DCist/WAMU 88.5
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.
This Map Shows Where Rent Is Dropping in D.C. | Dec. 2020
Even though the median cost of a single-family home in D.C. keeps ticking up, the prices for rental apartments are falling in nearly every corner of the city.
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
As the novel coronavirus continued to spread across the D.C. region in early spring, social workers at the district’s child protective services agency began to panic: Their bosses appeared oblivious to the toll this would take on their workforce. 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 that they’ll be fired—or “walked out,” in agency parlance—social workers say they’re afraid to flag life-threatening mistakes with supervisors, endangering the lives of the children they’re charged with serving.
As D.C. Weighs How to Fix Its Public Housing, Families Keep Getting Sicker | March 2019
Months after the DC Housing Authority went public with details about the extent to which its public housing stock has deteriorated, and years after its residents say they first began to complain, families continue to cope with the physical consequences of living in units that even the Authority’s chief acknowledges are in “deplorable” condition—and they’re doing so with no end in sight.
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
Luxury Ghost Towns | Dec. 2020
The pandemic proved cities have far too many ultraexpensive apartments. They shouldn’t forget it.
“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
The 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 inexperienced Ohio lawmaker as its leader.
High Country News
Questions surround Utah’s hastily passed inland port| April 2020
Plans to build a massive distribution hub along the Great Salt Lake divide Utahns and test Western leaders.
Philly Inquirer
Philly touts its low rate of homelessness, but who isn’t counted tells a larger story | Feb. 2020
Despite years of practice and a growing sophistication in how cities understand homelessness, 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.
Outsider Baseball | June 2017
Jim Johnson led a $4.6 billion budget as under secretary of the Treasury, helmed one of the country’s biggest racial justice centers, and practiced law for one of the most esteemed firms in the U.S. Now he’s running for governor of New Jersey. So why has nobody heard of him?
