Cape Coral, Florida, was built on lies. One big storm could wipe it off the map. It’s also the fastest-growing city in the United States.

They thought that they’d found the perfect New York apartment. They weren’t alone.

“It was a crumbling Parkdale rooming house, populated by drug users and squatters and available on the cheap. We were cash-strapped, desperate to move and hemmed in by a hot market.”

The landlord’s guide to gentrifying New York.

Alben Sagan got his name from the U.S. Marshals. Then he got a fortune from a woman he’d only known for a few years.

A look inside Donald Trump’s portfolio of exclusive real estate properties.

Why has a prestigious address been used so many times as a center for elaborate international fraud?

Two floors of a building in prime Brooklyn for $1000 a month seemed too good to be true. It was.

Shakiya Robertson thought she had found a way get her family a home. She moved in, fixed the place up, made all the payments. Then she, like thousands of others in Detroit, was told that the house she thought she had purchased wasn’t actually hers.

An elderly woman renovates her basement for renters and discovers uncomfortable truths about herself.

Only after buying a new home did the Milliken family learn something terrible had happened in it.

How New York real estate became the new Swiss bank account.

On the urge to live in a house you can't afford, the "acceptable lust" of American life.

A profile of the Los Angeles Clippers owner, an oft-sued real estate baron with a documented racist streak and a penchant for heckling his own players, on the occasion of him winning an NAACP lifetime achievement award.

How a disgraced principal-turned real estate mogul helped cause the global financial crisis.

Bruce Cawsey Waite has no home, no office, and wears a dead man’s suit.

A 21-year-old’s audacious real estate scam and subsequent escape.

A visit to the newly on-the-market Jamesburg Earth Station, a massive satellite receiver that played a key role in communications with space, and its neighbors in an adjacent trailer park.

Before the market crashed and home prices tumbled, before federal investigators showed up and hauled away the community records, before her property managers pled guilty for conspiring to rig neighborhood elections, and before her real estate lawyer allegedly tried to commit suicide by overdosing on drugs and setting fire to her home, Wanda Murray thought that buying a condominium in Las Vegas was a pretty good idea.

Dreaming of the perfect apartment.

Should anyone ever choose to remake and bastardize Breakfast at Tiffany’s, I propose an opening sequence re-imagined to reflect more contemporary preoccupations. The revised opening scene should be filmed against the backdrop of an early evening in Brooklyn. The throngs of suits coming home from their nine to five grinds in Manhattan would be emerging from the subway stairwells like ants from an anthill, rushing off down various streets towards their various homes and families and dinners. All except for the would-be protagonist who, as the crowd rushes past her, makes her way to the closed-for-the-night real-estate storefront opposite the subway station. Somewhere, “Moon River” might still be playing, as if it had never stopped. Disheveled, lugging her purse and gym bag, she pauses for a number of minutes to read listings she has already read, and which she committed to memory weeks ago: a studio on Pineapple Street; a loft on Gold Street; a townhouse on Argyle Street; a two-bedroom coop on First Place; a one-bedroom condo on Carlton Avenue; a brownstone on Henry Street. It’s fall and the leaves blow in eddies on the sidewalk. She gets cold and turns away from the window to walk off down the street just as dusk begins to arrive in earnest. The occasional “For Sale” sign swings on its hinges, and the story of the day ends only to begin again in the morning.

What a century and a half of piled-up housing reveals about New Yorkers.

A New Yorker finds an unlikely house guest on Craigslist.

A mid-boom critique of New York City’s high-priced, mostly glass condo buildings.

A just-barred Pakistani-American attorney attempts to save a young family’s home from foreclosure and glimpses the contradiction-rich bureaucracy that has emerged in response to the housing crisis.