Lose Home

During the Fall 2024 semester, Dr. Patricia Basile taught a course at the geography department at IU-Bloomington, entitled “Housing Struggles Under Capitalism.” This course focused on understanding why we have so many people struggling to afford housing while, at the same time, so many houses sitting empty. They studied the history and policies of housing in the United States and how they have shaped the realities we have today. For the final project, students in the course investigated various questions about housing in Indianapolis.

L. Amani, P. Nascimento, and C. Rivera worked as a group on trying to answer the following question: what makes one vulnerable to evictions in Indianapolis, Indiana?

For their analyses, they used data from the American Community Survey (ACS), selecting specific variables such as gender, race, ethnicity, income to create an index of vulnerability to evictions. The selection of these specific variables was based on findings on who are the people most likely to be evicted from previous research and grassroots organization legal activism. After conducting these analyzes, they created maps to show the spatial distribution of people most at risk of being evicted from their homes in 2017, 2019, and 2021 in Indianapolis.

Overall, their findings show an overrepresentation of Black and African American women who are raising their children alone in the Index. This means that they are the most vulnerable to losing their homes through an eviction.

Check out the zine they produced with the findings from this project!