Bay Area Housing Crisis: An Investigative Project - Alice and Larry ('18)

At the end of senior year, all Head-Royce students are given an opportunity to spend a month pursuing a project of their choosing. As people who have been busy throughout high school, we never got to spend as much time as we would have liked doing impactful work within our community. Thus, for our senior project, we chose to do an investigative research project on the housing crisis in the Bay Area. Originally, we hoped to be able to come to some concrete conclusions about the crisis, but we quickly realized that housing issues in the Bay Area are far too complicated and deeply rooted for us to generate solutions in just a month. In the end, we chose to contribute to addressing housing issues by writing articles that might help readers navigate and advocate against housing injustice.

With the help of our project supervisor Eric Robinson, a Principal at Paulett Taggart Architects, we conducted numerous interviews, attended events, visited neighborhoods, and did online research and reading. Throughout the process of our Senior Project, we had the chance to talk with lots of community activists -- from high school students to life-time advocates -- and meet people around the Bay Area who have been affected by the rising cost of living, from teachers at our own Head-Royce School to displaced high school students in Silicon Valley. These encounters have been both informative and formative, shaping the way that we understand not just the housing crisis but also community activism as a praxis. We hope that reading some of the work we were able to produce can help you on your own journey towards finding issues you can passionately advocate for in your own lives! :)

Website Content and Descriptions

Timeline: a brief outline of all the work we did

Outreach and Research: a description of all the people we interviewed and met as well as the research we did

Writing: a guide to the articles we wrote

Guided Presentation: a written reproduction of the presentation we gave on our project to the senior class, their parents, and some of the HRS faculty

About Us

Alice Chu is a member of the Head-Royce class of 2018. She is currently pursuing a dual degree program between the Paris Institute of Political Studies and Columbia University, studying political science and economics.

Larry Dang is a member of the Head-Royce class of 2018. He is currently studying sociology and data science at Harvard University.