Bloomington's Homeless Situation. Is it on a bloom or just a balloon?

For unfamiliar readers, Bloomington, Indiana is a medium size college town home to Indiana University and roughly 80,000 residents. It is filled with college sports, city events and festivals, and many places to explore. According to the 2022 Census data the average income per household is $46k and a poverty rate of %31 which makes it the poorest city in America…

Except it isn’t. Despite what The Bloomingtonian which is a repost of what Insider Monkey says. In actuality, it is an error in the methodlogy of testing that Census used where the seasonal college student portion of the population creates incomparable results. A disclaimer that is listed right below the data.

When taking this into account, Bloomington is actually only the 21st poorest city in Indiana, in an article post created by The Herald Times.

This doesn’t mean Bloomington doesn’t face poverty or a unhoused community much like any other city. If you were to visit the downtown streets of Bloomington or pass by Seminary Square, you would see people suffering from homelessness (if the city hasn’t already pushed them out recently) Or if you take a look at Bloomington’s subreddit you will be greeted with the near scheduled post about the homeless every week.

Research

As a current student at Indiana University studying Sociology, I wanted to explore if these claims of homelessness being the highest at all time, homeless people being bused to Bloomington by the dozen, and resident’s attitudes towards the homeless population.

In my research I analyzed the latest Bloomington community survey, virtually sat in on a public city meeting, talked to a key person that is helping create resourced for the unhoused, and analyzed peoples Reddit comments.

What I saw and heard was quite interesting. For starters a common theme came up in my research, NIMBY. An acronym that describes the sets of behaviors and attitudes of someone that does not want anything happening in their backyard in fear of change and their property lowering value because of new developments happening near them.

When I looked at the Bloomington survey, I was interested in seeing if people’s income affected the way they supported new housing developments. The results showed it does, in fact the middle-class residents opposed the most when asked of the city should create new housing throughout the city opposed to those that answered with other income levels.

During the city board meeting one of the parts of the agenda was approving a plan for a new community center to support the unhoused population proposed by Beacon Inc, a longstanding non-profit that has other projects we’ll see more about in a bit. The meeting was quite long, procedural, and boring but the Beacon project got approved by all the council members.

For the interview part of my research, I searched for key community service members that could give more insights on the unhoused community in the city and what they are doing to help support them.

Lastly in my research I analyzed the Bloomington subreddit and search for posts titled with the words homeless, affordable housing, and the term NIMBY. What I found was alot of comments I probably shouldn’t show and a very diverse range of perspectives residents held about the homeless situation. Some people blame affordable housing unobtainable in the city, some blame IU and accepting more and more students, some blame the city other blame larger political issues, some showed little empathy and claimed it’s a drug problem. Its one big game of finger pointing.

Some with some help of a tool I coded I could actually see the common words people used about a topic and the overall sentiment people had towards homeless without having to read every single comment. What was interesting from this was how on reddit people who posted negative sentiment on average got downvoted deep into the negatives.

Homelessness has been an issue in Bloomington for a long time and evidence shows it is at an increased rate. And I think I have a possible answer for that.

When Beacon or another organization creates new services or programs it gets referred by others in the homelessness community and by social workers which is great on the surface. Over time it will keep being recommend and at a rate higher than then the programs can rehabilitate, so it turns out that these programs actually attract more homeless individuals in surrounding areas. Turns out there is a term for such phenomenon, the magnet effect.

This research is by no means the highest quality or should be taken as truth but it does show how much one could easily learn on their as a concerned resident or someone wanting to bring awareness to the issue.