Indiana
Indiana led U.S. in February foreclosure rates, Indy among worst metros
Affordable housing is limited in Hamilton County. Here’s why.
Jennifer Miller, HAND’s executive director, shows Home Place Gardens and speaks about the need for affordable housing in Carmel and Hamilton County.
Kelly Wilkinson, Indianapolis Star
At a time when “affordability” is the watchword in politics nationwide, recent data shows that Hoosiers faced more risk of losing their homes last month than residents in any other state.
Indiana reported the nation’s highest foreclosure filing rate in February, according to real estate data company ATTOM. What’s more, the Indianapolis region ranked among the worst-performing major metro areas.
The findings contradict the view of Indiana and the Indianapolis region as affordable havens where residents can more easily own homes. Experts say that home prices remain low compared with other states but have risen steeply since 2020, increasing property taxes. Upticks in other expenses like homeowners’ insurance and utilities, along with stagnant wage growth, have put an increasing number of Hoosiers at risk of losing their homes.
“This is a bad look for us in general, and it does indicate that our affordability problem is kind of reaching a crisis,” said Sara Coers, associate director of the Indiana University Center for Real Estate Studies. “We have a lower natural ceiling on what we can afford because of the wages that we receive here.”
What Indiana foreclosure data shows
Last month, about one in every 1,600 housing units in Indiana had a foreclosure filing, which means lenders took legal action against a homeowner who failed to keep up with their monthly mortgage payments. That foreclosure filing rate was the worst in the nation and more than twice as high as the average U.S. rate, the data shows.
The situation is even worse in the Indianapolis metropolitan area, which landed at No. 3 among metros with over 200,000 people with the worst foreclosure filing rates.
In the Indianapolis region, roughly one in every 1,250 housing units had a foreclosure filing — about three times worse than the national average. Evansville was the only other Indiana metro to make the list, right behind Indy at No. 4.
The problem isn’t new, but it’s growing worse. After falling between 2020 and 2021 thanks to pandemic relief programs, Indiana’s foreclosure filing rates have since rebounded. Throughout 2025, Indiana consistently ranked among the 10 worst states, according to the Fair Housing Center of Central Indiana.
What’s behind the affordability crisis
Experts like Coers and FHCCI Executive Director Amy Nelson say the recent spike in foreclosure filings is in part due to rising escrow amounts — monthly payments for property expenses like taxes and homeowners’ insurance.
From 2019 to 2025, Indiana’s average escrow payment rose more than 50%, according to data analytics company Cotality. Today, about one-third of the money that Hoosier homeowners send to lenders each month goes toward those escrow costs, rather than paying down the home loan itself.
Beyond those property costs, residents are consistently spending more money on electricity bills, groceries and now gasoline, because of the war in Iran.
Higher costs especially strain residents in Indiana, a state where wage growth has lagged further behind the U.S. average in recent years, IU’s Indiana Business Research Center reports. More Hoosiers work lower-wage jobs in manufacturing or transportation than the national average, Coers said, and therefore they struggle to weather economic crises.
“Credit card usage is way up, savings rates are way down, and people just don’t have anything to back them up if things don’t go perfectly,” Coers said. “And if your expenses keep rising, but your wages are not keeping pace, it’s just really hard to stay abreast of your own household expenses.”
Households can often avoid foreclosure proceedings by being upfront about their financial struggles with lenders and finding alternate payment plans, said Trevor Meeks, chief consumer solutions officer for the Indianapolis Neighborhood Housing Partnership. Instead of losing the home through foreclosure, they might be able to sell it to help cover housing costs while they recover.
He said he’s worked with local families who found themselves in financial crises after losing jobs or working reduced hours. He mentioned one single-parent household that was forced to choose between paying for their child’s college tuition and paying the mortgage.
“Our mortgage borrower made the very difficult decision to cover the cost of tuition themselves and jeopardized their ability to make the mortgage payment on time,” Meeks said.
How Indiana leaders are responding
Indiana lawmakers in both political parties have increasingly called affordability a top concern, including Republican Indiana Gov. Mike Braun.
In a March 19 interview with IndyStar, Braun noted that Hoosier homeowners will soon get some relief as his sweeping property tax reform law, Senate Enrolled Act 1, takes effect this year. Two-thirds of homeowners are projected to see a lower property tax bill in 2026 than last year, mainly through tax credits that will save households up to $300.
With policies like this year’s House Enrolled Act 1001, Republicans also took steps to reduce the cost and regulatory burden on homebuilders so they can build more housing to help ease prices, Braun said.
To tackle the other side of the issue and boost wages, the governor said he’s pushing the Indiana Economic Development Corp. to create 100,000 more high-wage jobs in agricultural and life sciences in Indiana over the next decade. He said the state will commit $1 billion to that goal.
Braun’s property tax reforms have been criticized for offering meager savings to homeowners while sapping revenue from local governments, likely forcing leaders to make cuts to services like education and infrastructure unless they impose higher income taxes.
But Braun said Indiana’s staggering foreclosure filing rate shows that households need relief and local governments need to make do with less.
“I think if local governments are complaining about revenues being too slim, well, that obviously would be something that’d be hard to square with the fact that property tax payers, specifically as it relates to homes, are having trouble making ends meet,” Braun said. “So that means something’s got to give in the middle.”
Email Indianapolis City Hall Reporter Jordan Smith at JTSmith@indystar.com. Follow him on X @jordantsmith09 and Bluesky @jordanaccidentally.bsky.social.
Indiana
7 Indiana legislators face Trump-backed primary challengers after bucking him on redistricting
Seven Indiana Republican state senators are facing off Tuesday against primary challengers backed by President Donald Trump as he seeks to exact revenge over a failed redistricting plan.
Trump’s intervention in the typically quiet local primary races have brought a flood of money and national attention to the state. Roughly $12 million has been spent on advertising across the seven contests, according to the ad-tracking firm AdImpact, most of which has come from Trump-allied outside groups opposing the incumbents.
The Republican-led state Senate dealt Trump a rare rebuke when it voted down a redrawn congressional map he backed that was designed to result in two additional seats for the GOP. It was part of a broader mid-decade redistricting battle playing out across the country ahead of this fall’s midterm elections, when control of the narrowly divided U.S. House will be up for grabs.
But ultimately, the heavy-handed pressure campaign from Trump and his allies backfired. Now, they are revisiting similar lines of attack in their bid to unseat the seven lawmakers, turning the contests into another test of Trump’s grip on the Republican Party.
The most expensive of the primaries is for the seat represented by state Sen. Spencer Deery, who’s facing a challenge from Paula Copenhaver, an aide to Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith. More than $3 million has been poured into ads in a district of approximately 135,000 people. Deery served as an aide to former Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels when he was the president of Purdue University.
State Sen. Greg Goode is running in a three-way primary against two unrelated candidates with the same surname: Vigo County Council member Brenda Wilson, who has Trump’s endorsement, and Alexandra Wilson, a network engineer.
As NBC News reported last month, White House officials and Trump allies aggressively sought to push Alexandra Wilson out of the race, fearing she’d act as a spoiler in the race and help Goode survive.
State Sen. Travis Holdman, who’s been in office since 2008, serves in leadership as the third-most powerful Republican in the chamber. He is facing challenge from Blake Fiechter, a real estate agent who is backed by Trump. Fiechter briefly left the race in February, telling local media he was overwhelmed, but changed his mind after a White House visit in March.
State Sen. Greg Walker was set to retire last year after 20 years in the chamber, but reversed course amid the redistricting fight, where he notably broke down in tears speaking about his fear for the future if his party caved to Trump’s intimidation. State Rep. Michelle Davis, who was already planning to run for his seat, stayed in the race after his reversal and won Trump’s support. Walker’s campaign has spent just $73,000 on ads, while outside groups have funneled more than 1.3 million in ads in support of Davis.
State Sen. Jim Buck, 80, has served in the state Legislature since 1994, first in the state House before heading to the state Senate in 2008. He’s facing his first primary since joining the state Senate from Tipton County Commissioner Tracey Powell. Powell has Trump’s endorsement, while Buck has the backing of former Vice President and former Indiana Gov. Mike Pence.
Elsewhere, state Sen. Linda Rogers, who owns and manages a golf course and a home building company, is running against Dr. Brian Schmutzler, an anesthesiologist who said on his campaign website that he opposes “government health mandates” and tax hikes. He’s also said he was motivated to run by the redistricting fight.
And state Sen. Dan Dernulc, who represents a district in the northern part of the state near Chicago, has faced far less outside spending in his fight against two challengers, Trump-endorsed Trevor De Vries, an insurance broker, and financial analyst Nader Liddawi. While the six other races have each seen more than $1 million in ad spending, Dernulc’s primary has only hit $346,000.
Trump also waded into one of the open primaries for the seat currently held by retiring state Sen. Eric Bassler, who voted against the redistricting effort. The president backed former state Rep. Jeff Ellington, who is facing two Republican opponents on Tuesday.
PLAINFIELD — Light spills from a window above a wooden fixture of the crucifixion at Saint Susanna Catholic Church as parishioners weave through the pews at the close of the 11 a.m. mass on a recent Sunday.
Most leave, but some stick around for coffee and doughnuts, a fundraising effort for the church’s prison ministry, which provides rosaries, Bibles and faith study materials to inmates at the Hendricks County Jail. In the hallway are stacks of letters to U.S. Sen. Jim Banks, Sen. Todd Young and Rep. Jim Baird, urging them to support programs to reduce hunger at home and abroad.
“Cuts to SNAP and international assistance have already put millions at risk,” the letter reads, citing Jesus’ refusal to turn a hungry crowd away in the Bible verse Matthew 14:16. “We can and must do better.”
Those cuts have been hallmarks of President Donald Trump’s administration, which has taken a less generous, and at times adversarial, approach to those in need globally as it looks to reduce spending. The strategy has contributed to a larger tension between Catholicism and the president; at the helm of this opposition is Pope Leo XIV, the first American-born pope, whose criticisms of the war in Iran have increasingly landed him in Trump’s crosshairs.
But Catholics across the nation, including at Saint Susanna, told USAToday and IndyStar that they favor the pope’s approach.
“He has done it elegantly, but yet very stern,” Eloisa Garza, who helps run the prison ministry, said of Pope Leo after mass at Saint Susanna on April 26. “Being an American, which we are Americans, that’s what sometimes other countries look at us to do as leaders.”
Garza, 70, said she appreciates that Pope Leo has the courage to speak when the world needs a powerful voice rooted in faith. His role as the first American-born pope only adds to the impact, she said.
She runs the prison ministry along with Harla Lyle, 84, who also commended the pope for his “quiet, serene composure.”
Even when in conflict with some world leaders, Lyle said, Pope Leo sticks to faith.
“I think that he really is a symbol,” she said.
The trust in Pope Leo comes as the pontiff fields blistering attacks from Trump. After the pope called Trump’s threat of annihilation in Iran “unacceptable,” the president fired back that Pope Leo was “weak on crime.”
The tension between the two men is sometimes amplified by Vice President J.D. Vance, a Catholic himself who has openly disagreed with the pope and warned him to be “be careful” when discussing theology.
American Catholics have largely backed the pope in the past, and the broader public has continued to view the pope favorably. More than two-thirds of U.S. voters who are Catholic said they view the pope favorably, according to a November 2025 poll. Three-fifths of Americans in general view the pope in a positive light, too, a Reuters/Ipsos poll found in April.
Chicago native John Paloma, who now lives in Camby, Indiana, said he used to live “down the road” from where the pope grew up. Paloma said he appreciated that the pope has not engaged in extended battles with those who criticize him.
“There might be some controversy, but as long as he keeps to the faith, what could you say?” he said, sitting at a table after mass with fellow parishioners. “My hope is still high.”
Bob Duty, an 84-year-old man sitting with Paloma, shared a similarly positive view.
“I like the pope,” Duty told IndyStar. “He’s from America.”
Contact breaking politics reporter Marissa Meador at mmeador@indystar.com or find her on X at @marissa_meador.
A man is dead following a May 4 collision on westbound Interstate 64 west of Corydon, Indiana, according to a news release from the Indiana State Police.
ISP Sgt. Carey Huls said the two-vehicle crash occurred around 5:45 a.m. when Zachary Burdin, 31, was traveling westbound on I-64, and his vehicle collided with the back of a truck with a trailer full of paving equipment.
Burdin was pronounced dead at the scene by the Harrison County Coroner. There were no other injuries reported. Officials do not attribute the crash to any weather conditions.
Huls said the crash was cleared from the highway by about 9 a.m., and there are no current issues.
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