Cassidy Jensen joins Brick Underground as contributing writer
- She's a Brooklyn-based journalist with prior stints at The Baltimore Sun and the Concord Monitor
I started writing for Brick in January, and since then I’ve covered various topics including: keeping apartments cool, keeping apartments hot, and keeping apartments affordable.
Eric Jensen
Hello, Brick Underground readers! I’m writing to introduce myself as a new contributing writer. I’ll be writing four stories per month about the ins and out of New York City residential real estate.
When I’m not explaining housing for Brick, I work as a book researcher and freelance reporter. I often report on local news for the New York Times Metro section, racing around town to cover fires, court hearings, protests, and sometimes even snow days.
A little about me
I started freelancing full-time in NYC last year, after stints as a staff reporter for The Baltimore Sun and the Concord Monitor.
I currently live with my sister and a few roommates in Bedford-Stuyvesant, but I was briefly a Manhattan resident while I got my master’s in investigative journalism at Columbia Journalism School. I found my beautiful prewar apartment on the Listings Project in 2020 and moved in sight-unseen with a pandemic rent deal.
In Baltimore I primarily covered the criminal justice system, but I also wrote stories about how the city’s public housing authority implemented a rule making it easier to evict tenants following a mass shooting at one of its complexes, and how three children died in a house fire in an unlicensed rental without a working smoke alarm.
In New Hampshire, I followed a group of renters as they struggled to find housing amid the state’s dire shortage after a new owner evicted them from their apartment building.
Why real estate service journalism?
Last year, I took on an unusual assignment from policy journal Vital City. An editor asked me, could I get accurate financials for two buildings to show what running rental housing in NYC really costs?
The end result of the project was two simple income statements, showing how a rent-stabilized and a market-rate building each made ends meet (or not) in 2024. The project took me on a fascinating journey through NYC’s rent laws, housing history, and property management conundrums.
At one point, I spent hours in a Long Island diner trying to understand the details of one landlord’s accounting ledger. The project taught me that NYC housing is fascinating and that I enjoy synthesizing information into a clear and useful format for readers.
Housing is a chief concern for most New Yorkers. The high cost of living here determines so much about our safety, well-being, and ability to make ends meet.
Having suffered through a bedbug invasion in my fifth-floor Harlem walkup at the same time as I was finishing a months-long investigation, I understand intimately how much your living situation can impact your life.
What do I cover for Brick?
I started writing for Brick in January, and since then I’ve covered various topics including: keeping apartments cool, keeping apartments hot, and keeping apartments affordable.
You may have also seen my stories on Governor Kathy Hochul’s proposed budget and what it included for housing, and new efforts to protect NYC homeowners from losing their houses to deed theft.
Recently, I reported out a fun and quirky story: how to buy one of the VIP cabins built for the now-shuttered Brooklyn Mirage concert venue.
Finally, I’ve taken over the job of writing about housing lotteries for rent-stabilized units at new developments. (If you’ve successfully won an apartment through the housing lottery, we’d love to hear from you. Send us an email and we’ll keep you anonymous!)
In the future, I’m hoping to report on how artificial intelligence is changing real estate, the advantages and challenges of communal living and more generally, what policy changes on the state and city level mean for you.
Feel free to reach out! You can find me at [email protected] or on X or Bluesky.
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