Kathleen M. Howley is a seven-year veteran of Bloomberg News, covering the U.S. real estate boom and bust. Howley, a graduate of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, began her career in 1980 as a stringer for Associated Press while an editor at the school's newspaper. In 1983 she became a reporter, then news editor, at Beacon Hill News in Boston, covering local issues such as zoning and development. From 1988 to 1990 she wrote three weekly columns for the Boston Herald, including one that anchored its Friday real estate section. She was a real estate reporter and columnist for the Boston Globe from 1990 to 2000. Howley and her partner, Susan Stewart, live south of Boston in a Victorian farmhouse they are renovating at the foot of Great Blue Hill, the ancient home of the Native American tribe the state of Massachusetts is named after.