Producer Karen Brown has been making radio stories for WFCR for nine years, and her reporting experience makes this story shine. Brown introduces us to a young family that's made a social and environmental experiment out of their inner-city life together. They grow their own food, they don't own a car, and they light their house with candles at night, all in an effort to prove that living a simple, sustainable life is possible even in the middle of a modern city.

From the opening moments of this piece, we know we're in capable narrative hands. Brown takes us into the homesteaders' backyard, where hens cluck in the background and a vegetable garden sits next to a honey-producing beehive. Brown's writing is crisp and spatial, her delivery is a pitch-perfect combination of 'warm' and 'reporterly,' and on the technical front, this piece is mixed flawlessly, with plenty of ambient sound and a wide array of voices.

I really like the inclusion of the idealistic homesteaders' older, less 'visionary' relatives, like the uncle who points out that he has to drive them around because they don?t have a car! By the end of this story, I feel like I've been given a thorough, balanced introduction to the goals and the limitations of urban homesteading. It leaves me feeling inspired to try it myself one day, (like all the other things I'm going to do if I ever get organized).