Francesca Mari, National Fellow, has written features about housing, conmen, and abuses of power for the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic, the New York Review of Books, New York Magazine, and others. From 2012 to 2016, she was a writer and editor at Texas Monthly, and from 2016 to 2018, she was a senior editor at the California Sunday Magazine. She now lives in Providence, Rhode Island, where she teaches narrative nonfiction in the Literary Arts Department at Brown University and recently earned her real estate license. During her fellowship, she developed her book about why housing is so expensive, charting the consequences of financialization on the lives of neighbors on a single block in Los Angeles.
Selected Work
- Using the Homeless to Guard Empty Houses: A story for the New Yorker about a new version of house-sitting that signals a broken real-estate market.
- A $60 Billion Housing Grab by Wall Street: An article for the New York Times Magazine about how hundreds of thousands of single-family homes are now in the hands of giant companies, putting the American dream even further out of reach.
- What My Dad Gave His Shop: A reflection on the challenges facing small businesses around the country as they begin to fade at the hands of corporations for the Atlantic.
- The Sharks and the Shrimpers: The story of a BP oil spill settlement gone wrong for Gulf Coast seafood industry workers in the Atlantic.
- The Housing Vultures: An article for the New York Review of Books about how the investors who exploited the 2008 financial crisis are still writing the rules for our current moment.
