Covering Overcrowding with a Systems Lens

When Orlando Ruiz’s brother brought COVID-19 home from his janitorial job in May, self-isolation was out of the question. He lives in a house in East Oakland with his parents, brothers, and their families. Within days, four family members were sick with the virus, three of them hospitalized, including Ruiz’s father, who spent two weeks at Highland Hospital before returning home.

It’s a story that has repeated itself throughout Latino and Mayan immigrant households of East Oakland, which has seen some of the highest rates of the virus in the Bay Area. 

As with so many crises that have been illuminated in 2020, overcrowding isn’t a new one. According to the Kids Count Data Center, nearly one in three children growing up in Oakland live in crowded housing conditions — one of the highest rates in the nation, and one that has remained more or less unchanged for the past decade.

But unlike other symptoms of the region’s housing crisis, such as expanding tent communities, or parked vehicles serving as shelter, the crisis of those living five people to a room, or in a garage or a workplace, is easier to ignore, especially when it affects communities newsrooms lack strong relationships with. In fact, in all the years of news coverage of the Bay Area’s housing crisis, overcrowding has been nearly invisible.

Now, COVID-19 has turned a slow-brewing crisis into an imminent danger. For thousands of residents, their own homes put them at risk of contracting or spreading a fatal disease.

For the next six months, El Tímpano is embarking on a reporting project to investigate why so many Oakland immigrant residents live in overcrowded conditions. We’ve teamed up with Journalism + Design, a lab at The New School that uses a practice called systems thinking to help journalists better examine the interwoven systems, policies, narratives, and beliefs that fuel our most complex problems.

Learn more about this project on our Medium page.