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During the pandemic, Professor Fran Quigley changed the focus of his Health and Human Rights Clinic to that of representing low-income tenants. He wrote a column about the experience that was published in the Indianapolis Star.

Saying he expected students to learn about housing law, Professor Quigley indicates in the piece that he and his students learned much more. “We learned about racism, including the ongoing legacy of government endorsed redlining that blocked generations of Black families from home ownership. With home equity the chief source of family wealth in the U.S., housing discrimination is the driver behind white families still having nearly eight times the wealth of comparable Black families,” he writes in the column.

Housing subsidies, Professor Quigley points out in the column, are affordable. Some of the clinic’s clients are spending up to 80% of their income on rent. Indiana has one of the highest eviction rates in the nation, and nearly 90% of the landlords evicting people in Indianapolis are corporations. Subsidies to keep low-income tenants in their homes could be made available for less than the cost of the mortgage interest deduction, Professor Quigley writes. It’s a benefit which chiefly goes to Americans in the top 20% income bracket.

Professor Quigley is a 1987 graduate of IU McKinney, where he is a Clinical Professor of Law and teaches in the Health and Human Rights Clinic. Clinic students advocate for the rights of the poor, with a focus on individual and systemic barriers to accessing healthcare and the social determinants of health. His latest book, Religious Socialism: Faith in Action for a Better World, was published in September 2021. He is the author of several academic journal articles on social justice and human rights, multiple mass media articles and columns, and five books including this most recent work. Prior to his work at the law school, he served as the first Chief of Staff for Congresswoman Julia Carson and as the executive director of ACLU of Indiana.  He edits the newsletter Faith in Healthcare and contributes to and helps edit the publications of the Religious Socialism working group of the Democratic Socialists of America.