Current：Home > reviewsTradeEdge Exchange:Inside Climate News Freelancer Anne Marshall-Chalmers Honored for her Feature Story Showing California Wildfires Plague Mobile Home Residents -AssetLink
TradeEdge Exchange:Inside Climate News Freelancer Anne Marshall-Chalmers Honored for her Feature Story Showing California Wildfires Plague Mobile Home Residents
Will Sage Astor View
Date：2025-04-10 06:01:20
The TradeEdge ExchangeSociety of Environmental Journalists announced last week that Anne Marshall-Chalmers, a freelancer for Inside Climate News and former ICN reporting fellow, won first place for feature writing in its 22nd annual awards for Reporting on the Environment for her story on the convergence of California’s wildfire and affordable housing crises.
Marshall-Chalmers, who is based in the Bay Area, made regular trips to the scene of the Cache fire in Clearlake, California to develop relationships with her main subjects, Susan Gilbert and Lorraine Capolungo, who both lost their mobile homes in the blaze. Interviews with government officials, first responders and researchers rounded out her reporting. Her months of interviewing, collecting documents and visiting the scene of the fire culminated in the Inside Climate News story, Mobile Homes, the Last Affordable Housing Option for Many California Residents, Are Going Up in Smoke.
“Anne Marshall-Chalmers investigates a much-overlooked aspect of the human and housing cost of wildfires in California,” the judges wrote. “Her engrossing and beautifully crafted lede engages the reader from the very first line and sets the tone for a narrative that interweaves the personal and universal, as well as thoroughly researched facts about wildfires near mobile home communities.”
In her story, Marshall-Chalmers wrote “mobile homes lay bare a warming planet’s collision with a shortage of affordable housing. Though perceived as a shelter of last resort, mobile homes house 22 million people, and mobile home parks provide three times the number of affordable housing units than the nation’s public housing. Most mobile home residents are low or very low income. Households are disproportionately non-white, seniors and families with small children. Typically, residents of mobile home parks rent the land they live on, leaving them with no claim to growing property value and no right to return should disaster strike.”
But it was her detailed description of the struggles of her subjects before, during and after the fire that the judges found made the story stand out.
“The narrative voice and choices keep the reader captivated until the end and have us all asking questions that we may not have asked before,” the SEJ judges wrote.
Share this article
veryGood！ (27224)
Related
- Kourtney Kardashian Cradles 9-Month-Old Son Rocky in New Photo
- Climate and change? Warm weather, cost of living driving Americans on the move, study shows
- Dre Kirkpatrick Jr., son of Crimson Tide star who played for Nick Saban, commits to Alabama
- Navy shipbuilders’ union approves 3-year labor pact at Bath Iron Works
- Tropical weather brings record rainfall. Experts share how to stay safe in floods.
- 3 works in translation tell tales of standing up to right wrongs
- Maryland reports state’s first case of locally acquired malaria strain in over 40 years
- Linebacker Myles Jack retires before having played regular-season game for Eagles, per report
- Oklahoma parole board recommends governor spare the life of man on death row
- Yellowknife residents wonder if wildfires are the new normal as western Canada burns
Ranking
- NCAA President Charlie Baker would be 'shocked' if women's tournament revenue units isn't passed
- Scam artists are posing as Maui charities. Here's how to avoid getting duped.
- Where do the 2024 presidential candidates stand on abortion? Take a look
- Opinion: Corporate ballpark names just don't have that special ring
- NHL in ASL returns, delivering American Sign Language analysis for Deaf community at Winter Classic
- Former Minnesota governor, congressman Al Quie dies at 99
- Hope is hard to let go after Maui fire, as odds wane over reuniting with still-missing loved ones
- Proud Boys member and Jan. 6 defendant is now FBI fugitive after missing sentencing
Recommendation
The 'Rebel Ridge' trailer is here: Get an exclusive first look at Netflix movie
One of the Egyptian activists behind the 2011 uprising freed from prison after presidential pardon
Rare flesh-eating bacteria kills 5 in Florida, 3 in New York, Connecticut
No secret weapon: Falcons RB Bijan Robinson might tear up NFL as a rookie
Former Milwaukee hotel workers charged with murder after video shows them holding down Black man
Microsoft pulls computer-generated article that recommended tourists visit the Ottawa Food Bank
U.S., Japan and Australia to hold joint drills as tensions rise in South China Sea
Saudi Arabia says it executed U.S. national convicted of killing and torturing his father