How is Indianapolis Doing?

The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted nearly every aspect of life in American cities for the past two years. Indianapolis is no exception. Beyond the devastating loss of life and lingering health effects for our friends and neighbors, the pandemic upended our economy, daily routines, and many other facets of life.

This project tracks the ongoing pandemic recovery in Indianapolis with regularly updated visualizations on some of the most pressing and challenging issues in our community.

This project was inspired by The City, based in New York City. Special thanks to our intern team of Aravind Chintalapudi, Sai Chirag, Ted Deitz, Veena Mahesh, and Shruti Mukadam for their work to keep this data updated.

The COVID-19 pandemic created one of the biggest global economic downturns in history. The stock market crash of 2020, supply chain disruptions, and general economic uncertainty led to layoffs at an almost unprecedented rate. The overall US unemployment rate peaked at 14.7 percent in March 2020 near the pandemic’s beginning and has just recently returned to the pre-pandemic (February 2020) rate of around 3.6 percent.

Through much of the recovery, Indianapolis’ unemployment rate was lower than the nation’s. It increased in spring 2022, but this was because more people joined the labor force, not because people lost jobs.

The recovery from the unemployment high of 14 percent in April 2020 was slow and steady. Indianapolis gained jobs each month between May and August of 2020. Job growth stalled during the winter of 2020-2021, but was steady during the spring and summer of 2021, finally hitting pre-pandemic levels in July 2021. However, another decline occurred in September 2021 as the Delta variant caused a peak in COVID-19 cases, resulting in 3,000 lost jobs.

Since then, despite the Omicron variant causing the highest case number peak in the winter of 2021-2022, job growth has been steady.

Monthly number of employed people compared to February 2020

Indianapolis

If you’d like to know more about the sectors and the types of jobs included in each, you can look at the groupings here.

Even if you were not house hunting during the past few years, you have no doubt heard about the difficulty in finding affordable housing. It is a nationwide problem that hit Indianapolis hard. The median home price in the Indianapolis metro area increased by over $60,000 between 2020 and 2022. Prices have become so high that for the first time since the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta began their affordability index in 2014, the Indianapolis Metro Area has been designated as an “unaffordable” housing market.

Monthly Rent

Not everyone owns a home. One third of Central Indiana households rent, and rent has also been increasing over the past few years, albeit at a much slower pace than home prices. Rent increased 1.2% per month in 2021, compared to just 0.3% per month in 2020.

If you’d like to compare rents in Central Indiana to other metros, see Apartment List.

The discussion about inflation in the U.S. economy has dominated news coverage during the pandemic and has topped the list of American’s concerns recently, as tracked by Gallup. Inflation is driven by pandemic relief funding, disrupted supply chains, and Russia’s attack on Ukraine. For many consumers, gas prices were the most obvious sign of price increases.

Gas prices have risen everywhere in the country, but in Indiana our especially high gas taxes have combined with inflation to produce particularly high prices. Recent months have finally shown a decline in prices.

The figures below show prices in Indianapolis compared to one month and one year ago at this same time.

Gas Prices

Indianapolis, as of 01/08/24

By now you've probably read an article or two about how downtown office buildings are struggling to return to pre-pandemic levels of usage. Kastle Systems, an office facility security provider, tracks how many people are swiping their key cards to enter office buildings in major metro areas. Nationwide, the weekly average share of employees going into the office has hovered around 40 to 45 percent of pre-pandemic levels.

While we don't have that data available for Indianapolis, real estate firm Cushman & Wakefield does publish quarterly reports on the office building market for our metro area. Their reports track two key indicators for the health of the office market: vacancy rate and net absorption rate. Vacancy rate is the percentage of office building square feet that could be occupied, but is not. Net absorption shows whether there has been more square footage leased than vacated, resulting in a positive rate. A negative net absorption rate means that more square footage has been vacated than leased.

Indianapolis Metro Area: Office Real Estate Indicators

Murders increased 27% in 2020 nationwide, the largest single year jump in over 60 years. Then, in 2021, they increased again. In 2022, homicides have actually been declining around the country. Here in Indianapolis, there has been an intense focus on the murder rate and increase in violent crime locally. 2021 had the highest number of homicides in the city's history, but things started to trend downward in 2022.

*Previous versions of these charts were sourced from IndyStar, which is no longer tracking the total number of homicides by year. As a result, we now source from WRTV, which has slightly different numbers but trends remain the same.

Homicides by Year, per 100,000 population

Marion County, Indiana

Indianapolis received $420 million in relief from from the American Rescue Plan Act. $91 million was spent on replacing lost revenue due to the pandemic and $27 million will be spent on property tax relief for homeowners. The remaining $303 million will be spent on anti-violence programs, economic recovery, and neighborhood investments.

For a list of some of the programs that will be funded, see this budget book that was presented to City-County Council in August 2022.

The chart below shows the total relief spending so far from the American Rescue Plan Act. Obligated funding is committed to a program but not spent. Spent funding represents actual program expenditures. As more information becomes available, we will add data on spending categories and impacts.

Cumulative pandemic relief spending

Quarterly amount represents a cumulative total since the beginning of the program

Total spending by category