Heather Vogell is a reporter at ProPublica looking at U.S. trade policy and the baby formula industry.
Previously, she investigated the rental housing market and how many of the nation’s biggest landlords were sharing data and using one company’s algorithm to set rents — potentially in violation of laws against price fixing. Afterward, dozens of tenants filed antitrust lawsuits and U.S. senators proposed legislation that would restrict the practice. She has also written about President Donald Trump’s business entanglements and collaborated with WNYC reporters on the podcast “Trump, Inc.” Her 2019 stories were the first to chronicle discrepancies between what the Trump Organization told New York City property tax officials and what it reported on loan documents.
At The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, her work on test cheating in the public school system resulted in the indictments of the superintendent and 34 others. A series she co-authored, “Cheating Our Children,” examined suspicious test scores nationwide.
Her work has been a finalist for the Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting and the Gerald Loeb Awards for Distinguished Business and Financial Journalism; it has also won the Hillman Prize, Sigma Delta Chi Awards and multiple honors from the Education Writers Association and the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing.
Texas-based RealPage’s YieldStar software helps landlords set prices for apartments across the U.S. With rents soaring, critics are concerned that the company’s proprietary algorithm is hurting competition.
The vast tenant screening industry is subject to less regulation than credit scoring agencies, even though experts warn that algorithms could introduce racial or other illegal biases that can prevent people from getting housing.
Amid a national housing crisis, giant private equity firms have been buying up apartment buildings en masse to squeeze them for profit, with the help of government-backed Freddie Mac. Meanwhile, tenants say they’re the ones paying the price.
The filing, submitted by New York Attorney General Letitia James, comes several years after a ProPublica investigation revealed conflicting financial details the Trump Organization filed for its downtown Manhattan skyscraper at 40 Wall Street.
Did a tenant screening company, such as LeasingDesk, On-Site, Credco or RentGrow, send you a score or report? We want to understand their effect on tenants.
Eleven states let school districts decide whether students and staff must wear masks. One Georgia middle school where masks were optional became the center of an outbreak.
Despite a history of underperforming properties, Kushner Companies received a near-record sum from a government-backed lender. Should it default, taxpayers could be forced to foot much of the bill. The agency says politics played no role.
One set of reports listed the tower’s 2010 profits as $13.3 million; a second put them at $16.1 million. That helped the Trump Organization borrow $73 million more than it had before.
Securities that contain loans for properties like hotels and office buildings have inflated profits, the whistleblower claims. As the pandemic hammers the economy, that could increase the chances of another mortgage collapse.
Five former city employees and a former Trump Organization employee say the company used middlemen to pay New York City tax assessors to lower building assessments and pay less taxes in the 1980s and 1990s.
Asked about ProPublica’s findings that the president’s company made itself appear more profitable to lenders and less to tax officials, Bill de Blasio said the city had examined the matter and sent its findings to the Manhattan district attorney.
Documents show the president’s company reported different numbers — higher ones to lenders, lower ones to tax officials — for Trump’s signature building. Last month, ProPublica revealed a similar pattern in two other Trump buildings.
The president’s businesses made themselves appear more profitable to lenders and less profitable to tax officials. One expert calls the differing numbers “versions of fraud.”
In the latest chapter in ongoing litigation, the private equity fund that bought what used to be called the Trump Ocean Club claims the Trump entities pocketed money that should have gone to the Panamanian government.
McCabe talks about going after Russian organized crime in Brighton Beach as a young agent — and how some of those characters showed up in the Mueller report.
The bank kept writing checks even after Trump defaulted on loans worth hundreds of millions and sued it. Now Congressional investigators are going to court to uncover the financial records behind their relationship.
In this week’s episode, we explore some of Donald Trump’s partners — including a developer with no site and no funding — and find one reason Trump might’ve needed to enlist help from the very top of Russia’s government.
A long-standing effort to make big investment funds abide by the same rules that banks and brokerages follow has bogged down. The fund industry says it supports the rules — it just has a few quibbles.
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