Matt Levin was the data and housing dude for CalMatters. His work entails distilling complex policy topics into easily digestible charts and graphs, finding and writing original stories from data, yelling at his computer for something he did wrong in his code, and complaining about his rent on "Gimme Shelter", the housing podcast he co-hosts. Matt's award-winning housing and data reporting has been featured on Marketplace, NPR's Here & Now, and the San Francisco Chronicle. Matt is a former research associate for the Public Policy Institute of California, where he specialized in quantitative analysis of poverty and social policy. He has a Master’s in Public Policy from UCLA and an MS in Journalism from USC, but he'll always consider himself a Cal bear.
Tucked into a $15 billion school bond measure is a break to encourage developers building apartments around transit. Some fear it could hurt certain school districts.
Gov. Gavin Newsom has a goal of 3.5 million new homes by 2025. His path to reaching it is even more limited, now that a hot zoning "reform" measure is dead for the year.
It's easy for volunteer counters to miss unsheltered people, especially when law enforcement clears camps just before counters arrive. And they're not even trying to count people living doubled up, or renting cheap motel rooms. So why is so much riding on a count so bad?
A group of homeless and housing insecure mothers made national headlines after occupying a vacant home in West Oakland. Podcast hosts CalMatters’ Matt Levin and The Los Angeles Times’ Liam Dillon discuss why Moms 4 Housing was so successful and ask them where they go from here.
Recommendations by Gov. Gavin Newsom's task force on homelessness in California call for a legally enforceable 'mandate to end homelessness' on the November ballot, echo the governor's request for more funding and call for a homelessness czar.