State officials have unveiled an updated housing dashboard to help communities across Indiana track housing inventory.
Officials say the tool underlines large gaps in housing availability.
The state’s initial housing dashboard was released in late 2021 and aimed to give regional officials access to information about local housing needs. Most of the dashboard is built on 2021 census data, with more recent sourcing available for things like evictions.
Stephen Enz is with the Indiana Housing and Community Development Authority. He said the new dashboard greatly expands the data available and also offers advice on how to use that information.
“The real push is to make sure that communities know that housing needs to keep up with job availability,” he said. “That’s the way we’re going to grow our workforce and that’s the way we’re going to grow our economy.”
Enz said the dashboard shows a huge gap in housing for extremely low-income households. Roughly 130,000 more units are needed statewide.
For renter households earning less than $35,000 annually, the amount of housing stock is roughly even with the reported need.
But Enz said that just because the dashboard shows housing in your price range is available across the state, that doesn’t mean it will be available where you are living.
“They might be affordable but I can’t get to them, I can’t get home from work,” Enz said. “That’s when you have to look at it a lot more close to home – you have to go to either city or town.”
The state’s dashboard can pull up data on both individual counties and city by city.
West Lafayette, for instance, shows massive gaps in available housing for households making less than $20,000 – with just 387 units available to some 5,000 renter households. That means about 8 percent of households in that income bracket have access to housing within their price range.
In Indianapolis, an estimated 9,000 units are available to over 43,000 households making less than $20,000 – meaning just 21 percent of renter households in that income bracket have access to affordable housing.
You can view the state’s housing dashboard here.
