A century of overcrowded homes: How we reported the story of the ‘crisis’
By the time this story ran in February of this year—nearly two years after we broke the story that the country had become a nation of “overcrowded” homes—most national and local newspapers had begun to take steps to alter their story-gathering practices, beginning the push-back that eventually led to the passage of the Fair Housing Act. In late February, the New York Times changed its headline from “Crisis Rising” to “Crisis in America’s Homes,” its story title also becoming “The New Homes Crisis.”
This story of the “new” housing crisis began as Americans’ faith in their government was shaken by the publication of the New York Times’ landmark series in late 2013. (See this month’s story.) Then, in the summer of that same year, the first major news organization to break the story of the “crisis” was the website Truthout (which has since become the most-talked-about news organization in the country).
Truthout was a groundbreaking enterprise. It was an on-line newspaper that published first-hand accounts from activists and ordinary citizens, providing a fresh new voice of direct communication and a counter to the mainstream media’s increasingly conservative bent and its habit of not only presenting a balanced view of the situation but also of providing a counter-narrative, which in this case was that we were merely victims of a vast national housing bubble.
In early April 2013, Truthout’s editor-in-chief, Judd Legum, wrote in an editorial that what was happening in America was both “a symptom of the system’s dysfunction and a cause of it.”
He went on, “In the long-term, housing prices would naturally decline as incomes in the economy rose. This is what happened in Japan and Germany and elsewhere during