Fiction Pick of the Week: "Stay A While"
An elderly woman renovates her basement for renters and discovers uncomfortable truths about herself.
An elderly woman renovates her basement for renters and discovers uncomfortable truths about herself.
Alice Kaltman Joyland Magazine Sep 2015 20min Permalink
Only after buying a new home did the Milliken family learn something terrible had happened in it.
Will Hunt, Matt Wolfe The Atavist Aug 2015 40min Permalink
How New York real estate became the new Swiss bank account.
Andrew Rice New York Jun 2014 25min Permalink
On the urge to live in a house you can't afford, the "acceptable lust" of American life.
Michael Lewis Portfolio Sep 2008 20min Permalink
An investigation into Boston’s off-campus housing.
The fire that killed a Boston University student in a house filled with 13 other people and only one exit.
Examining the laws around off-campus housing and their lack of enforcement.
How the giants in the student rental trade do business.
Boston Globe May 2014 1h5min Permalink
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.
Peter Keating ESPN Jun 2009 20min Permalink
How a disgraced principal-turned real estate mogul helped cause the global financial crisis.
Gary Silverman Financial Times Feb 2014 15min Permalink
Bruce Cawsey Waite has no home, no office, and wears a dead man’s suit.
Lisa Taddeo The New York Observer Oct 2012 Permalink
A 21-year-old’s audacious real estate scam and subsequent escape.
Kevin Purdy Buffalo Spree Jun 2012 25min Permalink
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.
Alexis Madrigal The Atlantic Feb 2012 25min Permalink
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.
Felix Gillette Businessweek Dec 2011 20min Permalink
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.
Nell Boeschenstein The Morning News Oct 2009 15min Permalink
What a century and a half of piled-up housing reveals about New Yorkers.
Justin Davidson New York Apr 2011 15min Permalink
A New Yorker finds an unlikely house guest on Craigslist.
Brian Boucher New York Jan 2006 15min Permalink
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.
Wajahat Ali McSweeney's Mar 2010 40min Permalink
The author joins his father’s work crew, gutting out foreclosed houses in Florida and interviewing their former residents.
Paul Reyes Harper's Oct 2008 Permalink
War stories from the world of Manhattan real estate, written during an era when everybody knew the Internet would completely change the business and nobody quite knew how.
Susan Orlean New Yorker Feb 1999 20min Permalink