Fishers, Carmel don't think renters deserve single-family homes

Indianapolis Star

06-05-2025

Hamilton County cities are scapegoating Wall Street so they can award affluent buyers and existing homeowners with exclusive access to single-family houses and keep away unsavory renters.
City officials in Fishers and Carmel argue it's necessary to ban renters from subdivisions where single-family homes hit 10% renter-occupied. It's every American's right to treat shelter as a financial instrument, they argue. If we can't all leverage hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt to purchase a home in hopes that it behaves like a mutual fund, are we even a country?
'That's been a part of the middle class kind of American Dream for a long, long time,' Fishers Mayor Scott Fadness said, per Fox59. "We're just simply trying to put policies in place that would protect it.'
First Fishers, now Carmel
The Fishers City Council on April 21 unanimously approved a 10% rental cap. Now, Carmel is taking up the crackdown on renters, with City Council President Adam Aasen echoing Fadness.
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'There are a lot of people who are renting, who want to buy, and they just can't find homes for sale,' Aasen said, per IndyStar. 'When they do find reasonably priced homes ... they're outbid by a corporate investor who wants to turn it into a rental.'
The problem, in this view, is that Wall Street firms are treating homes as investments, making it more difficult for individual buyers to … treat homes as investments.
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Wall Street isn't the actual target here. Fishers and Carmel are making a qualitative distinction between homeowners and renters as resident classes. Proponents of single-family rental caps say homeowners take pride in their properties while renters neglect them, causing houses to fall into disrepair and dragging down neighborhood values. City officials avoid directly disparaging renters by blaming the ills on out-of-town landlords.
This is where the logic gets tortured. The pro-rental cap theory is that investors are making housing unaffordable by bidding up prices and buying all the homes while simultaneously causing property values to fall by letting them go to hell.
So, which is it? Are the investors causing prices to go up? Or down? Wrapping your mind around these mutually exclusive claims can feel a little like circling the roundabout at 96th Street and Allisonville Road until you crash.
Ban, baby, ban!
The most generous interpretation of these 10% rental caps is to view them as a response to bad landlords letting properties fall into disrepair and forcing tenants to live in poor conditions. This is a real problem, and I've reported on it extensively.
I can't believe I have to say this next part, but I guess I do. The solution to bad landlords isn't to ban rental housing. That's like saying the solution to drunken driving is to bring back Prohibition. Instead, cities should enforce housing codes and penalize landlords that violate them.
Of course, Indiana doesn't let cities do that. When Indianapolis tried to crack down on derelict property owners in 2020, the Indiana General Assembly responded with strict legislation preventing cities from regulating landlords.
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Landlords hold all the power in Indiana, and neither tenants nor cities can do anything about it. It is ironic, then, that the Indiana General Assembly in April briefly considered a measure that would nullify rental caps like the one Fishers passed and Carmel is considering.
Cities want to ban rental housing because the legislature bans them from regulating landlords, so now lawmakers want to ban cities from banning single-family rentals. That about sums up the relationships between municipalities and state government in Indiana.
10% caps make the housing problem worse
Of course, this isn't a story about landlords or Wall Street. Homeowners don't want to share neighborhoods with renters, so Fishers and Carmel are codifying their preference and justifying it by tapping into the moral panic over institutional property owners.
This obsession is disingenuous. Based on Carmel's figures, only about 2% of the city's housing stock is owned by institutional investors. Investors are neither juicing nor destroying home values. They're one out of a hundred factors influencing housing economics.
If you want to look deeper, then we can also talk about how building costs are rising and interest rates are higher than they used to be. Lending approvals are tightening, making homeownership available only to people with high incomes, down payment cash and excellent credit.
As I wrote in March, the average homebuyer age hit 56 last year, according to the National Association of Realtors. Increasingly, the only single-family housing option for young families is renting. Fishers and Carmel are making desirable single-family subdivisions inaccessible to those families — something they might want to be wary of as Hamilton Southeastern Schools is suddenly soliciting students from outside of the district to combat falling enrollment.
Housing is unaffordable because we don't have enough of it. It's that simple. Restricting the pool of people who can occupy homes in Fishers and Carmel will reduce the incentive for builders to construct new housing, because there will be fewer people who qualify to live in them, exacerbating the supply problem while pushing renters into communities that value them, like Brownsburg.
If you don't want renters, fine. Just say that. Don't ban them and pretend you're doing it to protect the American Dream. The only thing Fishers and Carmel are protecting is homeowner exclusivity.