How systems thinking is guiding El Tímpano’s reporting on health & overcrowded housing
By: Madeleine Bair
Tags: Systems Thinking, Health Disparities, Design Journalism, Journalism, Collaborative Journalism

How systems thinking is guiding El Tímpano’s reporting on health & overcrowded housing

From icebergs to feedback loops, El Tímpano intern Sonya Lustig details how we’re working to understand this largely invisible crisis Madeleine Bair Follow Apr 26 · 7 min read

By Sonya Lustig

Three months ago, El Tímpano began investigating the prevalence of overcrowded housing in Oakland’s Latino and Mayan immigrant communities and how those housing conditions affect the health of residents, throughout and beyond the current COVID-19 pandemic.

We knew from the start that this project demanded an unconventional approach to reporting. The crisis of overcrowded housing — particularly as it affects undocumented immigrants and intersects with public health — touches upon a web of public policies, economic structures, and social idealogies that cannot be neatly separated from one another. If we wanted to examine how overcrowding impacts public health, and what we can learn from the COVID-19 pandemic, we had to take a wide lens.

El Tímpano teamed up with Journalism + Design to incorporate tools from a practice called systems thinking as a way to identify the interconnected systems at play in overcrowded housing and surface opportunities to address structural inequities embedded in this largely invisible crisis. While we are still a ways from completing our reporting, we want to pull back the curtain on the process that the Journalism + Design team has led us through to take a systems-oriented approach to this issue, and how it’s informing El Tímpano’s journalism.

1. Surface insights and information needs from key stakeholders

To start, we wanted to ground our reporting in the insights and information needs of those who experience or work on these issues. By seeking out their insights and learning more about the intersecting issues that contribute to overcrowded housing and poor health outcomes, we can design our reporting to be valuable to multiple stakeholders, build on local expertise, uncover areas in need of investigation, and identify opportunities for change.

We began our work in November by creating a “stakeholder map” — an exercise in identifying the different groups of people who are connected to or impacted by overcrowded housing conditions in Oakland in order to surface the perspectives and information needs of those closest to the issues we are exploring. We generated a wide list of stakeholders that included those living in overcrowded households, as well as landlords, public officials in health and housing sectors, community organizers, legal aid professionals, and journalists.

After mapping these stakeholders, we identified specific people we could interview from each of our stakeholder groups. This initial set of interviews was geared to deepen our team’s understanding of the key drivers and effects of overcrowded housing in Oakland, solicit questions that our reporting could help answer, and seek out relevant resources and information that El Tímpano could provide as part of our reporting.

In addition to these interviews, we drew insights from El Tímpano’s SMS community. More than 1,600 people, primarily Latinx and Mayan immigrants in East Oakland, subscribe to our SMS platform. Many had previously shared their experiences living in overcrowded conditions, so we knew that, in addition to individual interviews, we could surface the insights of dozens of people directly impacted by the issue through our participatory reporting platform.

We asked our community how they thought their housing conditions affected their health, and what they might change about their living situation to improve it. As we sent those call-outs, we also provided information about local tenant protections and financial assistance.

We received dozens of replies that shed light on both the physical and mental health impacts of overcrowding. “I live with three couples and four kids,” one person shared over text (translated from the original Spanish). “One woman got sick and we lived with the fear of getting sick as well. It’s very hard for us, and even harder for our son.”

Other responses provided insight into the forces driving overcrowded housing “I live in an overcrowded house with several families due to high rent prices,” one person wrote.

Our conversations with county health officials and legal aid organizations uncovered resources and information that addressed many of the questions we heard from those living in overcrowded conditions, as well as a desire for better data and more stories to understand the experiences of affected residents. Several people told us that simply shining a spotlight on overcrowded housing and its impact on health will bring needed attention to a crisis many people don’t realize exists.

“There is this kind of, you know, out of sight, out of mind dynamic happening here,” said a housing policy advocate. “Many people think, ‘Yeah, I may be paying a lot for my apartment, but I’m not sharing it with five or six other people. And so I don’t really feel like it’s a huge, huge issue.’”

An analyst from the county’s public health department said she would like our reporting to provide her with a better sense of how the policies implemented to stave off displacement during the pandemic are working. “That’s something I wonder about a lot, like, how effective is our [eviction] moratorium if people don’t know about it, or are afraid to push back?”

At the same time, members of El Tímpano’s SMS community were sharing stories of being threatened with evictions, and questions about where they could find legal assistance and rental relief. Clearly, there is an important role our reporting can play in connecting the stories and information of these various stakeholders.

2. Visualize the system’s structure

Early in our process, we also turned to a group of reporters and editors from a variety of local media organizations to both inform our reporting and share our systems-oriented process to help deepen coverage of the housing crisis at a regional level.

We convened reporters and editors from KQED, El Tecolote, The Oaklandside, Reveal, The Mercury News, and Bay City News, using a systems thinking tool called the “iceberg model” to collaboratively map the structures, policies, and ideas fueling Oakland’s overcrowded housing crisis. Participants broke into small groups and brainstormed examples for each layer of the iceberg, pictured below.