Unews

Illustration by Shoshana Gordon/ProPublica. Source images via IRS and Flickr. On any given night, thousands of people sleep on the streets in Portland, Oregon. They seek shelter in tents, bushes and overpasses in a city that has struggled with one of the worst housing crises in the country. Portland, like many cities, has raced to increase its supply of affordable housing by turning to a federal program that’s existed since the 1980s: the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit. It provides up to $15 billion worth of tax credits a year nationally to help developers build apartments. Portland supplemented the federal construction money with local dollars, creating incentives that were hard to turn down. But to meet the affordability requirements, all the developers needed to do in most cases was put rents within reach of someone earning 60% of median income, an earnings threshold that equates to about $75,000 annually for a family of four. It turns out that this amount of rent is ...

Collage by Mauricio Rodriguez Pons/ProPublica. Source images: Katie Campbell/ProPublica. Kara Meredith can tell you the exact day her life turned upside down: Aug. 23, 2025. She was at her home in Fort Gibson, Oklahoma, caring for her 5-week-old son, when one of her daughters ran to tell her there was water all over the bathroom floor. Her husband, Mitch Meredith, wasn’t worried — until he saw the dark liquid bubbling up around the base of the bathtub. Mitch and his relatives worked all night trying to contain it. It was near dawn when his uncle said, “This is oil.” Read more Oily Sludge Is Flooding Their Dream Home. Oklahoma Regulators Say They Can’t Help. The United States is the largest oil and gas producer in the world. All of that drilling produces hundreds of billions of gallons of toxic wastewater each year. For decades, energy companies have disposed of that briny fluid by shooting it back underground using high-p...

Community leaders and civil rights advocates say that one year into Louisville, Kentucky's attempts at police reform, the efforts have yielded mixed results. Jon Cherry for ProPublica Last May, as President Donald Trump settled into his second term, the Justice Department walked away from federal efforts to reform troubled police departments across the country. Officials announced their decision to not only drop lawsuits against two cities for unconstitutional policing but also retract findings of abuse in a half dozen other places. Some of those jurisdictions celebrated the news. But not Louisville, Kentucky, a blue city in a red state whose elected leaders used the occasion to make their own announcement. After the federal withdrawal, Mayor Craig Greenberg said Louisville would be “moving ahead rapidly” with reforms to its police department, which had been found to have a pattern of unconstitutional policing. In fact, the city would be adopting a version of ...