Limiting background checks on rental applications? + a big new study on homelessness
Plus a Q&A with Oregon's governor Tina Kotek about housing
Hello hello!
It’s been an eventful few weeks in the media world. For those who are joining “Threads” as an alternative to Twitter — I’m now on there. I like it a lot so far actually, could definitely see it becoming the place journalists migrate to over time. We’ll see?
I have a few new housing stories to share — two from before I left for vacation and one from this week.
The first is a story I wrote about the push to restrict what landlords can review about a rental applicant's criminal, credit, and eviction history — and the legal battles that’s generating in turn. Think "ban-the-box" but for housing. Can these policies make housing fairer? What do we know about their IRL impact so far? Can read that piece here.
The second piece is a Q&A with Oregon’s Democratic governor Tina Kotek, who was elected in November. She almost lost her election though, and a Republican came close to taking the governorship there for the first time in over 30 years. One of the reasons she almost lost — as voter surveys and polls made clear — was due to widespread frustration with the state’s worsening homeless crisis. Roughly 18,000 people are unhoused in the state, and there’s been a 63 percent increase in unsheltered homelessness over the last six years. We talked about her state’s housing and homelessness crisis and how she thinks about it politically. Can read that here.
And lastly, I have a story up this week about a new large representative study of homelessness in California — where 30 percent of the nation’s homeless live. It’s hard and rare to get these kinds of studies done; this one includes 3,200 administered questionnaires and 365 in-depth interviews collected between October 2021 and November 2022 with homeless people from all over the state. I aimed to pull out some of the biggest and most surprising findings, and talked with the head researcher about her broader thoughts. Can read that here.
Thanks for reading and will have some new reporting on abortion rights for you next week,