Francesca Mari is a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine. Send tips to

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Francesca Mari

Francesca Mari is a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine focused on housing and equity and an assistant professor of the practice at Brown University. Her cover stories for The New York Times Magazine explain the pandemic real estate boom (in print and on The Daily); the rise of private equity landlords; and how the U.S. housing market became so dysfunctional and why it didn’t—and doesn’t—have to be this way. In addition, she has written features on homeless housesitters, con men, and other abuses of power for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Texas Monthly, The New York Review of Books, The Cut, and others.

Her Atlantic feature about the identity theft of 40,000 Vietnamese fishermen was optioned for film and her essay “The Assistant Economy” was anthologized in the Best Business Writing 2015. “The Talented Mr. Khater,” a true crime story about an international conman who buried a woman alive, was named one of the 10 best stories of the year by Longform in 2015, highlighted on NPR, and won the City and Regional Magazine Award for feature writing. She has toured with Pop-Up Magazine, performing a story about Alzheimer’s before sold-out audiences at BAM, The Ace Theater in LA, and The Paramount, and the Aspen Ideas Festival main stage. She is a grateful recipient of fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study (2022-2023), the New America Foundation (2021-2022), MacDowell (2019 and 2023) and Yaddo (2021). She was previously an intern at The New York Review of Books, an associate editor and writer at Texas Monthly and a senior editor at The California Sunday Magazine in her hometown of San Francisco. She generally lives in Providence, Rhode Island.