Housing reporter · Milwaukee, Wisconsin
For three years at the Lakeshore Ledger I've covered evictions, landlords and the city's housing money, with court records, public data and a lot of knocking on doors.
Five stories, what each one found, and what changed after it ran.
Lakeshore Ledger · March 2026 · Investigation
I sat in Room 400 for 61 mornings and logged every case. Nine in ten tenants had no lawyer, and most hearings were over in three minutes.
What happened next
The county funded a right-to-counsel pilot for 1,200 families and cited the series in its budget vote.
Lakeshore Ledger · October 2025
Shell companies, 2,300 code complaints, and tenants who couldn't find out who owned their building.
What happened next
The city sued the owner in January to force repairs at 60 buildings.
Cream City Public Radio · June 2025 · Audio series
The voucher waitlist opened for 72 hours. Eleven thousand families applied for 3,000 places, and I followed four of them for a year.
What happened next
The housing authority added a text-message status line after listeners said they couldn't check their place.
I grew up in a rented duplex on Milwaukee's south side, studied journalism at Marquette University and joined the Lakeshore Ledger, a nonprofit newsroom, the week after I graduated in 2023.
I read court filings and property records most days, file a lot of open-records requests, and interview in English and Spanish. My stories are built to be checked: every number links to its source.
Records
Open-records requests, court dockets, property and tax data.
Data
Spreadsheets and SQL to build my own datasets from documents.
Interviews
In English and Spanish, with tenants, landlords and officials.
Audio
Reported, scripted and voiced a three-part radio series.
“Lena files clean, early, and with the documents to back every line. Our lawyers stopped asking.”
Ruth Adeyemi, managing editor, Lakeshore Ledger