Indianapolis Sustainable Communities Monitoring Report - Southeast

The Local Initiative Support Corporation (LISC) Sustainable Communities Initiative supports community-driven efforts to revitalize neighborhoods through comprehensive community development. In 2006, Indianapolis launched the Great Indy Neighborhoods Initiative (GINI) to promote healthy communities through comprehensive quality-of-life planning and development. This effort has resulted in several programs and targeted investments in six demonstration sites throughout the city. This report is intended to help local funders, civic and neighborhood leaders, and LISC staff monitor change in these areas of concentrated investment by providing local data and indicators of quality of life in one of the six demonstration neighborhoods, Southeast.

The graphs and maps used in this report are based on the best-available information from local and national sources. Although these indicators do not show everything about the neighborhood’s quality of life, they do refer to items many residents believe are important. To monitor change in Southeast, we identified a comparison neighborhood elsewhere in the county that measured similarly to Southeast on several key indicators* and trends** but is not part of GINI or any other significant development efforts. This report compares the targeted area within Southeast to its comparison areas (see map on p. 4) with the assumption that the investment in the targeted area will result in improvements that will not be seen in the comparison area.

For the purpose of this report, the following definitions are used to describe the neighborhood and comparison areas (see map on p. 4):
Southeast – the census tracts that make up the entire Southeast neighborhood. (Tracts 3578.00, 3573.00, 3572.00, 3571.00, 3570.00, 3569.00, 3562.00, 3559.00, 3557.00, 3556.0

Southeast Target Tracts – the census tracts within Southeast that represents the area receiving the most investment and is the area being monitored for change. (Tracts 3570.00, 3569.00, 3559.00)

Comparison Tracts – the census tract outside of the Southeast neighborhood used for comparison against the “Southeast Target Tracts.” The assumption is that the “target” tract will show improvement over the “comparison” tract over time. (Tracts 3555.00, 3512.00, 3576.00)

Marion County – the entire county is used as a relative measure to show how the target neighborhood compares to the larger area in which it resides.

This report uses 2007 as a baseline because many of the programs began in that year. Many programs, however, may have been in the works before this start date, including some that were not related to the GINI effort. The report includes the trends leading up to 2007 to depict how the neighborhood was doing before this local planning effort began (e.g., Has the neighborhood been prey to the housing market bust? Has it been experiencing economic growth? Has neighborhood safety been declining?). These trends are important to consider when determining whether a program is positively impacting a neighborhood.

This report is organized by the following quality of life categories, beginning with an overview of the neighborhood and its residents:

• Community Quality and Safety
• Housing and Real Estate
• Income and Wealth
• Economy and Workforce
• Education
• Health

Additional neighborhood maps not referenced in the text are included in the appendix.

*Single-Unit Property Median Sales, Two-to-Three Family Property Median Sales, Robberies per 1,000 Persons, % Racial and Ethnic Minorities, % Owner-Occupied Properties, Median Family Income, and Crude Birth Rate

**3-year Trend in Single-Unit Property Median Sales Price, 3-year Trend in Two-to-Three Family Property Median Sales Price, and 2-year Trend in Robberies per 1,000 Persons