Join SV@Home for a panel discussion with the Bay Area News Group “Reporting on the Housing Crisis: Why It’s Important to Public Policy & Perception “How intense is the Bay Area’s housing shortage? Intense enough for one news chain to grow its beat from 1 to 5 reporters.”
SV@Home and The Bay Area News Group:
“Reporting on the Housing Crisis” panel will dig in to The Bay Area’s News Group’s role in informing the public on housing policy, plans, and shaping public perception around all things housing. We recognize that the media plays a key role in addressing the housing crisis and one news group locally is investing more time and resources into this monumental task. The panel will highlight their focuses and priorities when reporting out to the community on housing and how these issues interact with other sectors. We look forward to a lively discussion focusing on ways to come together to address our housing challenges and how to appropriately identify possible solutions.
Bay Area News Group Housing Reporters:
George Avalos is a business reporter for the Bay Area News Group. He covers the economy, jobs, PG&E, Chevron, financial companies and commercial real estate. He’s been ahead of everybody reporting news on Google’s massive purchases and plans for San Jose.
Erin Baldassari covers transportation and housing the East Bay Times and Mercury News and is based in Oakland. She served on the East Bay Times’s 2017 Pulitzer Prize winning team for its coverage of the Ghost Ship fire and was one of a handful of reporters to continue covering the fire’s fallout for months afterward, focusing specifically on housing insecurity for similarly situated tenants throughout the city of Oakland. A California native, Erin grew up in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains before moving as a pre-teen to the North Bay. She cut her teeth as a reporter and photojournalist in the greater Boston area, where she covered local government, crime, courts, economic development and music, arts and culture, writing about everything from robotics to rap music. She graduated from Tufts University in 2010 with a bachelor’s degree in economics and earlier this year rode through Cambodia on a motorcycle.
Louis Hansen covers housing — or the lack of it — for the Bay Area News Group and is based at the Mercury News in San Jose. He has won several national awards for his investigations and feature stories. He was a John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford in 2014-2015 and joined the Mercury News in the summer of 2015. Prior to that, he was an investigative reporter at The Virginian-Pilot, where he covered state government, criminal justice and the military. Along the way, he embedded with soldiers and sailors in Iraq, and profiled a gallery of con men and other criminals. A New York native, Lou got his master’s degree in journalism at New York University.
Marisa Kendall covers housing for the Mercury News and East Bay Times, splitting her time between Oakland and San Jose. She joined the Bay Area News Group three years ago as a technology reporter writing about startups and the venture capital industry, before moving to the housing team. Before that, Marisa worked as a courts reporter for the Recorder in San Francisco, covering high-profile, high-stakes legal battles involving Silicon Valley’s biggest tech companies. She started her career writing about murders and mayhem in Southwest Florida for The News-Press, a Gannett paper. Marisa graduated from American University in Washington, D.C. with a degree in literature, not journalism, but she’s wanted to be a journalist since she was 16. In her spare time, Marisa lives in Oakland, enjoys open water swimming and bicycling, and recently completed her first triathlon, which may become a new hobby.
Katy Murphy covers housing and the state Legislature for The Mercury News and East Bay Times. Working from Sacramento, she is the Bay Area News Group’s one-woman Capitol bureau. She previously covered education for over a decade, writing about Oakland Unified and other K-12 districts, as well as colleges and universities. Before taking her first full-time journalism job in Bloomington, Indiana, Katy worked for two years as a teacher and organizer in a neighborhood in San Juan, Puerto Rico. She grew up in the Chicago area, and majored in anthropology at the University of Notre Dame. She recently moved from Oakland to Davis, the bike-friendly college town where she lives with her husband, 3-year-old daughter, and the wild turkeys that walk the streets like they own the place.
Moderator: Dr. Carolina Reid, Faculty Research Advisor, Terner Center for Housing Innovation; UC Berkeley