Molly Solomon
Molly Solomon joined HPR in May 2012 as an intern for the morning talk show The Conversation. She has since worn a variety of hats around the station, doing everything from board operator to producer.
She is now the General Assignment reporter and covers a number of important topics including education, tourism, and food sustainability. A California native, Molly joined HPR after graduating from University of California Santa Cruz with a BA in Sociology. At UC Santa Cruz, she volunteered at KZSC as well as the student newspaper, City on a Hill Press. When she's not reporting local news, Molly can usually be spotted riding her bike around Kaimukī or eating her way through Oʻahu's plethora of Japanese restaurants.
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California leased hotel rooms for unhoused residents during the pandemic to move them out of crowded shelters. Then it bought some of those hotels to create long-term homes for them. -
California's Project Homekey buys motels and turns them into housing for its homeless population. It's resulted in 94 new housing projects across the state. Three are run by Native American tribes.
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Two homeless mothers in Oakland are fighting to stay in an empty house that they've taken over. They're against speculators who are buying vacant housing amid the Bay Area's growing housing crisis.
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President Trump's new tariffs have ports and steel manufacturers in the West uneasy, as they rely on steel imports from the Pacific Rim. -
The smoke and ash hanging in the air from the still-burning Eagle Creek Fire in the Columbia River Gorge could easily transfer to the grapes, potentially changing the quality of the wine. -
The sunken Hero, an Antarctic research vessel from the 1960s, is leaking oil into Willapa Bay, where more than half of the state's oysters are grown. And no one knows how to remove it. -
The sugar industry in Hawaii dominated the state's economy for over a century. But it has shrunk in recent years. Now, the last of the state's sugar mills has wrapped up its final harvest. -
In Hawaii, more than 34,000 acres of forest have died from a mysterious disease. The blight is affecting a tree critical to Hawaii's natural water supply and cultural heritage. -
During the height of summer tourist season, miles of beaches have been closed. Flooding from heavy rains caused more than 500,000 gallons of waste to overflow from manholes and cascade into the surf.
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In Hawaii, a battle is going on over the future of a mountaintop. Native Hawaiians say it's sacred ground, but astronomers say it's the best place in the world to build an 18-story telescope.
