Mayor Joe Hogsett says he's fixed 2,500 blighted homes. Does this look 'transformed'?

The house at 942 S. Kenwood Ave. is uninhabitable.

The doors and windows are boarded up, there is black graffiti sweeping across the south side and some kind of plant is peeking up out of the chimney — all signs pointing to a future when the house is likely razed to make way for Lucas Oil Stadium parking.

The crumbling dwelling is emblematic of nearly 14,000 vacant or abandoned homes that Indianapolis counted as of January 2018. Yet, Mayor Joe Hogsett considers it part of a success story — one of more than 2,500 homes that are nonetheless classified as "transformed" thanks to an initiative intended to combat blight and criminal activity.

Hogsett in 2017 pledged to “rehab, transform or demolish 2,000 homes within the next two years.” The mayor and his staff have trumpeted the initiative in at least seven speeches and 11 social media posts, including messages on Facebook and Twitter last month that proclaim the mayor “blew past” his goal.

Fact check: Hogsett's misleading statements about housing fix

But the dilapidated house on Kenwood Avenue reveals how Hogsett's 2,000 homes initiative has filled up an impressive scorecard of activity while falling short of the promised neighborhood transformation that might have been achievable through a more deliberate plan. A monthslong IndyStar investigation found that Hogsett’s housing program:

• Has not targeted violent neighborhoods that are most in need of help
• Inflates numbers by counting everything from hundreds of new luxury apartments to existing homes that received minimal maintenance and sometimes remain in unlivable condition
• Calculates work by such a scattered spectrum of government departments and programs that it is impossible to pinpoint a focused or consistent strategy

What's more, IndyStar could not independently evaluate the success of Hogsett's program by using similar data from previous years because, aides said, such data does not exist. As a result, IndyStar could not determine whether the number of vacant or abandoned homes in Indianapolis — perhaps the most basic objective measure of an urban housing plan — is better or worse since Hogsett took office.

What is counted in the numbers

City officials and residents interviewed by IndyStar point to signs that Hogsett has made progress toward demolishing and remodeling blighted homes, but some were taken aback by how the city has racked up numbers by counting high-end apartments and routine repairs as victories.

When Hogsett has talked publicly about the program, he has emphasized city-funded remodeling projects and demolitions. He has held press conferences at sites where construction vehicles crashed into houses and knocked them into piles of debris.

But those direct actions constitute fewer than half of the interventions his administration is taking credit for. Of the more than 2,500 housing units the city counts as transformed, 424 are demolitions, 394 are property sales and 83 are remodels.

The rest include 717 newly constructed housing units — most of which are subsidized rental homes — and 1,028 repairs, a nebulous category that includes everything from owner-occupied improvements to code violations that compel property owners to fix problems.

When IndyStar asked Hogsett about the investigation's findings, the mayor acknowledged discrepancies between his description of the housing program and what it has accomplished. Perhaps most significantly, when Hogsett announced the 2,000 homes initiative, he described it as a public safety solution.

“Somewhere in this city, today, a child biked around a block, passing blighted properties and abandoned homes,” Hogsett said in his 2017 state of the city address. “Danger lurks everywhere. No neighbors sit on those front porches. No other children play in those front yards. We must do better for that child.”

But, in the interview, Hogsett said he couldn’t “remember exactly how I characterized it” and said it “was not envisioned to be exclusively a public safety-related, violent crime-related program.” Instead, Hogsett said, the initiative was about setting an imprecise goal and attempting to quantify all of his administration’s work on housing.

“My intent all along is to take whatever steps are necessary to make improvements and to improve housing stock, improve market-rate availability and, by doing so, improve neighborhoods,” Hogsett said. “We can argue about the nomenclature. … But I think it’s fair to say … that we have improved housing stock and improved neighborhoods in excess of 2,000 (units) throughout the city.”

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‘I don’t feel any safe here’

If the neighborhood north of 10th and Rural streets is improving, Danny Martinez is not seeing it.

Martinez, 35, has lived on Gale Street for nearly three years. Fear nags at Martinez, preventing him and his 11-year-old niece from walking to Brookside Park just blocks away.

“I’d rather drive,” Martinez said. “We would rather go somewhere else. I don’t feel any safe here.”

Many of the vacant and abandoned buildings dotting the streets contribute to the area's crime problem, said Indianapolis Metropolitan Police officer Adam Moss, who has patrolled that beat for more than two years. 

Driving down Gale Street, Moss scanned the houses near Martinez's home: "I've been inside most of these here." 

He's found stashes of stolen property and people who are using drugs. He's even seen abused dogs and bodies of people who died of drug overdoses. 

Moss said he can keep people out of the vacant homes whenever he's able to reach the homes' owners. For many of the properties controlled by shell companies, though, Moss said he can never identify the owners, let alone reach them.

"We really struggle to get anyone with any authority to call us back," Moss said. "This area would be great for young families."

That area is one of the most violent in the city. At least 135 violent incidents happened there last year, including three criminal homicides and at least 42 crimes involving guns.

Hogsett’s housing program, however, counts just 27 interventions in that area over two years.

More to that point, data analyzed by IndyStar show the city has not targeted violent neighborhoods for housing investment: Areas experiencing the top 25 percent of violence received 11 percent of the housing interventions.

IndyStar collected two sets of data — one outlining the city's interventions and another listing all violent crimes in 2018 — then identified corresponding census tracts, a term referring to an area typically larger than a neighborhood and smaller than a ZIP code. Not every violent incident (fewer than 5 percent) could be counted because of discrepancies with how the addresses were entered by police officers and other issues. The remaining data, more than 10,500 records, were analyzed.

There is anecdotal evidence that some Indianapolis residents have benefited from the city's housing work during Hogsett's tenure. Candace Robinson, for example, waited years to see a crumbling house at 3311 N. Colorado Ave. be torn down near her.

"It was full of water, raccoon infested, the roof collapsed in," Robinson said. "The next strong wind, it was going to come down."

When the city demolished the house in 2017, Robinson and her neighbors went outside to watch.

"We were just happy," she said. "It happened so quick and I've never seen a demolition. It was kind of nice to watch."

But even when a challenged neighborhood receives help from the city, it’s not clear that isolated demolitions can have a widespread impact on violence and blight.

Take Martinez’s neighborhood. Most interventions near him aren’t home renovations or demolitions. They’re mostly repair orders stemming from code violations.

Martinez, meanwhile, can see five vacant houses from his front porch. One across the street is even listed by Hogsett as another transformed home. 

Luxury apartments boost stats

At one end of Hogsett’s 2,000 transformed homes spectrum is a dilapidated house. At the other end is River House, a $19.5 million Broad Ripple apartment complex that offers rooftop views and access to the Monon Trail.

Hogsett in March celebrated River House as a successful piece of his housing initiative when it opened along the White River.

"Neighborhood revitalization starts with aiding in repairs and rehabs, tearing down blight in Indianapolis neighborhoods and supporting new construction of housing and apartments — vacant lots and underutilized land are opportunities to create productive market-rate and affordable housing units," a press release from the mayor’s office said of River House.

The mayor’s characterization baffled Colleen Fanning, a Republican on the City-County Council who represents Broad Ripple. Fanning in an interview with IndyStar stressed that the property was not blighted. It housed a fully occupied office building.

"I think River House has been great for Broad Ripple," Fanning said. "But it was office space before and it was actually sorely needed office space. We’re trying to scramble to add more office space to support the small businesses here."

Despite a shortage of commercial space in Broad Ripple, developer Todd Morris of Birch Tree LLC decided his property would be more optimal for a mixed-use project.

"It was a good building for us," Morris said. "We knew that the site demanded more."

His firm replaced the old 15,000-square-foot building with a 125,000-square-foot apartment complex that includes retail and some offices. The new project is making better use of the site, Morris and Fanning said.

Hogsett is counting all 87 apartments at River House toward his 2,000 homes goal. But, in an interview, he highlighted eight of the apartments, where rent starts at about $1,000 per month for people who meet low-income qualifications. The rest of the apartments rent for higher prices.

"You might say, 'Well, wait a minute, this isn’t what he was talking about, building this beautiful development,'" Hogsett said. "Well, maybe it wasn’t necessarily the focus of the emphasis that we put on problem properties. But, what it does successfully do is incorporate into the Broad Ripple community some apartments that are below market rate, or affordable."

Fanning agreed that the cheaper apartments are a win for Broad Ripple, particularly in exchange for the $2.7 million in developer-backed bonds that the city issued to support River House. But she questioned how the overall complex relates to Hogsett’s housing promise.

"It’s important to note there are eight (affordable) housing units included in the River House project," Fanning said. "I think maybe those can count a little more, but certainly it isn’t appropriate to say that housing was transformed in Broad Ripple because of River House. Transforming 100 percent occupied office space into multifamily housing, that’s not exactly what most people would imagine Mayor Hogsett is referring to when he talks about housing transformation across the county."

The River House apartments are among 717 new construction units that Hogsett says have been built, with the help of city subsidies, as part of his initiative. That also includes The Vue, a 242-unit luxury apartment complex near Fletcher Place, and Hellenic Senior Living, which includes 125 homes for senior citizens near Greenwood.

All told, luxury apartments and senior housing comprise 454 units, or 17 percent, of the homes Hogsett is taking credit for. That's more than the number of uninhabitable homes demolished — 424 — over the same time.

Jefferson Shreve, a City-County Council Republican, whose district includes The Vue, told IndyStar he doesn’t understand how those luxury apartments match Hogsett’s 2017 promise.

The Vue is a $28 million project developed by Herman & Kittle Properties. The project had been in the works since 2014, before Hogsett took office and right in the middle of an apartment construction boom. The city supported The Vue through environmental cleanup at the site.

"The administration can’t say, 'Look what we did,' " Shreve said. "That’s just the Downtown multifamily housing market doing what it’s been doing for the last half-dozen years."

Shreve complimented the Hogsett administration's work on housing, but said the mayor should focus on demolitions and remodeling projects when taking credit for success.

"I think the administration is making material headway in knocking down houses and I think the houses that are coming down are the ones that should be coming down," Shreve said. "(The Vue), to me, is just the private capital market at work. That was no magic of the Hogsett administration."

A miscellaneous collection of data points

The down-in-the-weeds policy work behind Hogsett’s initiative began in 2016, in his first year in office, as an effort to collect in one place all of the actions taken to address housing issues. When neighbors report a problem to the city, they want to know what the city is going to do about it.

"The goal was to be able to track and count and account for all city interventions and properties," said Mackenzie Higgins, a Hogsett policy aide. "We wanted to tell the full story about what we're doing as a city, but it's obviously very complicated."

The effort transformed into a political initiative ahead of Hogsett’s 2017 state of the city address. And what started as a miscellaneous collection of data points from an array of city agencies was soon slapped with an arbitrary goal: 2,000 homes in two years.

The bulk of the city’s housing work includes assisting in newly constructed housing units and taking credit for more than 1,000 repairs.

The repairs category, a vague catch-all that amounts to 40 percent of the interventions, includes such things as owner-occupied improvements made using federal money as well as code violations that compel property owners to fix problems such as falling gutters.

It's not clear to what extent the city is responsible for improvements made by homeowners.

Mike Bundren, for example, in 2017 received code violations for flaking paint and damaged windows and doors at his house on Moller Road near Interstate 65. But, when he answered his door to talk to reporters on a recent Friday afternoon, Bundren said he was unaware of the city's repair orders.

"If they sent it, I threw it in the trash," Bundren said.

Bundren received and paid a $500 fine, according to city records. But Bundren said he was fixing up his one-story house, which he bought in 2014, for personal reasons. As Bundren spoke, a ladder leaned up against his house and there were signs of fresh landscaping work. Bundren said he recently sanded his floors.

"Yeah, we fixed it up once we got here," Bundren said. "But the city didn't have anything to do with that. That was just, so when I sell it, it'll be worth more."

The city's patchwork of housing programs — from multiple agencies using several funding sources with different priorities — makes it difficult to assess the 2,000 homes initiative as a coordinated solution to blight, violence or anything else in particular.

While code enforcement is considered an important city function, it can offer a skewed picture of housing improvements because violations tend to originate from homeowners who complain about properties in their neighborhoods. Healthy neighborhoods can, somewhat counter-intuitively, generate more code violations than transient, low-income neighborhoods where properties are more likely to fall into disrepair.

"It’s driven by human behavior," said Thomas Stucky, the executive associate dean of the Paul H. O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs at IUPUI. "And that’s a very important point, because it may very well be that the locations where you have people that bother to call in a code violation are where you have (at least) some minimal level of interest in the neighborhood stability."

Stucky is the co-author of a 2012 study in Social Science Quarterly that found foreclosures, a predictor of vacant and abandoned homes, were associated with increased crime in Indianapolis between 2003 and 2008.

Stucky is not the only researcher to draw connections between housing and lawlessness. Other research has concluded that housing initiatives can be effective tools for combating crime — so long as there is a strategy in place. A 2018 paper in the Journal of Criminal Justice, for example, found that demolitions were associated with reduced violent crime in Detroit between 2009 and 2014.

Stucky emphasized that it is difficult to prove causation. But, to the extent that housing interventions can make a difference in criminal activity, they are most likely to succeed when targeted in small geographic areas, Stucky said.

"There is an argument to be made that concentrated activity in one area is perhaps better than an equal amount of activity spread across a variety of areas," Stucky said. "There are tipping points here. Let’s say that you have a block that has three dozen documented code violations and you handle one of them. Probably not going to make an impact. If you have one that has 10 (code violations) and you address all 10, the residents of that neighborhood, they’re probably likely to see a difference."

Hogsett's program is anything but concentrated on high-crime areas. Again, just 11 percent of the housing interventions have happened in the city's most violent areas.

Home on the city’s radar again

It’s impossible to compare the Hogsett administration’s efforts during the last two years to similar work in the past. Hogsett’s office was unable to share comparable data on repair orders, property sales and demolitions from Mayor Greg Ballard’s eight years in office.

Hogsett insists his initiative is a first-of-its-kind effort to account for housing actions taken by city government. Much of the data is available in an online dashboard, which Hogsett says shows a commitment to transparency and establishes a baseline for future administrations.

"It's hard to make an apples-to-apples comparison," Hogsett said. "That's one of the important outcomes of the 2,000 homes initiative. We are now in a position where we can track very, very closely what progress is being made."

The abandoned home on Kenwood Avenue, sitting alone among a grassy expanse in the city’s most violent area, appeared on Hogsett’s transformation list because of a 2015 repair order.

Back then, the building’s owner started fixing several issues discovered in a city inspection, such as a cracking front porch, an unsecured door and foundation problems.

In June 2017, a follow-up city inspection found the problems had been addressed. Case closed.

That timing, which coincided with the launch of Hogsett’s 2,000 homes promise, led his administration to include the dilapidated house among the other “transformed” homes.

In contrast, the property’s condition is actually getting worse, prompting an inspector in June 2018 to issue a new repair order.

"This property is on the city’s radar once again," Taylor Schaffer, a Hogsett spokeswoman, told IndyStar.

It remains one of nearly 14,000 vacant or abandoned homes in Indianapolis.

This year IndyStar is deeply examining the level of violence in Indianapolis: why it is occurring, what is being done about it and what may inspire solutions. The project, called The Toll, also includes a weekly email newsletter. Subscribe for free at indystar.com/thetoll.

Corrections & clarifications: An earlier version of this story noted the wrong street address in a photo caption for the home shown at 942 S. Kenwood Ave. 

Contact IndyStar reporter Ryan Martin at 317-444-6294 or ryan.martin@indystar.com. Follow him on Facebook or Twitter: @ryanmartin

Contact IndyStar reporter James Briggs at 317-444-6307. Follow him on Twitter: @JamesEBriggs