Is a hackberry a good tree to plant in Indiana?
Hackberry can work here, with caveats. Native and common across central Indiana, especially in bottomlands and fencerows, and now planted widely in streets and parks as one of the recommended post-EAB ash replacements. That popularity is worth flagging to customers — the standard urban forestry guideline is no more than 10% of the canopy in any one species, and several Indiana municipal planting programs are leaning hard on hackberry.
What you'd be signing up to clean up
Pea-sized dark purple drupes ripen in September and October and hang into winter; birds strip most of them, but what falls stains concrete and gets tracked indoors, and the bird traffic itself becomes the complaint when the tree is over a parked car. On top of that the dense fine branching sheds constant small twig litter after every wind event, making hackberry a light-but-year-round cleanup tree rather than a two-weekends-in-November one.
Where to keep it away from
One of the genuinely good root systems for a residential lot: hackberry roots deep, commonly reaching 10-20 ft on most sites, instead of running a shallow mat like the maples. That deep habit makes it markedly slower to lift sidewalks and driveway aprons than a red or Norway maple of the same size, which is the real argument for putting one in a narrow tree lawn between curb and walk.
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