Sarah Kim grew up in a two-bedroom apartment in Flushing with five people and considered herself lucky. Her parents — second-generation Korean-Americans who ran a grocery on Main Street — knew families of seven in one-bedrooms, families who moved every year because leases were never renewed, families whose children changed schools three times before fourth grade. Kim grew up understanding housing not as a policy question but as a daily condition that determined what was possible for the people she loved. That understanding became her beat.

Kim studied journalism and public policy at CUNY’s Graduate School of Journalism on a City fellowship. Her thesis research examined the relationship between school rezoning decisions and patterns of neighborhood displacement in Brooklyn — a project that required her to cross-reference school enrollment data, census records, and real estate transaction filings in ways that her advisors described as “obsessive.” She graduated with a methodology and a story, and spent the next five years refining both at a Brooklyn-based nonprofit newsroom covering housing, education, and tenant rights.

At the nonprofit, Kim developed a reputation for reporting that moves between the systemic and the personal without losing either thread. She wrote about the mechanics of eviction court — who shows up with lawyers, who shows up alone — and about the way school funding formulas quietly defund schools in neighborhoods where property values are lowest. She spent eight months on a series about the city’s emergency shelter system that was cited in a state legislative committee report and prompted a formal city council inquiry.

“Housing and education are the same story. Where you live determines where your kids go to school. Where they go to school shapes what they’re able to become. I report on the system that makes those decisions for people who never got a vote.”

At NYC Pulse, Kim covers housing policy, tenant rights, and the public school system with the data literacy of a policy researcher and the storytelling instincts of a reporter who understands that a human being’s life is always more complicated than any spreadsheet. She speaks Korean, reads Spanish, and has cultivated sources across tenant organizing networks, public school parent associations, and city agency offices that most reporters never manage to reach.

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