Tag Archives: Indianapolis

A Not-So-Subtle Candidate

Criminal Justice, Local Government, , , ,

It’s primary election season, and in Indianapolis, the parties are wrapping up their races for the Mayoral nominations.

Indianapolis–like every urban area over 500,000–is a majority-Democratic city. When I first became politically active, it was a reliably Republican stronghold; I served as Corporation Counsel in a Republican administration headed by four-term Mayor William Hudnut. That GOP dominance lasted for thirty years.

Times–and Republicans–have changed.

Our current Mayor, Joe Hogsett, will be running for a third term. He’s a Democrat, he has lots of campaign money and he has the advantages that come with incumbency. (Of course, he also has the disadvantages that come with incumbency; in his case, a widely-criticized faintheartedness that his opponents are honing in on.) He’s widely favored to win the Democratic primary–and, given the significant Democratic tilt of the electorate, the general election.

The Republican primary is dominated by two candidates–Abdul Shabazz, a lawyer, media figure and longtime political pundit, and Jefferson Shreve, who is using a significant portion of the millions he made when he sold his business to blanket the airwaves. And when I say, blanket, I mean blanket–his ads are unavoidable. (I watch very little television, but I’ve seen what seems like thousands of them.) The ads ignore his primary opponent and focus on the Mayor, who–in Shreve’s telling–has presided over the “crumbling” of the city.

Shreve talks a lot about “leadership” (which he doesn’t define).  When I saw his spots the first few hundred times, I found them basically content-free, with the single exception of wildly exaggerated claims about crime–a problem that he proposes to solve with “leadership.”

Crime is the only actual issue raised by Shreve’s ads. Fair enough–it’s a real problem here as well as across the country, although we are hardly the hell-hole his ads describe. Shreve’s approach to the issue, however, is troubling. He will “let the police do their jobs.”

In an interview with Axios Indianapolis, Shreve was asked whether police reform has gone too far or not far enough. His response was instructive.

We don’t need police reform to make Indianapolis safer, we need more, better-paid police officers.

What that means comes through loud and clear.

Indianapolis, like all major cities, needs to police its police. There are many admirable officers in IMPD, and the force has made consistent good-faith efforts to educate its members about cultural differences and language barriers. But–again, like most cities–we’ve had episodes where officers have engaged in aggressive and/or inappropriate behaviors–times when they have acted in ways inconsistent with their training.

When I listen to the Shreve commercials, what I hear is “when I’m Mayor, I’m taking the restraints off. In my administration, the police will always be right. I’ll have their backs no matter what.”

Perhaps that is an unfair reaction, but several other people I’ve spoken interpret it the same way. That is, I know, totally anecdotal, but it does reflect national differences between the parties on issues of policing.

The Republican emphasis on law and order has gone hand-in-hand with reflexive and uncritical support for the police. Republican politicians warn that even modest efforts to restrict police tactics will make communities less safe. They also tend to attribute criminal behavior to minorities–and to focus on street crime rather than corporate or other white-collar criminal behavior.

Democrats have been more supportive of criminal justice reform, increased police accountability and transparency. Democratic candidates tend to express concerns about police brutality, racial profiling, and excessive use of force, and to call for the implementation of policies to address those issues.

Criminal justice scholars tell us that aggressive policing approaches have been disproportionately applied in communities of color, and that, politically, “law and order” policies  purporting to be tough on crime are particularly appealing to White Republicans who hold negative attitudes towards minorities and immigrants. A 2018 study by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) found that White Republicans were more likely than other groups to believe that police officers treat whites and minorities equally, despite almost daily disclosures to the contrary.

Republican politicians are far more likely to frame crime and violence as problems caused by minorities and immigrants– framing that has been shown to motivate the GOP base. Maybe I’m unduly cynical, but that’s the actual message I hear conveyed–a message underscored in the accompanying, grainy videos– by those unending Shreve advertisements.

On the other hand, perhaps I’m just overreacting to the sheer number of those fatuous commercials….Maybe there’s more to this candidate than his promise to “let the police do their jobs” and his assurances that such unquestioned support defines “leadership.”

Unless Abdul beats him on May 2d, or he runs out of money, I guess we’ll find out.

 

 

The ReThink Project

Local Government, , , ,

I used to defend Indiana’s slow progress by pointing out that allowing other states to innovate and then seeing what worked and what didn’t was prudent. What happened in State X after it did thus-and-so, and what can we learn about the best way to handle thus-and-so?

Unfortunately, that justification too often mistakes stubborn resistance to change for prudence.

That bureaucratic refusal to consider past error was especially annoying in the initial effort to get the Indiana Department of Transportation (INDOT) to rethink its automatic approach to repairing the Interstate highways that divide the city’s downtown.

As I have previously written, it was inarguable that at the 50-year mark (which we hit a few years back),those interstates required  extensive repairs. A group of downtown residents, businesses, architects and landscape architects formed a group they called “ReThink I69/70” and urged INDOT to “rethink” the design of those highways and to mitigate, where possible, the problems they’d created when they were first rammed through the city’s Black and historic neighborhoods.

The racism reflected in the siting of the nation’s Interstate system has been widely documented, and the Biden Administration is confronting the damage.

The interstate system — largely built between the 1950s and 1970s — helped move Americans in large numbers and at high speeds, but its creation required a lot of destruction. History.com reports that “more than 475,000 households and more than a million people were displaced nationwide” due to federal highway construction. “Hulking highways cut through neighborhoods, darkened and disrupted the pedestrian landscape, worsened air quality, and torpedoed property values.”

That damage was largely inflicted in Black and Latino neighborhoods. That wasn’t an accident. At Yale Law Journal, Sarah Schindler writes that the “placement of highways so as to intentionally displace poor black neighborhoods” was commonplace in places like New York, Miami, Omaha, Oakland, and many other American cities. “Although this work was undertaken in order to make places more accessible to cars,” she adds, “it was also done with an eye towards eliminating alleged slums and blight in city centers.”

Knocking down poor neighborhoods to make room for commuter highways was inherently racist, the Los Angeles Times adds: “Highway builders often defended taking property in Black neighborhoods by arguing the land was cheapest there — a fact that relied on government-backed mortgage redlining policies that discouraged investment in Black areas.” Sometimes the harmful intent was more overt, Reuters reports. In Montgomery, Alabama, the state routed Interstate 85 “through a neighborhood where many Black civil rights leaders lived, rather than choosing an alternate route on vacant land.”

The need to address structural problems in our aging roadways gave Indianapolis a rare opportunity to address the problems created by those initial decisions. The ReThink group argued that  thoughtful revamping could improve traffic flow and restore community connectivity and walkability. It could also spur economic development that would significantly add to the city’s tax base–nothing to sneeze at, given our fiscal constraints. It is rare that a city gets such an opportunity.

The initial response of INDOT was to ignore and dismiss the alternatives promoted by the ReThink coalition. It took considerable time and effort to get the agency just to back off its initial plans to add lanes to the current configurations,  consuming more real estate and increasing the divisions between neighborhoods. By the time the coalition had generated enough attention and support for redesign, the northeast section of Indiana’s Inner Loop was already being reconstructed–in place, but thankfully, without the additional lanes and concrete walls.

The remaining work, however, may benefit from the persistence of the ReThink coalition and  the Biden Administration’s emphasis on the need to address the mistakes (and animus) of the past

Today Mayor Joe Hogsett, Congressman André Carson, Rethink Coalition, and the Indy Chamber announced a $2 million grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT). The award will fund a planning study around the southeast leg of the I-65/I-70 Downtown Inner Loop near the Fletcher Place and Fountain Square neighborhoods, examining how to create more livable, reconnected communities around the interstate while maintaining interstate commerce and regional travel.

“This federally funded study will help guide our community as it looks at ways we can reunite neighborhoods divided by the original interstate program,” said Mayor Joe Hogsett. “Thanks to USDOT, INDOT, and our community partners, this announcement begins a process that could have lasting benefit for generations of Indianapolis residents.”

There’s a broader lesson here. Citizens who are sufficiently aroused can move lawmakers and bureaucrats.

Chinese citizens forced changes to their government’s  COVID rules. Iranians are protesting their government’s “morality police.” Israeli citizens are opposing Netanyahu.

Margaret Mead said it best : Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.
 

 

An Approach That Deserves Emulating

Public Policy and Governance, , ,

A recent report in the Indianapolis Star focused on the lack of affordable housing in Indianapolis and the state.

The research had been done by SAVI, a program of The Polis Center at IUPUI that partners with United Way of Central Indiana. SAVI is an online community information system that provides data to government agencies and organizations, and maintains a website making that data freely accessible. (The paper no longer has the resources to independently research such matters.)

In Indianapolis, there are only six affordable rentals for every 10 extremely low-income households, and .there are virtually no vacancies in that category units, making it hard–if not impossible– for extremely low-income households to find an available unit.

Since 2017, the city has supported the construction of 3,842 units of affordable rental housing and 887 permanent supportive housing units by private and nonprofit developers, according to an IndyStar analysis of city data. Permanent supportive housing units are a type of housing for formerly homeless people that includes social services and often cover rent with housing vouchers.

Of the affordable rental units, no more than about 744 are reserved for and required to be affordable to very low-income individuals, who are those making $32,000 for a one-person household or $41,000 for a three-person household.

The city has also supported the creation of 333 affordable homes for lower-income households to own.

That still leaves a shortage of 33,600 homes.

Indiana’s legislators evidently took time out from their obsessions with women’s reproduction and CRT to pass  a bill last session creating a new statewide affordable housing tax credit. The city believes that will boost local government’s ability to build low-income housing using the federal low-income housing tax credit program.

The lack of low-income housing and the growth of homelessness are hardly new problems, here or elsewhere. Municipal governments and CDCs (Community Development Corporations) all struggle with the issue, recognizing that the lack of housing feeds into a number of other social ills, especially crime, so I was fascinated to read about an approach being taken by Kansas City that seems promising.

Kansas City began with an intervention aimed at the most dire manifestation: homelessness.

In order to help alleviate homelessness—and to improve the cleanliness of the city—Kansas City’s Public Works department is collaborating with local nonprofits to create new jobs for some people who are unhoused. The employees of the Clean Up KC initiative were paid to pick up litter from underserved inner-city areas for three months. It’s been crucial—not just for keeping the city cleaner, but for improving chances that they find housing, for which employment is a major criteria. At the end of the program, many have moved into housing, and a new cohort of workers will start a new pilot soon.

The approach being tried by Kansas City recognizes the inter-relationship of social problems, and of the challenges faced by folks who have fallen on hard times–or never known any times that weren’t hard.

Crucially, finding housing is often easier with employment, as it’s more appealing for private landlords and sometimes on a list of criteria for public housing. As part of the program, the nonprofits also helped the workers navigate the housing system. “A goal of this is helping them to create a sustainable, successful life,” Parks-Shaw says. “And you can’t do that without housing.”

Research has shown that investments in programs to help people who are unhoused reduces spending for cities—and taxpayers—on healthcare and emergency department visits.

The obvious question about this particular approach is: what happens to these people when the program–and employment–end?

For the program graduates, there may the opportunity for full-time employment. Kansas City’s Full Employment Council will provide the additional training and certification needed to work for the city on a permanent basis. “I see this as a win-win for our unhoused individuals, and a win-win for the city at a time when we’re struggling to fill positions and meet the needs of our community,” Parks-Shaw says.

That paragraph reminded me of long-ago proposals addressing joblessness by making government the “employer of last resort.” 

In Kansas City, providing employment through government addressed much more than homelessness; not only did formerly homeless people find housing, but workers removed litter and piles of trash from city streets, enhancing the municipal environment.

If America ever emerges from the cold civil war and focuses on solving public problems, Kansas City may provide an approach to emulate. 

 

 

The Importance Of Local Politics

Local Government, ,

One of the reasons so many of us in today’s America feel angry and hopeless is the effect of what has been called the “nationalization of politics.’  That nationalization has been facilitated by the media we consume , which reports almost exclusively on national news– local newspapers that still exist increasingly confine their coverage to sports and crime and no longer regularly cover local government and politics.

As an article from Vox recently confirmed, America may have local political institutions, but it increasingly has a nationalized politics–and for a number of reasons, that needs to change.

If you own a home and pay local taxes, have children in the public schools (or depend in any way on an educated population and/or workforce), live in a neighborhood where public safety is a concern (and that’s pretty much every neighborhood), you have a big stake in what happens locally–and as I posted a couple of days ago, those local races also matter more politically than most people realize.

So why is participation in local electoral politics so anemic?

The overwhelming majority of Americans consume disproportionately more news about national politics than about state and local politics. In one analysis, 99 percent of respondents in a typical media market never visited websites dedicated to local news. In a typical local election, fewer than one in five citizens bother to vote.

The last several decades have seen the standardization of parties across state lines. I recently saw a website in which a Republican running for  a local office described herself as  “pro life, pro gun, pro God.” (I’m sure God is grateful…) There was no explanation why any of this should matter–I’m pretty sure she was running for a position where she would have little or nothing to say about any of those issues. She was just signaling her Trumpist “brand.”

I’m sure this “homogenization” of partisans makes it easier for voters, who can just vote based on the R or D next to a candidate’s name. But when everyone running for office is a clone, the individual candidates themselves don’t much matter.

But the short-term convenience of standardized brands comes at a long-term cost for democratic accountability: If local candidates know that they won’t be evaluated on anything more than the D or R after their name, it changes how they think of their role. What can they do if their electoral fate depends almost entirely on national tides? As Hopkins writes, “Today’s vote choices are simply too nationalized for politicians to build much of a reputation separate from their party’s.”

The thing is, in the cities we inhabit, candidates and local institutions do matter–a lot!– and local efforts to support good candidates are much more productive than a few dollars sent to Beto O’Rourke, et al (although I hasten to say I plan to do both and you should too.)

And we have some first-rate, “non-clone” candidates running for local offices.

I became interested in our local prosecutor’s race, for example, because my youngest granddaughter–a high-school senior–has been interning in his Conviction Integrity unit. He established that process to review past convictions, to ensure that they had been dealt with properly–to catch errors or miscarriages of justice. When he took office, he also announced that he would focus the (necessarily limited) resources of the office on the prosecution of serious threats to public safety–and those serious threats didn’t include cases involving small amounts of pot.( He got a lot of flak for that from our local culture warriors, but I applauded.)

I recently had a wide-ranging discussion with that Prosecutor–his name is Ryan Mears–  and I was impressed not just with his very thoughtful and informed approach to criminal justice issues, but with his commitment to Indianapolis. That commitment is based on a belief that positive change at the local level is both necessary and  possible–and that improving our city matters.

I wholeheartedly agree.

Most of us are not in a position to affect national politics, but we definitely are able to make a difference locally. We can work to elect people who genuinely care about their communities–and , not so incidentally, to defeat the local Trump clones who just want to wage culture war and are clearly uninterested in doing the day-to-day grunt work needed to make our communities better places to live. I’ve begun meeting with other candidates for local and state office, and I intend to lend my (somewhat wizened) hand to selected campaigns.

if nothing else, participating in local races will allow me to actually do something–something that potentially matters.

It’s my way of fighting my feelings of political impotence. And maybe it will keep me from being so grumpy…

 

 

Wow…Indianapolis Is Doing Something Right

Local Government, ,

A few years ago, my husband and I took a long-planned cruise around South America. Our point of embarkation was Buenos Aires, and we booked a small hotel that had been recommended to us for a few days before setting sail, to see a bit of the city. The street in front of the hotel was being repaved, and we were struck by how Argentinians approached that task –they weren’t “resurfacing” the street by putting a few inches of asphalt over the roadway, they were reconstructing it. We watched as they dug down at least two feet, and carefully prepared the substructure before repaving it (with granite, no less!)

When they were done, they expected it to last many, many years.

I don’t know how other cities in the U.S. approach street maintenance, but as long as I have lived in Indianapolis, I have seen the way our city “fixes” our potholed thoroughfares. City administrations have repeatedly  covered the crumbling substructures with thin coats of asphalt (at the same time confirming the old political adage that “long-term to a politician is until the next election.”)

I have not been all that happy with our city’s current, timid administration (for reasons not relevant to this post), but credit where credit is due: they are actually rebuilding city streets. Properly.

We moved in May to the downtown core, and realized we’d moved into a construction zone; the major thoroughfare running past the exit to our parking garage has been torn up for months. But we’re not complaining, because the City is actually repairing it the correct way–digging down and rebuilding, just like the street repair we’d seen in Argentina.

Now there is news that the city will take that same approach to other, formerly neglected streets in Indianapolis–not just those in the urban core.

As the Indianapolis Star recently reported

Ninety miles of residential streets throughout Indianapolis will get complete makeovers next year through a rare $25 million infusion of cash.

The streets will not simply be repaved, but entirely reconstructed, reflecting a shift in strategy for the Department of Public Works from surface-level fixes to more expensive, but more longterm, deeper fixes.

That “shift in strategy” is more than welcome. Indianapolis–and all of Indiana–has followed the “penny wise, pound foolish” method of infrastructure maintenance for far too long. The usual approach–visually paving over the problem and pretending it’s solved–saves dollars initially, rewarding politicians who then brag about doing more with less while ignoring the fact that those superficial “fixes” cost taxpayers much more over the longer term.

But hey–longer term, most of them intend to be occupying a different/higher position…Leave it for the next guy to deal with.

In all fairness to our short-term politicos–they think they are being responsive to the majority of constituents who insist on government services on the cheap, the citizens who want to drive on smooth roads, visit well-maintained parks, and depend on properly trained and equipped police and fire departments–but who definitely don’t want to pay an extra nickel in taxes in order to support those services.

This attitude is incredibly shortsighted. Not only do the quick fixes require more frequent resurfacing, driving on streets that are constantly pockmarked and potholed due to underlying structural failures causes flat tires and bent rims that those tax-averse citizens end up paying out-of-pocket.

The administration says that funds to do Indy’s streets properly are coming from savings that accumulated during the pandemic, when city departments instituted hiring freezes and cut discretionary spending. Those funds should be augmented by Biden’s massive infrastructure bill, allowing even more repairs.

Proper street re-construction will take more time, and will cause traffic problems, but I for one will be delighted to put up with those inconveniences.

Now, if we could only get our utilities to buy into that longer-term strategy and bury their poles and wires…think of how much money they’d save after the next storm takes their above-grade infrastructure down, causing widespread outages…