Christopher Connelly
One Crisis Away ReporterChristopher Connelly is a reporter covering issues related to financial instability and poverty for KERA’s One Crisis Away series. In 2015, he joined KERA to report on Fort Worth and Tarrant County. From Fort Worth, he also focused on politics and criminal justice stories.
Before coming to Texas, Christopher covered the Maryland legislature for the NPR member station in Baltimore. He also worked at NPR as a Joan B. Kroc Fellow – one of three post-graduates who spend a year working as a reporter, show producer and digital producer at network HQ in Washington, D.C.
Christopher is a graduate of Antioch College in Ohio – he got his first taste of public radio there at WYSO – and he earned a master’s in journalism from the University of California at Berkeley.
Email Christopher at cconnelly@kera.org. You can follow Christopher on Twitter @hithisischris.
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Texas is still mostly affordable for middle-income homebuyers, but affordability is declining. It’s a long-term trend, but new data shows an even sharper decline in home affordability since the beginning of the year. -
At the height of the pandemic, Americans saved a lot of money. Wealthier households turned that increase in savings into increased wealth. But for a lot of lower- and middle-income people, building wealth has been much harder.
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Medical debt declined during the COVID-19 pandemic, but it remains a massive issue for millions of Americans, afflicting Black people significantly far more than white people. That inequity is rooted in deep disparities in health and wealth, and Texas' policy choices make those disparities worse.
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For a lot of North Texans, the arrival of COVID-19 set off a pandemic of debt. To those without much financial cushion, who worked in jobs with no remote option, the early days of the pandemic often meant racking up credit card bills to keep the family whole. Now, many are working to pay off pandemic debt.
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Americans have tacked on a more than $2 trillion in household debt since the pandemic began. Dig into that eye-popping number, and an increasingly unequal America emerges.
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For two Dallas city workers enjoying their lunch on a hot afternoon in the shade of City Hall, news that the Supreme Court had overturned Roe v. Wade prompted their first conversation with each other about abortion rights.
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Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm came to North Texas to highlight its efforts to build a greener economy and avert more catastrophic consequences of climate change, but she was mostly asked about the price of gas at the pump.
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Over the course of the pandemic, Americans’ credit card balances have been on a roller coaster. KERA News wants to hear about your experience.
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This is the fourth story in a four-part series. Read the first, second and third stories. Everywhere, all the time, cockroaches.Rashidah Yusof says that’s just part of life for her family in their Vickery Meadow apartment. No matter how much she cleans, the bugs are relentless.
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A new report finds that Texas courts use very different yardsticks to decide who’s poor enough to get a court-appointed lawyer. That patchwork often leaves people without the legal defense in a criminal trial that the Constitution promises.
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The Dallas City Council adopted 11 recommendations to address “equity blind spots” in its Comprehensive Housing Policy. Now, city staff members are charged with turning those recommendations into official city policy and practice.
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The federal Department of Housing and Urban Development is investigating a complaint alleging that the City of Dallas’ policies and practices steer low-income housing into Black and Latino neighborhoods in violation of federal civil rights laws.
