Three Southern California News Group reporters won a Gold Award for Best Team Report for coverage showing 97% of California cities and counties are behind on state-mandated homebuilding goals, the National Association of Real Estate Editors announced Wednesday, Dec. 9.
The first-place prize from NAREE went to Jeff Collins, Nikie Johnson and Alicia Robinson for their statewide housing scorecard measuring progress for all 538 California municipalities under the state’s Regional Housing Needs Assessment program or RHNA.
The two-part story also documented how Southern California’s housing goals soon will triple, requiring the region to plan for 1.34 million new homes by the end of the decade — almost as many homes now located in Orange and Ventura counties combined. Many cities and counties in the region, already behind current housing mandates, were stunned by the increase, the team reported, with some leaders wondering where new housing will go in their “already built out” communities.
NAREE’s judges called the report “an enterprising story built on impressively detailed data and in-depth reporting.”
“The team tells a clear story of well-intentioned policy running into local community opposition,” the judges said. The stories show “how the impasse is affecting real people amid California’s worst housing crisis in state history.”
It was the fifth award the series won this year, including a first place for Land-Use Reporting from the California News Publishers Association, a first place in the Best Series category from the Orange County Press Club and second and third place awards from the Los Angeles Press Club.
NAREE is a 91-year-old group for real estate and housing journalists. The awards were announced Wednesday during NAREE’s first virtual conference, which had been postponed from June because of the pandemic.
In addition, Collins won a third-place Bronze Award for Best Residential Real Estate Story by a daily newspaper for an article about the new trend of selling homes online to “iBuyers.”
Judges called the story “an important reader service.”
“Collins’ story explains every part of the iBuyers process in accessible prose,” the judges wrote. “The story includes specific numbers from homeowners about the amount of profit they left on the table by going this route, as well as the larger economic context.”
SEE ALL THE NAREE AWARD WINNERS HERE