Megan Kimble Recognized by AARP Texas for Outstanding Journalism in the Public Interest

AARP Texas is thrilled to announce Megan Kimble of the Hearst Newspapers’ Texas Bureau as the recipient of our 2024 Texas Journalism Honors recognition for her impactful reporting on home insurance and other issues of importance to older Texans and their families.

Kimble is a political economy reporter based in Austin. She has delivered powerful stories on housing, transportation, agriculture and local governance for several years. She’s also published two books, including City Limits, which is about urban freeways and the outcomes of their seemingly endless expansion in Texas. Her reports appear in the Houston Chronicle, San Antonio Express-News and other Hearst publications in Texas and elsewhere.

Image provided for authorized use by Megan Kimble.

While Kimble’s investigative journalism probes complex issues of widespread interest, her work is centered in Texas and its people, with much of her reporting tied to a curiosity about climate change and the responses to it by society, governments and consumers.

“I just really want to understand better how and why the world works the way it does,” Kimble said. “I’m really drawn to complicated, seemingly boring questions about the way we live. All these policy decisions, for me, are the justifications and processes for the world being the way it is.”

For City Limits, Kimble started on the project in 2020 when the Texas Transportation Commission allocated $4 billion to expand Interstate 35 through the heart of Austin near her home. She had already been writing about housing and sprawl, and to her, the highway project seemed like a start to a bigger story about America’s car dependency.

By giving attention to a topic not widely reported on – state and federal transportation funding – Kimble tells the story in City Limits of how tens of billions of dollars are spent in places like Austin, Dallas and Houston building bigger and wider highways that don’t thoroughly ease congestion but worsen automotive emissions and disrupt communities.

Kimble said she thrives on shedding light on “hidden processes that shape our world and that are not really glamorous but are important.” That perspective is seen in the ongoing news coverage she’s been delivering since early 2024 on the topic of homeowner’s insurance. That work includes a deep examination of matters tied to the availability and cost of property insurance in Texas – a topic that AARP Texas is working on during the 2025 Texas legislative session.

“The cost of homeowner’s insurance is where the cost of climate change is impacting people’s budgets,” Kimble said.

Kimble’s attention to the topic began, she said, as a general assignment to cover the issue, but she ran with it and soon talked to dozens of people throughout Texas last year as well as national experts and numerous homeowners from coastal areas to folks in the Panhandle.

This is the fourth year that AARP Texas has recognized journalists for outstanding reporting in the public interest. Through this recognition, AARP Texas seeks to honor journalists whose work promotes awareness and understanding of older Texans and the issues that matter to them and their families.

“Property insurance coverage, housing and home affordability, and the other consumer-oriented topics that Megan writes about are squarely of great interest and importance to AARP members and other older Texans and their families,” said AARP Texas Director Tina Tran. “Great journalism, like the kind that Megan Kimble is producing, adds a tremendous value to communities, and it’s work that AARP Texas is proud to recognize.”

Besides City Limits, Kimble also is the author of Unprocessed, a book about her year-long experiment in eating unprocessed foods. She is the former executive editor at The Texas Observer, and she has written about housing, transportation, and urban development for, among other publications, The New York Times, Texas Monthly, The Guardian, and Bloomberg CityLab.

No monetary donations are involved in the AARP Texas journalism recognition, though AARP Texas intends to provide Kimble with a keepsake item of nominal value. Works of journalism by both professionals and students were reviewed by a small team at AARP Texas, including written news reports, broadcast stories, podcasts, photojournalism, and other forms of storytelling.