Ari specializes in making complicated topics easy to understand.
He's written a tremendous number of stories about real, estate, land use and zoning codes, and he's done it in a way that people with no experience in those fields find accessible.
Ari writes about the environment and the impacts people have on it. He's written about the ways competing interests can create real struggles not only for those directly involved, but for the wider population.
He has written about every level of government and the way they interact with each other, as well as the impacts they have on individuals.
Finally, he's done a bit of work in education, explaining how policy-level decisions can mean major changes to individuals.
He realizes it's a bit cliche, but Ari is interested in writing about nearly everything. One of his favorite parts about working as a reporter is that every story is a chance to learn something new, be it a personal story or how something really works. He looks forward to the challenge of being asked to do something he's never done before.
Except sports. He finds writing about sports deadly boring. But everything else can be really interesting.
Ari earned a B.A. in English at the University of Maryland, College Park in 1995. To be perfectly honest, the dates listed above for start and end are rough estimates. He knows he started in the fall of 1991, and he finished in December of 1995, but the exact days may be wrong. It's been a while.
Ari has spent 20 years as a journalist, and in that time, he's written about government from every possible angle. he's covered school boards, city halls, county councils, state legislatures, the U.S. Congress. He's written about decision makers, and decisions in the executive branch, from local governments, filling potholes to the federal government helping fund mass transit. He's written about the courts, up to and including the U.S. Supreme Court.
He understands the difference between government and politics, and he understands that all government decisions are really about trade-offs.
Ari has written about education from primary level to undergraduate. He's covered the impact shifting expectations can have on students. He's written about innovative classroom teachers and about school board policies. He's written a lot, a lot, about funding. About school district funding, state funding, how they overlap and how they leave sometimes large gaps. If it happens in a classroom, a school board meeting or the halls of a state legislature, Ari has written about how it impacts education, and how it filters down to individual students.
Ari has written countless stories about real estate. He's written many stories for various local newspapers dissecting the state of the market at any given time. He was writing for local papers during the bubble years of the early 2000's, and through the crash of 2008, so he's seen how the market works at both extremes.
He's also written a lot about land use and development and gained an understanding of how the real estate market can impact development decisions.
Ari wrote a tremendous number of stories about land use and development over his years as a reporter. While doing this, he developed an understanding of many architectural concepts and styles. He understands how planning and zoning can impact a building's design. He knows what it means to be LEED-certified.
He's learned much of the jargon architects use and found ways to translate it to be understandable by an outside audience.
Ari has spent years working as a land-use reporter, and in that capacity, he developed a firm understanding of the construction industry. He's written about what it takes to get a project through various stages of code review in different states and localities. He's written about builders getting their projects LEED-certified and using new techniques like modular construction. He understands the details of construction, and he can tailor written work to audiences that want to hear about them or audiences that just want the highlights.
Ari did some writing for a personal finance website. The site focused mostly on consumers without an in-depth knowledge of finance and money in an effort to educate them. He wrote about things like what's a glide path in retirement planning, or what's an opportunity cost in investing and spending. He tried to inform people about these concepts so they could better take charge of their finances.
Ari has spent about 20 years working as a journalist. He's written more articles than he can even really estimate. His stories have covered just about every topic in existence, from education to the environment, feature stories about interesting people to hard news about boring changes to the zoning ordinance. His work can vary in length from quick blog posts to long-form, in-depth reporting. All of them, no matter the length or topic are accurate, readable and on deadline.