Washington Post Magazine 

As Pandemic Aid Ends, Families Face a Housing Nightmare | April 2022
Covid relief kept Holly Williams and her sons out of a shelter. Now that it’s gone, will they be able to keep their home?   

Mother Jones

Will Minneapolis Pass A Law To Help Renters Buy Their Homes? | Feb. 2022
Advocates see the fight as a chance to stop developers from displacing residents.  

DCist/WAMU 88.5

When National Outlets Write About Violence In D.C., Whose Stories Do They Tell? | July 2021
In a city where 40% of bullets are fired in 2% of city blocks, Black public safety and gun violence prevention activists say they are dismayed to watch as affluent, mostly white residents see their fear and pain validated on national television — while they are left to quietly grieve the deaths of family and neighbors with little notice from prominent media.

DC Wasted Hundreds of Permanent Housing Voucher Subsidies Last Year | April 2021
About 520 vouchers representing $14 million in allocated funding went unused over the last fiscal year, even as housing needs spiked across the city while the pandemic broke out.

Washington City Paper

Rent Strike | Aug. 2020
Thousands of renters lost their jobs, savings, and sources of stability. They’re now contending with hostile confrontations with property managers over unpaid rent, ranging from threats of eviction to disputes about living conditions and payment plans. 

Shelters in Place | June 2020
Dozens of sick or symptomatic employees, knockoff N95 masks, and COVID-19-positive foster children staying overnight at agency headquarters — in violation of a court order — would be just the beginning for the agency. Supported by the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

Exit Wounds | April 2019
Social workers in D.C. describe an agency where caseloads are often so high, and the pressure to close them so immense, that both children and workers suffer devastating consequences. Unsupported by a weak union and paranoid they’ll be fired, social workers say they’re afraid to flag life-threatening mistakes with supervisors, endangering the lives of the children they’re charged with serving.

D.C. Chronically Failed to Spend Federal Funds to Remediate Lead Paint Hazards | Feb. 2019
In doing so, it lost out on the only dedicated subsidy for remediating lead paint hazards for low-income tenants with small children.

What Life Is Like – Still – In D.C.’s Public Housing | Aug. 2018
One tenant can’t cook on Thanksgiving because sewage bubbles up from her drain. Another saw rats destroy all her belongings. A third breathes in six different kinds of mold. This is the condition of public housing in Washington, D.C.

Slate

“Classical” Architecture Is Just One Way Tyrants Build in Their Own Image | Feb. 2020
Trump’s draft plan for federal buildings has something in common with 20th century fascists—and 21st century strongmen.

VICE

Floods Nearly Wiped This Iowa Town Off the Map. It May Never Come Back. | Aug. 2019
In Pacific Junction, Iowa, a small town decimated by historic flooding this spring, residents are begging officials to buy them out so they can move on and build anew. But town leaders are resisting, arguing that, if they secure buyouts, they’re allowing FEMA to wipe Pacific Junction “off the face of the Earth.”

Thirty-Six Hours With the Parkland Survivors in Vegas | Oct. 2019
March for Our Lives organizers learn how to juggle their activism, celebrity, and recovery.

The New Republic

HUD Deserves Better Than Marcia Fudge | Dec. 2020
The chronic neglect of the nation’s housing agency continues with the decision to tap an Ohio lawmaker as its leader. 

Philly Inquirer

Philly touts its low rate of homelessness, but who isn’t counted tells a larger story | Feb. 2020
The data we rely on to understand the scope of homelessness in the U.S. are misleading. What hangs in the balance is the health and survival of all the people who depend on the services that are shaped by these numbers.

Pacific Standard

The Poison in Our Water | May/June 2018
As scientists sort out the best way to capture and measure the harmful microfibers that now litter most of the world’s freshwater, we have no choice but to keep drinking.

Shrinking Bears Ears | June 2018
No other president in the last 50 years has attempted to shrink the national monuments designated by his predecessors.

Field Notes From a Cemetery for the Nameless | March 2017
In one tiny California city, a graveyard for those who died in quest of a new life.

Concrete’s History With Political Unrest | Sept. 2017
There’s a reason concrete is the world’s most widely used synthetic material, and it’s not because concrete is easy on the eyes.