The New York Times, August 12, 2020: Covering the Housing Market at a Tipping Point
Before the coronavirus pandemic, I was writing a lot about housing insecurity. Housing in America has been a problem for decades. One in four tenants spent more than half their income on rent. Younger professionals had no chance of buying a house. We had a million evictions a year and about half a million homeless people. So I was focused on housing in a multifaceted way: Why do our federal programs not cover as many people as they should cover? Why is it so difficult to build lower-income housing?
For many reporters, the pandemic shelved a lot of long-term projects. But for me, the opposite happened. What I had been writing about for years became that much worse. The story was no longer about making housing better but about that most basic thing: How do you keep people from being thrown out of their homes?
