Francesca Mari is a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine focused on housing and equity. Her cover stories for TheNew 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 housing, 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 to sold-out audiences at BAM, The Ace Theater in LA, and The Paramount. 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 editor and writer at Texas Monthly and a senior editor at California Sunday in her hometown of San Francisco.