Meet Joan Lynch, The Tribune’s new housing reporter
Fourteen months ago, as the worst of the pandemic began to recede, The Tribune launched a fundraising campaign to expand its full-time reporting team for the first time in years.
Much like the rest of California and the country, housing, the rising cost of living and its impact on our communities remain a top-of-mind issue, particularly with a potential recession looming on the horizon.
I was hired by the Tribune to explore these stories in San Luis Obispo County, with the aim of looking at what drives the high costs and how the shortage of affordable housing creates daily challenges for local residents.
I’m extremely grateful for this opportunity to work for the SLO County community and to The Tribune for giving me this opportunity.
Originally from Kenosha, Wisconsin, I’m a recent graduate of Ball State University — the university that alumnus David Letterman described as “the Harvard of Muncie” — where I worked for The Ball State Daily News for four years as a news reporter, opinion editor and columnist, covering the Ball State and Muncie communities. I loved my time at The Daily News.
Now, I’m on my way west to live in SLO full-time, a task that has been more challenging than I would have anticipated.
I’ve never undertaken a move or job of this size, and the search for housing has been a challenging one. While I appreciate the irony of a housing reporter who can’t find housing, I think this speaks to the larger problem I was brought to The Tribune to cover.
Simply put, housing in San Luis Obispo County is hard to come by, and expensive at that. I’m fortunate enough to have a family who can help me with the move and transitioning to a full-time job, and even with those advantages, finding housing — or even shared living situations — that I can afford has been my biggest obstacle in moving out to the area.
This is the problem I want to cover most: Why housing is so hard for average people moving to or already living in SLO, and prohibitive to people with fewer options.
What is being done to help them? How do they find ways to get by? How are other rising costs like gas and food exacerbating the problem even further?
I hope I can answer these questions and serve this amazing community to the best of my ability, while living up to the expectations you, the readers, have for this role.
If you have any story ideas you’d like me to explore, feel free to shoot me an email at jlynch@thetribunenews.com.
Hopefully, I’ll see you soon.
This story was originally published June 24, 2022 at 5:00 AM.
