The short version · Everything else is detail
The rest of this series runs to nine pages because the details matter. This page is the whole thing in about three minutes.
Marion County is not building enough homes, and it is losing families to its own suburbs.
1,342
Housing units permitted in Marion County in 2025, down from 2,472 two years earlier.
10,653
More people moved from Marion County to elsewhere in the United States than moved in, in one year.
$0
New homes built anywhere in the metro under $225,000. The median new home sells for about $405,000.
Two different things are going wrong at once, and they need different answers. In the weakest neighborhoods almost nothing new gets built, and four houses in ten are owned by somebody who does not live there. Meanwhile, for the poorest households, no amount of new construction arrives fast enough: below 30 percent of area median income, four in five households already have a housing problem.
Five things. Each one has a different body that has to say yes, which is why they move at different speeds.
1
Build or rebuild a home where the market is not building, and the parcel carries a published property-tax abatement that follows the house to its buyer. About $2,900 a year on a $325,000 home.
2
Every one of the county's 253 neighborhoods scored on five federal measures, so the incentive is a calculation, not a negotiation. Strong markets get nothing.
3
Fund receiverships, certify the vacant-property list every year, and stop letting layered companies own buildings nobody can serve with a notice.
4
Three townships still run their own. Their residents pay two to three times the fire rate. The fire department has already planned the merger; the law lets a township veto it.
5
A City-County Councilor cannot introduce a zoning change. In every other Indiana county, an elected legislator can. One sentence of state law fixes it.
This is the part most housing conversations skip, and it is the reason good ideas stall.
| Proposal | Who decides | Earliest |
|---|---|---|
| The abatement and the map | The Metropolitan Development Commission, by resolution. Not the Council. | 2027 |
| Accountability for absent owners | The administration and Corporation Counsel, with Council budget support. | 2027 budget |
| Fire consolidation | The General Assembly, to end the township veto. Then the Council and mayor. | 2027 session |
| Councilors proposing zoning | The General Assembly. | 2027 session |
No. Nothing here raises a rate on an existing home. The abatement applies only to value created by new construction or a substantial rebuild, and only in designated neighborhoods. Fire consolidation would lower the rate in three townships.
The benefit sits on the parcel and shows up on the buyer's own tax record, with the remaining years intact when the house sells. A builder will price some of it in. That is true, and it is in the objections page.
It applies to value that does not exist yet. A vacant lot keeps paying what it pays now. And strong markets, where building happens anyway, get nothing.
Not directly, and I will not claim otherwise. A household at 30 percent of area median income is not buying a new house. That is what the housing fund and the tax-credit pipeline are for, and neither is funded at the scale the need requires.
None of it. The abatement waits on one written legal opinion. The fire merger waits on the legislature. The map is a prototype with one indicator still standing in for another.
Every page in this series marks what is unproven. Here are the three that matter most.
Whether the city can do the abatement at all. It rests on one reading of one sentence of state law, and no lawyer has confirmed it in writing. That memo is the single thing standing between a proposal and a program.
What fire consolidation saves. Estimates exist. None rests on an independent audit, so this series shows no number.
Whether the map is drawn right. Four of five measures are final federal data. The fifth is a stand-in until the Assessor provides the history it needs.
If something here is wrong, the useful thing is to tell me now rather than at a hearing. There is a form for that, and it goes to my inbox.
In the order most people find useful.
The abatement is the core proposal, with a calculator. The map shows where it would apply and who owns the houses there. Affordability is the honest accounting of what each tool does and does not do. Accountability covers the properties nobody answers for. The fire levy is the property-tax half. Who gets to propose explains why a councilor cannot introduce a zoning change. The system is the diagnosis underneath all of it, the timeline is the sequence, and the glossary defines every term.