Mike Wolanin | The Republic Amy Nelson, executive director of the Fair Housing Center of Central Indiana, gives the keynote speech during the Columbus Human Rights Commission dinner meeting at The Commons in Columbus, Ind., Thursday, June 27, 2024.
A home is far more than a proverbial castle, but a literal lifeline.
And where that home is located can dictate health, wealth, and even life expectancy, according to a central Indiana housing specialist who served as the keynote speaker at Thursday’s Columbus Human Rights Commission’s annual meeting at The Commons in downtown Columbus.
Amy Nelson is the executive director of the Indianapolis-based Fair Housing Center of Central Indiana. In this role, she spearheaded the establishment of the agency in 2011 and her leadership has elevated the entity to national prominence.
“Where we live determines our access to quality education,” Nelson said, referring to what she has regularly labeled an extreme housing crisis. “And where we live determines whether or not we are able to build wealth, for instance, through home ownership.”
She said that, in Bartholomew County, where one lives can determine as much as an 18-year difference in life expectancy, from 71 years to 89 years, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.
Her fast-paced, 30-minute address before 360 people included justice-related issues such as lower annual wages for women vs. men ($61,000 for men and $36,000 for women in Bartholomew County); Indiana’s racism through the years on housing, including with the Columbus Board of Realtors as recent as the late 1960s; and the general housing shortage.
Affordable housing has been identified as a major issue by local community leaders as far back as the 1990s.
“Housing is literally life,” Nelson said. ” … When evictions and foreclosures increase, so do suicide rates. In the years of the national foreclosure crisis from 2006 to 2008, a total of 37 percent of suicide deaths happened within two weeks of an eviction notice, or foreclosure court hearing.”
That detail came from The American Journal of Public Health.
“The housing crisis we’re seeing today is not that much different than the crisis of back then,” Nelson said Friday morning.
Nelson’s comments also outlined “a very significant racial gap” in which whites have a much higher rates of home ownership versus Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians, according to statistics the speaker sourced from 2021 census figures in Bartholomew County. Home ownership among whites was 75 percent, 31 percent among Blacks, 57 percent among Hispanics, and 38 percent among Asians.
Nelson also pointed out a few well-publicized generalities: that fewer homes are available today for people to move into a home ownership, which slows their progress to build generational wealth. The partial result is a clogging of the rent market that in turn has helped push rental prices higher, which also slows a renter’s transition to home ownership.
“In this country, of all countries, a person’s zip code shouldn’t decide their destiny,” Nelson said, quoting former President Barack Obama.
Amid challenges, Nelson remains an optimist.
“We can turn things around,” Nelson said. “I have seen things get better here in the state of Indiana when it comes to housing. I see that the movement that started 10 years ago has so many more participants in it than it once did.”
