Indianapolis city officials and homelessness service providers on Tuesday plan to announce an $8.1 million push to end street homelessness, beginning by rehousing hundreds of people by next year.
Led by the Coalition for Homelessness Intervention and Prevention, or CHIP, the collective will implement a long-term plan called Streets to Home, which some advocates hope will create a more sustainable, balanced system to serve Indianapolis’ homeless. The first step: house people living in tents and at encampments.
Advocates have long argued that homelessness is a solvable problem and have called upon Mayor Joe Hogsett to invest in a solution that includes housing and wraparound services. Similar systems have been implemented in other cities, including Cleveland and Houston.
Stakeholders initially planned to announce the initiative in a Tuesday afternoon press conference, but the event was scrapped in the late morning, according to city spokeswoman Emily Kaufmann. She cited “recent events” as the reason for the shift.
Monday night’s City-County Council meeting erupted in chaos after Lauren Roberts, who had accused Hogsett’s former deputy mayor of sexual harassment, was forcibly removed from council chambers during her public testimony regarding a recent external report that examined the city’s handling of her allegations and those made by other women. Roberts has said the report omitted key documents and details, including “uncomfortable” text messages sent to her and another woman by Hogsett.
The Streets to Home initiative will instead be formally announced in a virtual press briefing.
“Mayor Hogsett’s commitment to end chronic and unsheltered homelessness in Indianapolis remains unwavering,” Kaufmann said.
Indianapolis’ documented population of people living in encampments has yo-yoed under the current system—the 339 people counted while sleeping outdoors in January 2024’s annual census of the homeless population represented a slight decrease from 2023, but is 72% higher than when the same count occurred in 2022 and triple that of 2019.
“People are dying on our streets waiting for housing,” CHIP Executive Director Chelsea Haring-Cozzi told IBJ. “We know that’s not OK, and we have to do something about it.”
How Indianapolis plans to eliminate street homelessness
Efforts will ramp up in August, Haring-Cozzi said, with the goal of housing between 300 and 350 people currently in unsheltered homelessness over the next nine to 12 months.
Starting in July, CHIP will coordinate the rapid rehousing of a test group in a small encampment of five to 10 people. Rapid rehousing connects homeless individuals with housing, then gives them short-term rental assistance and support services, such as case management. Ultimately, the intervention aims to give people access to housing quickly, increase their self-sufficiency and keep them housed.
Rdoor Housing Corp.’s housing acquisition team will identify units for these individuals, while the city will distribute tenant-based rental assistance to ensure they can stay housed. Tenant-based rental assistance is an income-based, yearlong program that helps low-income renters afford market-rate rent, as well as security deposits, utilities and other housing costs.
The $8.1 million for Phase 1 will come from three sources:
• $2.7 million from the city of Indianapolis, allocated from federal opioid settlement relief funds and approved by the City-County Council on Monday evening;
• $2.7 million from the Housing to Recovery Fund, a fund within The Indianapolis Foundation that includes private, philanthropic donations. That funding will specifically pay for supportive services, like mental health support or job training;
• An additional $2.7 million to be raised from philanthropic, corporate and faith-based communities.
The city funding and additional funds sought by the Mayor’s Leadership Council are one-time infusions to launch the first phase. The Housing to Recovery Fund will allocate $2.7 million to support the first phase of the initiative. It’s unclear how much the fund will allocate to the initiative in the future.
Subsequent phases will aim to house those living in shelters, then divert 2,500 individuals from entering the homelessness system. Plans also call for continued efforts to stabilize the Indianapolis Housing Agency and prioritize vouchers for those experiencing homelessness. Those phases do not yet have a goal budget or timeline.
Stakeholders’ ultimate goal will be to identify long-term funding sources, including Medicaid waivers, to continue the work.
Previous plans ‘haven’t really moved the needle’
Following an August screening of “Beyond the Bridge,” a documentary on homelessness by a local filmmaker, Hogsett told attendees that political will and leadership are necessary to ensure homelessness is “brief, rare and non-recurring.”
At that screening last fall, Hogsett also announced the creation of the Mayor’s Leadership Council on Homelessness, which includes members of 17 groups and organizations, including the Indianapolis multi-faith community and the Indy Chamber. He also appointed senior policy advisor Aryn Schounce as the administration’s housing czar.
Schounce said this initiative is the culmination of that commitment. The Mayor’s Leadership Council on Homelessness, which is convened through the Greater Indianapolis Progress Committee, began meeting last October. Since then, it has laid the groundwork for Streets to Home.
“This is really meant to accelerate the community’s efforts around chronic and street homelessness,” she said. She said that previous citywide efforts through the Indianapolis Continuum of Care “haven’t really moved the needle on” street homelessness.
The increase in street homelessness may have fueled the recent push for a statewide ban on public camping at the Statehouse. Republican state lawmakers repeatedly introduced legislation to create legal penalties for sleeping on public property after lobbying from the Texas-based think tank Cicero Institute.
Schounce said that the first phase of Streets to Home Indy is often referred to as a “camp decommissioning strategy.” Cities like Houston have aimed to house all individuals living outdoors and close the encampments where they once lived.
Haring-Cozzi said a year’s worth of work with national experts led to the plan’s creation, including the specific projections. For example, the 2,500 individuals the plan aims to divert in the third phase should end the homelessness system’s “bottleneck,” where there isn’t enough space or bandwidth of services for those in crisis, she said.
The new effort coincides with the Indianapolis Continuum of Care’s newest community plan to end homelessness. A previous iteration of the plan, from 2018 to the end of 2023, fell short of its goal to end chronic homelessness.