Francesca Mari is a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine and an assistant professor of the practice at Brown University. She writes about housing, con men, abuses of power, and, every so often, fashion.
While at MacDowell in 2019, Francesca completed a longform article about the rise of private equity landlords following the 2008 financial crisis for The New York Times Magazine and wrote a thematically-related review of Homewreckers, a book on the role of vulture capitalists in housing, for the New York Review of Books. She also completed editing on a story, begun three years earlier, about the identity theft of 40,000 Vietnamese fishermen after Deepwater Horizon for the Atlantic Magazine.
At MacDowell, in 2023, she wrote a story for the New York Times Magazine about studying Vienna's social housing as a way of diagnosing the dysfunction in the U.S. housing market. Her last housing story for the magazine, on the pandemic real estate boom, was one of the magazine's most-read of the year and the subject of a Daily podcast. Her first housing story for the magazine, on the Wall Street acquisition of single-family homes, has been repeatedly cited in reports by the Department of Housing and Urban Development and inspired doctorate work by sociologists at Princeton.
