Tag Archives: Indianapolis

About “The Least of Us”….

Sunday sermon time…

Homeless people make most of us uncomfortable. The reasons vary: some people are frightened or intimidated, believing that unkempt and sometimes strange-acting street people pose a physical danger. Others feel guilt over a comparatively privileged status. Still others simply lack compassion and want “those people” to stop cluttering “their” landscape. A San Francisco Catholics Church evidently fell in the latter category.

First the water rained down, and then the condemnation rained down — and on Wednesday, San Francisco’s embarrassed Roman Catholic Archdiocese said it would tear out sprinklers that have been dousing homeless people sleeping in the doorways of its premier church in the city.

I’m sure Jesus would have been proud….

Here in Indianapolis, we haven’t been hosing down the homeless, but we’ve been hosing them in other ways.

As I’ve previously written, last year, a local group of independent filmmakers documented the City’s embarrassing treatment of homeless individuals (and the fact that NO public dollars are spent on programs to help them). The film actually motivated citizens to demand action by the City County Council–and the Council responded by passing a “Homeless Bill of Rights.” (Can we spell “democracy in action”? Very encouraging.)

Then the Mayor vetoed the ordinance.

The “usual subjects” defended the Mayor’s veto, because (wait for it) the constitution already gives homeless folks these rights. (Which were being so carefully observed by local authorities…)

The Huffington Post has an interesting report on the veto, under the headline: Hoosier Reputation Taking a Beating. (That’s a bit unfair–thanks to our legislature, our reputation is already pretty badly damaged….)

Prior to the historic vote and once humanitarian arguments were set aside, both sides debated the cost of granting equal rights to persons without housing. Opponents of the HBR feared high litigation costs should persons experiencing homelessness file lawsuits demanding equal access to public places.

I hate to point out an inconsistency here, but if homeless folks already have these rights, then they also already have the right to sue. And I haven’t noticed any “flood of litigation” over the City’s constant violation of those rights.

Proponents of the HBR cited statistics proving the cost of incarcerating the persons experiencing homelessness — something that is done now because homelessness is effectively illegal in Indianapolis — makes the HBR a cost saving measure.

We can argue costs and abstract rights until the cows come home, but I can’t get one scene from the documentary out of my head: the police trashing the pathetically few possessions of homeless people in an encampment that had become a sad but supportive “community”–throwing into dumpsters the books, chairs, tents and other items that these down-and-out folks had managed to hold onto, and telling them to scatter, to “go somewhere else.”

But not telling them where, because in Indianapolis, there are few, if any, places to go.

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Socializing Risk, Privatizing Profit and Evading Referenda

Let’s talk about the proposed Criminal Justice Center, shall we?

First: I think the project itself makes all kinds of sense.

Second: The way it is being planned, financed and constructed makes no sense at all–if by “making sense” we mean serving the public interest and creating a long-term public asset.

It’s the parking meter fiasco redux. The city could have upgraded the meters for a relatively reasonable sum, raised the rates as the vendor did, and retained additional millions of dollars to be used for public purposes. Instead, we enriched a private contractor and ceded control of our parking infrastructure for fifty years.

The proposed approach to the construction of the Justice Center promises to be far, far worse, because all of the incentives are perverse. The current plan (to the extent the Administration has shared any information, which it has been largely unwilling to do) has private developers designing, constructing and financing the center, then leasing it to the city.

The “virtue” of this approach is simple: the Administration has devised a clever financing mechanism that allows it to avoid the pesky requirement of a public referendum and the level of public scrutiny such a referendum would require. (Any project that would result in taxes exceeding the now-constitutional tax cap must be submitted to public vote.)

The defects of this approach are numerous.

  • It will cost more. Cities with excellent credit ratings (Indy’s is triple A) can borrow money at lower rates than private entities.  I’m told the interest rate spread is at least 2%; on 500 million dollars, that’s a chunk of change. Furthermore, private entities must include a profit (and usually cover taxes) in the quoted price.
  • That need to build in a profit margin is a powerful incentive to cut corners on design and construction–decisions will be based on return on investment considerations rather than quality and/or the long-term value of what will eventually be a public asset. (As my husband says, public financing gives us buildings like the old Federal Courthouse; leasebacks give us buildings like the post office on South Street.)
  • Public projects of this size and scale provide lots of opportunities for crony capitalism–for spreading the goodies among one’s political donors and friends.

And there remain important unanswered questions.

For example, what happens if the City defaults, or finds future revenues insufficient to make lease payments high enough to cover those higher costs? The Administration’s estimate of available revenues includes some highly problematic “savings” it anticipates by reason of the new construction. Which City services will be sacrificed to ensure that the required payments are made? Will our already underfunded public safety budget be cut? Will even more roads go uncleared or unrepaired? Will our public parks be even more neglected?

The problem with “deals” like this one– delivered to the City Council as “take it or leave it” propositions with no meaningful opportunity to ask tough questions or consider potentially superior approaches–is that we taxpayers get stuck with decades-long liabilities agreed to in the dark by people who will be long gone when the bills come due.

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Crime Control: We Need to Learn from the Big Apple

The New York Times recently reported on the state of criminal activity in the Big Apple.

Mayor Bill de Blasio said on Tuesday that a city his opponents once said would grow more dangerous under his watch had, in fact, become even safer.

Robberies, considered the most telling indicator of street crime, are down 14 percent across New York City from last year. Grand larcenies — including the thefts of Apple devices that officials said drove an overall crime increase two years ago — are also down, by roughly 3 percent.

And after a record-low 335 homicides in 2013, the city has seen 290 killings in the first 11 months of this year, a number unheard-of two decades ago.

Indianapolis, by contrast, has had 130 murders through November 25th. In the 2010 census, Indianapolis had approximately 830, 000 residents; New York City has an estimated 8,500,000. In other words, we have not quite a tenth of the population, but nearly half as many homicides.

According to official reports, it isn’t just New York (although the Big Apple is among the leaders in the decline.) Homicide rates in cities all across the country are falling.

Ours aren’t. The question is: why?

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A Task for Indy’s Next Mayor

So, yesterday, Joe Hogsett opened his campaign office, joining fellow Democrats Ed Delaney and Frank Short who previously announced they’d be opposing Greg Ballard. Early as it is, it would seem that the mayoral race is officially on.

Whoever wins that election will have his job cut out for him. (And yes, “him” is the proper pronoun. So far, Indy hasn’t exactly embraced female candidates for mayor, and this time around we don’t have any.) To suggest that our city faces multiple challenges would be a real understatement–from transit (rather, the lack thereof), to crime, to poorly maintained parks, to battles over the Mayor’s role in decisions about how to fix our schools, to debates over municipal funds for fancy sporting venues, the list is long–and resources to deal with the problems are getting ever more scarce.

You can add to the list of obvious issues a less recognized one: our unenviable status as the U.S. city with the fastest-growing inequality. According to the Institute for Working Families’ Derek Thomas,

This week, the Indy Star reported on the U.S. Conference of Mayors’ ‘Income and Wage Gaps Across the U.S.’ report. The story presented the group’s finding that “wage inequality grew twice as rapidly in the Indianapolis metro area as in the rest of the nation since the recession.”

The consequences of that inequality can be seen everywhere: in taxes we don’t collect, in hopelessness that leads to all manner of social dysfunction, in crime, in economic development that isn’t sustainable….

The candidates contending for our votes need to demonstrate that they understand the ways in which these problems are interrelated–and they need to tell us how they plan to address them.

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Save the Date

I’ve written before about  Uncharted: The Truth Behind Homelessness.

The film focuses on how Indianapolis deals with its homeless population. It illuminates the issues that all major cities have to confront about their homeless citizens: downtown panhandling, homeless camps in the way of urban gentrification, underfunded human services, and endless debates over whether local government has an obligation to provide services to homeless people and if so, the nature of those services.

You won’t be surprised to learn that Indianapolis doesn’t do very well dealing with these issues–which may be why Mayor Ballard has thus far refused filmmakers’ invitations to view the documentary. That’s too bad; I have seen it twice, and I can attest to the fact that it is meticulously even-handed; interviews with a number of City representatives are included, and there are no “bad guys” hung out to dry.

Plus, it is a really gripping, well-done film.

The filmmakers, A Bigger Vision, have invited the community to attend one of two free screenings at the IMA on August 30th, at 1:00 pm and 4:00.

You can get tickets here.

You can see a trailer here.

The issues are anything but simple, and (despite the Mayor’s evident fears) their treatment is non-accusatory. Anyone concerned with the quality of life—let alone the quality of mercy– in Indianapolis should make an effort to attend one of the upcoming showings.

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