City Desk
“Every column ends in failure. Like the city.”
22 bylined pieces in the archive
List prices are dropping on condos across the city, but the number that'll actually kill your budget isn't on any listing — it's buried in the HOA documents nobody reads until it's too late.
In the Hamptons, the people who cook your forty-dollar pasta and pour your rosé go home to a borrowed bunk in a garage — if they go home at all.
The democratic socialist who just took the Democratic congressional nomination has a housing platform built on history and hard numbers, and the landlords already hate it.
Out in the Hamptons they got a bribery scandal, a hundred-and-fifty-dollar glass of pressed grapes, and a summer economy so cooked it makes Canarsie look like a buyer's market.
A restaurant server asks what happens when you reach sixty with two thousand dollars in a Roth IRA and no plan B — and the answer is not pretty, but it is not nothing.
The NYC rental bidding war is a rich man's game, but a working stiff with a cousin, a story, and a borrowed truck figured he had an edge — he did not.
A West End Avenue co-op got three decades of obsessive restoration from one man — original moldings, period fixtures, the works — and the man himself never spent a single night there.
The rental market is a rigged game where landlords auction off your future to the highest bidder, but a working stiff with the right moves can still walk out with the keys.
Upstate Catskill towns are watching their volunteer fire ranks hollow out as second-home money prices out the working people who used to fill those seats, and nobody with a weekend place is volunteering to drag hose at two in the morning.
In the Catskills, the second-home boom has priced out the very people who show up at three in the morning when your weekend getaway catches fire.
In Shandaken and the hollow towns around it, the firefighters are retiring, the young ones are leaving, and the weekend people who bought the old houses aren't showing up to run the hose.
A Greek Revival mansion on Washington Square North just listed for $23.5 million, and the only thing trickier than the location is figuring out who on earth is actually supposed to buy it.
Bill Gates's daughter just signed a Flatiron penthouse lease for her shopping app, and from where I'm standing on the sidewalk, the math on that is something else entirely.
The city built affordable co-ops so working people could own something — then wrapped the whole thing in so much paperwork and income-limit math that the working people can't get through the door.
The cobblestones under the Manhattan Bridge are a war zone now — locals versus selfie sticks — and somebody's cousin has a truck and a plan that cannot possibly work.
The cobblestone streets under the Manhattan Bridge have become a selfie gauntlet, and the people who actually live there are done being polite about it.
A million-dollar house, a landmark NAR settlement, and every seller in America doing the same math on a cocktail napkin — the answer is not what the headlines promised.
Every market-rate tenant in this city has dreamed of out-talking the guy who owns the building — here is how close you are actually going to get, and it ain't pretty.
Cornwall Insight says British energy bills are heading to £1,850 a year come July, and the war in Iran is putting its boot on the gas pipe — and nobody in power is explaining it plain.
A new report says the average New York City buyer needs two decades to scrape together a down payment, which is funny because most of us can't scrape together next month's rent.
Ten million tourists are about to descend on American host cities this summer, and the people who actually live there are watching their rent notices arrive before the opening whistle even blows.
For the first time since the de Blasio years, the Rent Guidelines Board has floated a zero at the bottom of its range — and every stabilized tenant in the five boroughs just looked up from their coffee.
