This exclusive newsletter is just for you as a subscriber to The Buffalo News. Here, we'll regularly connect you with our journalists and take you behind-the-scenes of how our coverage comes together. 

What's inside:

• Inside our investigation of Buffalo home values 

• Get to know reporter Caitlin Dewey

• Newspaper bargains from more than 100 years ago

• How we use the Freedom of Information Law

Photo by Derek Gee

Reporter Caitlin Dewey was busy giving herself a crash course on Buffalo's history and economy when a community activist first told her about the housing reassessment and its potential impact on the Fruit Belt. The assessment would revalue more than 60,000 residential properties and be the first to reflect the market upswing that began in 2010. 

The results, originally scheduled for release this past June, faced a series of delays. Over the next few months, Dewey was in and out of City Hall, meeting with officials and inquiring about the data. It wasn't until September that the reassessment was released. 

With data in hand, The News enlisted the help of a programmer to compare the 20,000 pages of newly released housing data with the previous assessment. Then, Dewey dove in to draw insights and ask questions about its impact.

“I think it’s important because there’s no one else who’s going to do this work. No one,” Dewey said. 

“At the end of the day, The Buffalo News is the only way you are going to get this information."

The data, Dewey stressed, gives you the foundation and even guides your questions. But it's not the whole story. “You need people for a story,” she said. 

Dewey attended block clubs and other community meetings to find out how residents were being affected by the trends revealed in the data. The more people she spoke with, the clearer the picture became. 

After months of analyzing, vetting her findings with academics and spending time in the field, the first story was complete. But Dewey tells us there's more left to tell. “It illuminated the truth of a common narrative and some would say a common myth about Buffalo,” she said. 

“The sort of most prominent myth is that we have just an off-the-charts housing market. The reality is that narrow segments of the market are hot. People get so excited about the notion of a hot housing market because hot housing markets suggests a hot economy. I think those assumptions and narratives are important to examine." 

While we were getting the scoop on Dewey’s reassessment story, we couldn’t help but ask about her career in journalism and return to Buffalo. 

Why did you become a reporter? 

My path to becoming a journalist actually started at The Buffalo News. In high school I wrote for the NeXt section. I mostly wrote reviews of terrible high school concerts, which at the time, I thought were truly wonderful. I had a really good experience doing that. I didn’t think I wanted to be a journalist, but I really liked writing. When I went to Syracuse University and they saw I had all that experience from NeXt, they said, "We actually want to put you in the journalism school."

So, NeXt is literally the reason I became a journalist. I went to school for this, I graduated, I worked briefly at a financial magazine, then the Washington Post for six years before coming back to Buffalo in September 2018.

What brought you back to Buffalo? 

My family still lives here and when I got married, I always had this notion that we’d move back to Buffalo eventually. It was home and it seemed like a really good place to build a life; more livable than a place like D.C. When this job opportunity came up, the timing aligned so we decided to move a little earlier than we were planning.

You can hear more from Dewey on Twitter: @caitlindewey

On Feb. 3, 1895, Rosenbloom Bros. announced their annual clearing sale in The Buffalo Evening News. Among these bargains: "Men's Calf Hand Sewed Shoes, never sold less than $5, clearing sale price $2.83."