A Message from Senior Staff Attorney Chase Haller

On April 11th, we celebrated the 51st anniversary of the Fair Housing Act. The Act was passed in 1968, just seven days following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and guaranteeing, as a matter of law, equal access to housing opportunities for all Americans, regardless of race, color, creed, or national origin.

When Dr. King was killed in Memphis, Tennessee on April 7, 1968, he was leading an effort with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to carry out the vision of the Poor People’s Campaign. The focus of the Poor People’s Campaign was to obtain economic justice for poor people in the United States, and to ensure that all Americans have what they need to live a prosperous life. It included policy concepts that are still discussed today: access to affordable housing, poverty relief, universal basic income, etc.

In any discussion around poverty, housing policy is and should be a key consideration because it is the foundation of family life. Countless studies link housing stability with children’s success in schools and with their parents’ abilities to maintain jobs. Housing instability has also been associated with negative health outcomes in children; when a family is facing such instability, their other needs often go unmet, including access to nutritious and regular meals, access to healthcare and necessary prescriptions, and an ability to afford their utilities and other costs of living.

Housing is healthcare. Never has that statement been truer than in the midst of a global health pandemic. Hoosiers are already severely rent-burdened, especially our most vulnerable neighbors. A 2019 Indiana Housing Profile study by the National Low Income Housing Coalition identified that 27% of Hoosier households are extremely low income (ELI), with a maximum income in a four-person ELI household of $24,600. The study also identified a shortage of affordable rental homes for ELI renters of 134,485 units, with ELI households needing an average income of $32,359 to afford a two-bedroom unit at HUD’s Fair Market Rent. That means that 73% of ELI households have a severe cost burden for affordable housing in Indiana.

The COVID-19 crisis has exposed the underbelly of housing policy in the United States: a severe lack of affordable housing, with rent-burdened households currently unable to overcome an economic emergency. As a result of this pandemic, service industries and others have been decimated, with unemployment claims reaching six times what they were at the height of the 2007-2008 subprime mortgage crisis—a time when nearly nine million Americans lost their jobs and unemployment was over 10%. State governments, including Indiana, have issued temporary foreclosure and eviction moratoriums, but these are purely stopgap measures.

We must do more and plan for what is to come. Tenants and homeowners who have not had a paycheck since mid-March are not suddenly going to come up with the money to get their rent current or to send a check to the bank. If we do not respond to this crisis—and do so quickly—the most vulnerable in our society will groan under the economic stress and our country will experience a long period of economic uncertainty.

At the Clinic, we believe in being responsive to the needs of the community. We are working with stakeholders in the non-profit sector as well as in state government to identify possible solutions for homeowners and renters during this crisis. We are responding to increasing calls about threats of illegal eviction and referring the public to other resources to help them. We are committed to walking alongside our brothers and sisters who need us right now.

The vision of the Clinic is “justice for the vulnerable so that all may flourish.” We humbly follow in the legacy of Dr. King and his Poor People’s Campaign, fighting for economic justice and opportunity for our neighbors as a demonstration of Christ’s love for them. Housing justice is a cornerstone of that opportunity. As Dr. King said: “Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to open the doors of opportunity to all of God’s Children.”  

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