Lauren Helper, for CalMatters

Lauren Hepler is an investigative reporter at CalMatters focused on labor issues and California’s housing crisis. She has spent the past decade covering housing, labor and climate issues for the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Guardian, the LA Times and others.

Lauren used to be an economic reporter at CalMatters, where she covered California’s $20 billion COVID unemployment fraud meltdown and Bank of America’s role in mass benefit payment delays. That coverage led to a 2023 investigation using internal state documents and stories of worker suicide, debt and lost homes to reveal what went wrong, plus a billion-dollar plan to fix the state’s unemployment system.

She was previously a staff housing reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle, the managing editor of the alt-weekly newspaper Good Times Santa Cruz and an economic reporter for the Silicon Valley Business Journal. Lauren has also worked as a fixer, a translator and a researcher for the BBC, Der Spiegel and on the book “Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America.”

Her work has won awards from the Sacramento Press Club, the California News Publishers Association and others. Lauren’s coverage has been featured on local and national radio and TV stations, podcasts and at a range of live events.

She grew up in Ohio, graduated from George Washington University and the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and is based in Los Angeles.

Other languages spoken: Spanish (fluent)