Christian Leonard
Data reporter
Christian Leonard is an award-winning data reporter who covers housing, real estate and immigration for the San Francisco Chronicle. He previously worked for the Hearst DevHub as a newsroom developer.
About Me
I’m currently a data reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle, where I cover housing and real estate trends in the Bay Area and California. I also write about the impacts of the Trump administration’s policies on immigration, using data to highlight who is being most affected.
Previously, I was a developer fellow at the Hearst DevHub, where I helped build interactive data projects for the Chronicle and its sibling newsrooms, including a first-of-its-kind national overdose tracker.
I graduated from Biola University with a B.A. in Journalism and Integrated Media in 2020.
Skills:- Data Reporting/Analysis
- R, Python
- Data Visualization
- Web Scraping
- APIs
- Javascript/React
Experience
Cover the Bay Area housing crisis, real estate trends and immigration using complex datasets and thorough data analysis, consistently producing some of the highest reader engagement numbers in the newsroom.
- Produce about 150 articles a year on the housing affordability crisis, real estate and immigration
- Create engaging data visualizations to accompany written reporting, both for my own stories and to support other reporters
- Leverage technical expertise — including with R, Python, JavaScript and APIs — to scrape websites, identify potential angles and produce findings
Developed interactive reader tools for the Hearst Newspapers newsrooms, embedding in the San Francisco Chronicle’s data team by reporting on drug overdoses, housing and demographic shifts.
- Found, cleaned and analyzed data sets to produce 1-3 stories a week
- Used Datawrapper and created custom interactives to produce multiple visual elements per article
- Coded project templates and engaging visual experiences for our newsrooms
Was the lead reporter for the Burbank Leader, covering everything from city hall to COVID-19 to elections. Won first- and second-place awards from the California News Publishers Association for my coverage of local government in 2021.
- Pitched and wrote 4-6 articles a week, including several of the most-read articles on the website
- Cleaned, analyzed and visualized data to deepen and discover stories
- Cultivated sources among government officials, activists, faith leaders and other community members to regularly produce exclusives
Work Samples
Web Scraping
Tracker
Long-term Enterprise
Tracking U.S. drug overdose deaths
I managed the back-end development for this innovative project, which made the unwieldy fatal overdose data from the CDC easily accessible to the public. My role in this project, which won First Place for Journalistic Innovation in the National Headliner Awards, required building an automated data scraper and cleaner, while working closely with the front-end developers to ensure the system met their needs.
Data Gathering
Tracker
Short-turn Enterprise
This California law was supposed to end single-family zoning. Three years later, it’s ‘just symbolic’
This story followed up on a California state housing law that had been hyped up by legislators and decried by wealthy cities. My analysis revealed what many housing researchers had suspected — the law had done little to tangibly move the needle of housing production in California.
Data Analysis
Data Visualization
Quick turn
Trump is firing S.F. judges with highest rates of granting asylum, new analysis finds
During a rapidly developing push in federal policy — a series of immigration judge firings by the Trump administration — I analyzed a massive federal dataset of immigration court cases to determine that the S.F. judges fired by the administration had generally favored asylum claims brought before them.
Data Analysis
Data Visualization
Short-term enterprise
Here’s how much money S.F. mayoral candidates and their supporters are spending
One of my annual campaign finance deep-dives, this one was notable because of the sheer amount of money pouring into the San Francisco election, which we later identified as the most expensive in the city's modern history. I relied heavily on data visualizations to concisely convey my findings.
Data Analysis
Data Visualization
Quick turn
How the Bay Area housing market changed in 2025
I write a lot about housing — so much, in fact, that we realized readers might not have realized the sweeping changes that had occurred in the market over the past year. This story summarized, through a mixture of deep reporting and data analysis, the dramatic shifts in the Bay Area housing market.
Data Visualization
Front-end Development
Short-term Enterprise
Hearst Newspapers Walkability Project
This interactive map was featured in the San Francisco Chronicle, the Houston Chronicle and other Hearst papers. Using Environmental Protection Agency data, readers can see how "walkable" the federal government says their block is, what factors influence their walkability score and how the rest of the county compares.
Contact Me
If you have any questions, need a copy of a paywalled article or would like to get in contact with me for any other reason, just send me an email and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can!