TheStatehouseFile.com traveled to the Wayne Township Small Claims Court on the west side of Indianapolis last week, where court workers say they see an excess of 400 eviction cases a day. To combat the high rates of evictions, attorneys and court employees work tirelessly to provide assistance to tenants whenever they can.
Indiana is currently going through an eviction epidemic, with 301,625 eviction filings since March 2020, according to the Eviction Lab. Indianapolis alone is experiencing higher eviction rates than New York City and Houston.
When you walk into the court, there are workers there to point people in the direction of the free legal council provided by the Indianapolis Legal Aid Society.
“We will let people know, if you’re facing eviction this morning and you’re a tenant, we are available to speak to you. It’s free legal service,” said Jack Humphrey, a legal aid staff attorney.
Humphrey spent his morning going from meeting with tenants to less than one hour later representing them in court.
One of the people he represented was a Wayne Township resident who is a single mother who had recently gotten an eviction notice after she missed one month of payment to her landlord. Humphrey pleaded to the judge for an extension of time to make a payment because the only reason she had missed was due to her child having to undergo surgery.
This was a common theme among the defendants in the court—people who had missed only one or two payments after living in the property for a substantial amount of time undergoing the eviction process.
“A lot of people live paycheck to paycheck,” said Humphrey. “So any sort of statutory cushion we could get to give them time to cure [the problem] past a due date.”
One Hoosier who had an eviction filed against them was a 62-year-old woman who had multiple chronic health issues, and her only source of income was disability checks. The woman had to make the two-hour journey to the court by bus to make sure she could arrive on time to the courtroom. She was given two weeks to vacate the apartment.
Luckily for her and many Hoosiers like her, the courts offer the assistance of their court navigators. These employees work with tenants to help them find new housing options while they go through the eviction process.
While the court staff were visibly working very hard to assist those coming into the building, some court workers pointed to how short staffed they were due to the increased caseload.
“If there are more lawyers available to do this, I think that would definitely be helpful to get people out,” said Humphrey. “This is done during a weekday, people have got to take off work. I’ve talked to people that thought, ‘I hope I’m not fired.’”
In 2024, NPR reported that nationally, the United States is facing a housing shortage of between 4 and 7 million homes. Extremely low-income Hoosiers are dealing with a shortage of almost 140,000 units.
The CEO of Indianapolis Legal Aid Society, John Floreancig, and COO David Sneeden suggested that the eviction problem may be systemic from a practice by landlords managing their rental payments by filing for eviction.
“We will have clients that will be five days late every period because of the cadence of their payments and their paychecks. The landlord will institute and file an eviction, the tenant will pay current a couple of weeks later,” said Floreancig. “Then that just happens over and over again.”