advocates that we've brought together called the Hoosier Housing Needs Coalition has also been thinking about what's gonna happen when the eviction moratorium is lifted. We've done some data showing or done some research showing that we expect multiple waves of evictions. One that would start just as soon as the moratorium is lifted and we started to see that in the state when the state moratorium was lifted right before the CDC federal moratorium was put down. Another one when unemployment benefits and any sort of stimulus payments run out as they are starting to do. But then based on the great recession we anticipate a third or a later wave of evictions that would happen the year after because during the great recession the peak of evictions happened the year following the peak in unemployment. So this is not gonna be a problem that's going to go away soon. And we have been advocating at the state level for rental assistance programs that are not only targeted and available to low-income renters including people of color but also that has a way to do outreach to those communities and populations. And I think that's something that your next speaker, Dee will be able to speak to because I know that he's been involved in some of those conversations. But just to wrap this up and move the conversation along a couple of the things that we've been recommending moving forward is for the state to have a housing stability task force to really help bring in the voices of the people affected including renters, people of color but also landlords and also experts in the connections between public health and housing to a housing stability task force that could inform some of the use of CARES Act funds and other philanthropic funds that may be able to be on the table. And then we also would like to see a housing stability dashboard be put on the state's COVID website. We think that that would be a really important place to be able to measure the number of evictions that come as a result of COVID that are coming through the court systems that may be temporarily on pause but are likely to start again as well as some of the outcomes of the rental assistance programs so that we could line up to see where the applications and where the approved and disapproved applications are coming from and how well that lines up with the types of maps that New America has put out today. So I'll pause there but have to talk any more about any of this. Thank you so much, Andrew, that's so helpful. Dee, as Andrew said, I wanna come over to you because if Malcolm set the national stage and Andrew set the state stage you do the most hyper-local work of anyone that we've talked to on this call. We'd love to hear a little bit more about the foundation about your tenants' right advocacy and I'd love your take. Do we have it right? You talk to people every day. How much of a factor do you think race is in housing loss in Indiana? Yeah, thank you, Marley. Thanks everyone for having me on. Yeah, my name is Dee Ross. I'm the founder and CEO of the Ross Foundation. We are a grassroots organization in Indianapolis, Indiana. Our mission is to create more, is to take the community out of survival mode into thriving mode by creating effective youth programs, repairing our communities and development leaders. We also oversee the only Indianapolis tenants' rights union, the first tenants' rights union in the state which we do a lot of tenant advocacy, boots on the ground, going door-to-door, educating people about their rights, help with them with letters to their landlords, to property managers, to the judges, helping them get connected to legal, promote on legal services and right-to-round services that could help them, assist them with addressing any internal problems within their homes by contacting the American Health Department or whoever the powers may be. I also sit on the Hoosier Housing Needs Coalition also where we've been advocating and pushing Governor Hoke on to push the eviction moratorium back and then extend it and also be more intentional about connecting, getting connected with Black and Brown communities about, with these resources that's being provided. One of the things I wanna highlight is we can have all the resources and services in the world come into our state, but they're not being trickled down to the ones directly impacted the most that defeats the purpose. And we have to be more intentional when we have a more intact plan where when the funding comes in, we have a plan where we can deliver those items to the people directly impacted the most, those resources, because a lot of people in Black and Brown communities that I found on a local level don't have access to wifi or internet or TV or radio or social media or any of those outlets to really know about the eviction and moratoriums, to know about the executive orders, to know about any resources or services out there. And quite frankly, most of the community centers that are getting all these funds are working remotely. They don't have the capacity to do outreach at this time due to COVID-19. And so I think it's imperative when we talking about making sure that these resources is getting to the people directly impacted the most. Now disproportionately Black and Brown communities are impacted by COVID-19 the most. And before COVID-19, they were disproportionately impacted by poverty the most. And so it's a direct correlation when you see a spike in COVID-19, you have to really seriously look into the housing situation, the poverty levels in that community where you're seeing the spike in those zip codes because if there have been victims out of their homes, especially if they have color, they are more likely to catch COVID-19. One story I highlight before in the past is it was an elderly Black lady who was unlawfully kicked out of her home, not knowing her rights. And two weeks later, she catches COVID-19. This is here in Marin County. And she ended up passing away from COVID-19. She didn't make it. And so I just want to put that into perspective how serious this situation is when we talking about people become homeless or losing their homes or being displaced, they are more exposed to catching COVID-19 or more exposed to suffering from any type of pandemic or virus that's out there. And so we want to make it safe. We want to be able to put everyone in a safe living condition. And then also, we also address that it's been an ongoing issue during COVID-19 and prior to COVID-19 is, it's a lot of the deplorable living conditions, especially on the far east side of Indianapolis. And at one point we were number two in the entire country in evictions behind New York City. And we're not nearly the population of New York City. So, you know, it's just not people not paying their rent being put out of their homes. It's discrimination. It's people not knowing their rights. It's people being targeted and unlawfully being put out of their homes. And so that's the need. And so with Indianapolis Tennis Nation, we try to fill that need as much as possible with home, we do home literacy programs. We do financial literacy programs. And we also hire 20 Tennis advocates across America. I mean, across, excuse me, across Marin County to be split up in different neighborhoods on the east, west and south side of town, which are the hardest hits when we talk about evictions. And so, yeah, we're doing a lot of advocacy work and we hear it's a due to work. Thank you so much, Dee. That's terrific. And I would point folks to the chat. Early on in the chat, we posted the Ross Foundation website where you can learn more about the work. And also in the chat, we posted the Fair Housing Center of Central Indiana's efforts on Fair Housing Basics. They're doing some Fair Housing Basics training here in the fall. You know, Dee, one thing that you brought up is she didn't know her rights. Someone doesn't know their rights. I don't like to go to, you know, civil court. If I have a speeding ticket, I can't imagine going when the stakes were so high to small claims court and risk losing your home. Dee, I'll come to you first in the Malcolm. I'd like to come to you. Talk to me a little bit about the rights, the mythology that you think. What do you think people believe their rights are and what's one common mistake, Dee, that you think tenants are making when they're asked to leave their home or in financial straits? So, I'd like to allude to the fact. I'd like to allude to the fact that we have one of the poorest tenant laws in the country, entire country. So, a lot of people overlook that a lot on the local level and sometimes on the state level. When I'm dealing with a resident, they do not know that they have to still pay rent in the state of Indiana. They usually try to withhold rent. And that is like the biggest indicator of them being put out in their homes and being evicted because they're not aware that this is a law that you have to still pay your rent. You cannot withhold rent. And even if you live in inhabitable living conditions. And then also, they don't know how to, a lot of people are not, I guess, experienced in keeping documentation and receipts, keeping taking pictures, keeping any type of evidence to support their claims. Or even if they make the repairs on their own, how to justify that and rent costs and not being evicted, they don't know those things. And some of them don't know the steps when they live in a mold or silence is caged in and water is coming down their wall feces is grown on their walls. It's a lot of the global living conditions. You won't believe it in Annapolis. That's similar to what I just described. And there are children still living in their, that household right to this day. And some of them don't know the content of Merritt County Health Department. A lot of them are in fear speaking out against their property manager or landlord and fear of retaliation. And a lot of them have retaliated. And it was a similar situation in mental work apartments on the Far East side, where entire apartment complex, the property managers was basically telling the African-American population that they could not park in front of their homes but was allowing everyone else to park in front of their homes. And they said, if they try to park in their homes, they will retaliate and evict them. They were literally invicting people left and right of color from that establishment until the Ross Foundation got involved and we connected with the Indiana Civil Rights Commission and filed a lawsuit, which turned that situation around. And we went out there to do a lot of advocacy and education. But what we found out was a lot of people were scared to even speak out about the situation that was going on. And it was even deeper situation than just not parking in front of their homes. But they were scared, they was in fear of retaliation because on the Far East side, there's a lot of low income apartments. And so that's the biggest concentration of apartment complexes. And so that's like the last option before becoming homeless is that side of town. And when you lose hope inside of things, you try to just deal with the situation and settle with the environment circumstances you're in. Thank you so much, Dee. That's a really startling story, but I think one thing that leapt out to our researchers and to me when we were doing this research is I was shocked to find out that you couldn't withhold rent in Indiana due to disrepair or uninhabitable conditions. One thing that you've mentioned in Malcolm O, I'll come to you is the idea that navigating these systems isn't always explicitly racist. It's sometimes oppression by omission. I will only tell my black residents X and I will tell my white residents Y. Malcolm, things like this, why do you think it is that interfacing with housing and banking systems is so fraught for so many black and Hispanic Americans? Well, I think there's a slightly more complicated answer and a simple one. I'll start with the simple one, which is, and you cannot state this starkly enough, the answer is slavery. And it's really, really simply tied back to the origins of how this country was founded. Black families, of course, couldn't own property. They were the property. And so when white families had children, they were able to pass their property, both the homes and the enslaved people, onto their children. When slavery was abolished, there were some reconstruction-era efforts to grant property in some isolated instances to newly freed people. But then the rise of Jim Crow and a whole host of very explicit government-sponsored segregation efforts really undermined all of that work. And then you get to the 20th century and you have some really explicit efforts that reinforced what was already a pretty inequitable system, particularly things like redlining, which was efforts by both local governments and federal governments in partnership with private sector actors to deny access to a whole host of goods and services for people strictly and exclusively based on where they live. So if neighborhoods are largely segregated based on race, then it's easy for mortgage lenders or real estate agents or other businesses to simply say, we are not gonna serve those people. We know those people are overwhelmingly black. We're not saying we're not serving black people, but we can effectively do so by not serving those people. And so redlining exacerbated those existing inequities and made it harder for black people, black families to own homes. And then in 2008, we saw that black families were disproportionately the target of so many of these predatory lending practices that led to the 2008 crisis, meaning that even for black families that did own homes at that time, they were more likely than their white counterparts parts to actually lose their homes as a result of the crisis. And I think it's worth sort of putting some numbers behind this because these things are so deep seated and they are so foundational to this country, but the impact to today is really, really stark when you look at the numbers. So black families basically started in the negative from slavery up to the point of today. And you hear a lot about the income gap. You hear about it from a gender perspective. You hear about it from a race perspective and it's meaningful. Black women make something like 67 cents for every dollar that white man makes that number is a little bit higher for black men in the 70s or 80s depending on what source you're citing. But the wealth gap is orders of magnitude worse. For every $100 of wealth that a white family in the United States has, black families have about $5 and four cents. So you're talking about an income gap that is huge, significant and exacerbates a whole host of inequities that exist today, but the wealth gap based on race, white families because of all of the things that we've talked about, only on a surface level have about 20 times the wealth of black families, the disproportionate sum of which is based in their homes. And so when you think about this crisis, you're talking about exacerbating some pretty foundational and existential issues for black families. There are policy initiatives to fix some of this stuff. There are home down payment assistance programs. There are credit access bills that would actually create opportunities for the credit invisible to be involved in lending practices. Joe Biden has a first time home buyer tax credit that he's offering up as a part of his housing plan. But ultimately you're talking about making incremental progress around some existential problems that exist in both housing and in a whole host of economic respects that have made it more challenging for black families relative to their white counterparts. Thank you Malcolm. That is stark and it's a great reminder. And I believe I read from the national prosperity initiative that black wealth is trending towards 0% here in the coming decades. If we don't act now and certainly Latinx and Hispanic families are facing a similarly steep slope. Andrew, we've heard a lot about the importance of having lots of people around the table. And it sounds like for one, we need a far more racially diverse set of decision makers and we need far more racially diverse folks in banking, in lending. But we also need, we still need landlords at the table, right? And we still need folks who are perhaps not always in great company to come to the table and craft solutions together. And we had a question from the chat from Mandla about how we start to write this balance of power. How do we even, where do we even begin to make tenants and landlords give them even equal playing field? Are you working on anything like that? Can you solve it for us in the next 10 minutes? Yeah, I think that is a really important question. And I think that it is important if nothing else just from the practical nature of policy making, especially in a policy landscape like Indiana, it's difficult to get legislation over the hump at the state house unless you are including both the supply and the demand side of any policy issue, especially if you're coming from the side of say, low income and vulnerable tenants. So that is part of why we've come up with this idea of a housing stability task force that definitely does include different parts of the housing sector that includes not only landlords and people who have investments in housing, but also tenants and then that connection between public health and housing. And so in terms of the idea of like rebalancing, I think that that gets to some of that idea of, COVID has further tipped the scales and it becomes a public health threat to have more evictions. And that's something that the CDC has now explicitly recognized with the moratorium that, and I think some of your panelists mentioned that earlier that any evictions increase the threat to the entire community of spread of COVID. And that's something that I've actually seen some recent research on showing that when families are at threat of eviction, they tend to double up. One family comes and stays with another and that increases the chance of a spread not just within that household, but then two other households and throughout the community. And in fact, some of that research we're showing that depending on the size of the community that you could have as low as for every 60 evictions, you might end up with one additional COVID death in a large city. And that has really, really strong implications for not just the housing sector, but for public health and for policymakers to take into account. So to be able to address that, they need to look at things that would balance landlord antenna interest. But some things that they may wanna look at, some of the things that have been discussed a little bit before include preventing landlord retaliation at the statewide level so that you're not just protecting that in Marion County, but throughout the state. You might also want to make sure that you prohibit courts from disclosing information related to evictions where the actions against the tenant are dismissed or not prosecuted. So that's the case where even if an eviction is filed, but not granted, that stays on a renter's record for many years. And there are policy options to basically wipe that clean off of a tenant's record. Several other things that we may wanna look at. One that applies to the way that rental assistance programs have been enacted. At the state level, they've been voluntary for landlords to participate in. And the reason that the state has given for that is that there is not a way to prohibit discrimination of income, meaning where tenants are getting the source of their rent money. Landlords can't say, no, we don't wanna take it because it came from a public source or a rental assistance program. That may require some legislation and that may be necessary if housing and stability continues into 2021 the way we expect it to. Thank you so much, Andrew. And you touched on something really important that also came up in the chat, which is that landlords are as much gatekeepers of public health right now as any of us are through individual action. And that's a new role for a lot of people who probably didn't sign up for that. It's a really important role. Also speaking to the question in the chat about the public health implications of all of this, a lot of this points back to wages. And we've heard from a variety of folks today that the Midwest of course has historically flat wages. It's been something of a point of pride, right? To say we kept our wages flat because we're a very employer friendly culture. That is not great for workers. And here in Indiana, where I wanna say it's 25% of Hoosiers make less than $20,000 a year. And therefore could not afford the average rent of a two bedroom that Andrew noted. And during this pandemic to take care of their own health, they may have to stay away from work for a week because we know that ranks of folks who work in service and food prep and retail, really important honorable work. But we know that those ranks were dominated by women and people of color. And those folks here in Indianapolis make up 50 and 30,000 of the workforce respectively. So if 50,000 retail workers in Indianapolis take a week off, that retail worker is going to lose an average of $525 that week. That is definitely rent money, grocery money and it could set them back in a variety of ways. And so just being able to pay the bills is a public health issue and certainly ties to housing in the COVID-19 pandemic. So as we're wrapping up here in the last few minutes, I'd like to go around to each of you and I'd like you to suggest you have the magic wand. I hand it to you and you can make one change in housing policy in the state, in the city, in federal aid that you think will benefit black and brown communities and start to tip the scale. What is that one thing you do if I make you keep your day? So D, I'm going to start with you. Yeah, so I know definitely the biggest need is taking away that change that law where you can withhold rent if you're living in a habitable living condition because in black and brown communities, it's a lot of deplorable living conditions. There's a lot of people living in mold and feces and have mushrooms growing on a wall, water over flooding throughout their home. They should be able to withhold their rent if their property manager or landlord refuses to any repairs in a timely manner. And that's not right. No one should have to live in those circumstances or conditions. And sometimes the data doesn't show always where the need is. So I just want to point that out. That's a really important point, D. And there's actually a piece, Malcolm, that you wrote that speaks to the hidden epidemic of housing loss. And if you look back at the New America study, we saw some census tracks with high percentages of loss that surprised us. We can't always see who's losing their homes and we can't always see what's going on behind the front door, who's been unable to repair something, who's been unable to leverage their tendency to get their landlord to do the right thing. So D, I'm really glad that you brought that up. So we have D coming in to say we need to write the balance by empowering tenants to be able to withhold rent when their safety or their health is at issue. Malcolm, what would you do with the magic wand for a day? Yeah, I'll go in a slightly different direction and say, I think we need to fundamentally rethink and expand credit access. And I'll say a little bit more by saying there was a bill that was introduced in the Senate last year and it was called the Credit Access and Inclusion Act. It was a bipartisan bill, a Republican and a Democratic co-sponsor. And something like this would be really, really monumental and because one of the biggest inputs that goes into determining whether a person can get access to a whole host of financial services, including home loans is their FICO credit score, which I will note is a uniquely American entity. There's no other country in the world where there's a similar credit score structure. And that credit score has hundreds of, as you all mentioned, sort of behind the scenes inputs. Most of which take many, many years to build and many folks would say are deeply discriminatory in their own right. Black families are as much as 20% more likely to be what we call credit invisible, meaning they don't have that history of payments through things like student loans and mortgages and car payments. And they're disproportionately likely to be incarcerated, which means they emerge from having served time behind bars with an inordinate amount of fines and fees that they have to pay off before they can start to get access to these services. And so they're effectively eliminated from being able to engage in the home ownership process. And so there have been efforts over the years, things like the Fair Housing Act of 1968. There are some provisions of the voting, excuse me, the Civil Rights Act of 1965, as well as the creation of the CFPB that have done away with, I think Molly, you mentioned is the overt racism, but there is still this de facto racism in all of these systems. And until we start to kind of think about how to change the practices of the systems that underpin the systems, and I think credit access is one of them, then we're still gonna have a long way to go. So I think changing the way we think about the inputs that determine whether people get access to loans and financial services would be really, really meaningful and pushing forward. It's incredibly helpful. So Malcolm is advocating for a real change in approach to credit and finance in this country. So important. Andrew, what about you? Well, I definitely wouldn't disagree with anything that my co-panelists have said, but I would like to put out that we can't rebuild and recover until we're adequately taking care of basic needs. And when it comes to housing, we can't have housing affordability and security until we have housing stability in the face of this pandemic. So if I could wave my magic wand, I would have everybody listening to this podcast this webcast, contact Indiana senators and ask them to help follow the house's lead in passing 100 billion for housing stability and rent assistance. And that's what's going to allow Indiana to unlock its shuttered rental assistance program. And that's what's going to allow the funds to be able to get down to the community level. And as Dee said, to really have some intentional partnerships with the folks on the ground, we're gonna be able to make sure that people are able to stay in their homes and avoid eviction and homelessness. Thank you so much, Andrew. I could not have ended better than my three panelists just did. So I will wrap us for the event today. I wanna thank Andrew, Malcolm and Dee for joining us for the second half of the conversation. I want to thank Abby, Tim, Oshia, and Dan for the first half really taking a deep dive into displaced in America. If you registered for this event online, we'll be sure that we send you a link to other resources and the report itself. You can also always reach me at martin at newamerica.org. So as we close out today, I'd like to thank our partners at Nouveau News Weekly and at the Indianapolis Recorder as always for a rich discussion. Thank you so much. Please, everyone, stay well. And if you need help and immediate assistance with your housing, please do see the Fair Housing Center of Central Indiana's website for more information. Thank you so much. Take care and have a good night.