“One Day” aired on Current TV

Tuesday, June 24, 2008

A newly edited version of our short film about the rebels in Darfur titled, “One Day with the S.L.A.,” is now being aired on Current TV under the name “One Day in Darfur.” If you don’t subscribe to Current TV, you can watch it online.

This piece was originally commissioned by Wholphin DVD Magazine , appearing on Wholphin No. 5. Current TV added some of our footage and interviews with David Martinez and I. I’m happy with the way it turned out. 

Hellarity Burns

Tuesday, May 27, 2008

In one corner of North Oakland, California, a cauldron of squatters and property owners, stirred by green dreams and the bursting housing bubble, set an unusual Oakland house ablaze.

The house called Hellarity was originally part of a green property owner’s attempt to create a network of sustainable, affordable housing. When his project floundered, the residence was slowly taken over by his tenants, a group of people who one-upped his radicalism. Both sides claimed to be avowed anticapitalists, but their strategies were at odds; his was to produce an alternative to the local housing market by creating a nonprofit that would help tenants own their homes as a collective. Theirs was to make space for themselves in a rent-based housing market by seizing property from investors and absentee landlords.

The owner eventually went bankrupt — drowned in the early stages of the deflating housing market — and the property fell into the hands of a small-time real estate investor, despite the tenants’ attempts to buy it themselves. The tenants refused to leave, transforming themselves into squatters, and fought it out with the buyer in court for three years. As the court case bogged down, housing values plummeted, making the landlord’s investment lose value by the day.

Then, just after the squatters gave up their fight and agreed to turn the house over to the landlord, a new group of squatters moved in to reoccupied it. Two weeks later, the house went up in flames.

For months, I poured through court records, interviewed current and former occupants, the former landlord, and pieced together the story leading up to arson, which I found to have started before the house even started ten years ago. To read the 5,000 word feature I wrote for the San Francisco Bay Guardian this week, click here.

Darfur multimedia piece on Slate

Monday, May 05, 2008

“Darfur: Rebellion from the Margins,” is a multimedia piece I produced on the Darfur crisis and was recently published by Slate.  You can view the piece, here. To read a description of this project, read the full entry of this posting.

“Hotel Poverty” wins NPPA best audio slideshow feature

Sunday, March 30, 2008

“Hotel Poverty”, a multimedia piece I produced about people living in residential hotels in San Francisco, won 1st place for independent audio slideshows in the National Press Photographer Association’s 2008 Best of Photojournalism contest.

Divorcing the US

Thursday, March 20, 2008

In December of 2007, a group of Lakota people declared that they were withdrawing from the United States and forming their own country. USA Today reported in the declaration from Washington D.C. and a spur of international media attention followed. I hoped in a 4x4 and drove to the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota with Shon Meckfessel and spent four days in the United States’ second poorest county covering the story. I wrote a piece for New Internationalist magazine in the UK. You can read it here.