Addie Morfoot
Addie Morfoot focuses on real estate stories that hinge on people, rules and the way homes shape a life. Her reporting for The New York Times combines housing and lifestyle coverage, from personal narratives about finding a home after loss to features on how short-term rental policy affects everyday owners and renters. Alongside real estate, she maintains a substantial portfolio on documentary film and the entertainment business, giving her work a consistent cross-over between property, culture and media.
Short-term rentals during the World Cup
In her coverage of short-term rentals, Morfoot explains how local housing rules play out on the ground when a global event arrives. In a World Cup feature, she looks at New Jersey municipalities along the Hudson waterfront that are encouraging residents to take advantage of anticipated demand for short-term stays, while New York City keeps strict limits on rentals of fewer than 30 days unless the host is present. She reports on places such as Kearny, Union City and Secaucus that have passed laws severely limiting or banning short-term rentals to prevent disruptions in residential neighborhoods and to address worries that they would constrain housing supply or drive up costs for locals.
Her framing sets municipal decisions against the backdrop of New York City’s argument that the spread of short-term rentals through platforms like Airbnb has pushed up rents and worsened the housing shortage.
Morfoot uses this type of real estate story to connect policy to individual opportunity and tension. She shows how the same short-term rental market that promises a windfall to some homeowners can be seen as a threat by others and by local officials concerned with stability and affordability.
The piece underlines her habit of grounding real estate topics in clear explanations of laws and regulations, then returning to how those rules affect the options available to ordinary residents in specific towns and cities.
Homes, loss and personal turning points
Morfoot’s real estate features often center on the emotional stakes of a move or a purchase rather than on market statistics. In a story about a man confronting tragedy and finding his way to an “unexpected epilogue” in Virginia, she follows how the search for a new home becomes the structure for rebuilding a life. The narrative uses the details of the home hunt and the eventual property to mark phases of grief, acceptance and renewed purpose, treating the house as both a physical space and a marker of a new chapter.
She brings a similar approach to profiles of homes owned by artists and performers.
In a recent piece she visited actor Kathleen Chalfant’s brownstone in Brooklyn Heights, writing about the interiors and layout for The New York Times. The feature connects architectural elements and objects in the home with the owner’s creative history, showing how personal spaces can carry a career’s story as clearly as a résumé.
Taken together, these pieces show Morfoot using individual residences to illustrate resilience, taste and identity, while still anchoring the story in the specifics of a property and a neighborhood.
Sunday routines of actors and creatives
Morfoot is a regular contributor to The New York Times’ Sunday Routine franchise, where she follows notable figures through a typical day and records how they move through work, family time and the city around them. Her profile of Mark Duplass and Katie Aselton focuses on how the couple balance making movies together with keeping their relationship grounded, including small details like finding time to cuddle on the subway.
In a piece on Jesse Tyler Ferguson, she shows him stepping away from a well-known sitcom image and leaning back into theater, using his day’s rhythm to illustrate that shift. Her story on comedian David Cross follows him as he prepares for a night of what he calls “dangerous” comedy, tying his routines to the edge he wants to keep in his performances.
The Sunday Routine column also gives Morfoot room to explore the intersection of work and leisure for people in fashion and media. Her profile of John Slattery presents an actor who makes plans and then breaks them, capturing a looseness that contrasts with his more controlled on-screen characters. In another feature she traces menswear designer Todd Snyder’s preparations for New York Fashion Week, from sketching over French fries to watching a model bring dozens of looks to life.
Across these pieces, she pays attention to settings - homes, studios, restaurants, subway cars - making the spaces themselves part of the portrait and reinforcing her broader interest in how environment shapes daily experience.
Documentary films and the entertainment business
Beyond real estate and lifestyle, Morfoot has a long track record covering documentary film and the entertainment industry for major outlets. Variety has identified her as a long-time contributor and appointed her to oversee editorial content for its Docs section, describing her as well respected in the documentary realm.
Her recent work there includes an in-depth examination of fair use questions in nonfiction productions and a piece on how the docu-series format has been transformed, indicating a focus on both legal frameworks and changing storytelling structures in non-fiction film and television.
Her broader entertainment reporting spans festival premieres, financing vehicles and efforts to reach new audiences. Recent articles highlighted a documentary about Pompeii with Tom Hiddleston, the role of a fund backed by Hollywood A-listers in supporting projects, and Liz Garbus’s ESPN documentary about Billie Jean King opening the Croatia International Film Festival. Other biographical material notes more than two decades of experience contributing to The New York Times, Variety, The Wall Street Journal and Crain’s New York Business, with beats across film, television, real estate and entertainment.
Taken together with her work at The New York Times, Morfoot’s portfolio shows a reporter who moves easily between housing stories, profile-driven features and industry analyses, while keeping the focus on how decisions in property and media affect individual lives.
4 more real estate journalists.
Alcynna Lloyd
Alcynna Lloyd is a real estate reporter and economic journalist at Business Insider whose work is distinct for treating housing as a core economic system people must navigate. She covers how housing markets, costs, and mobility shape everyday life decisions, connecting data on rents, home prices, and city trends with stories of people managing debt, multigenerational living, and moves abroad. Her beat centers on housing costs, renters, and household strategies, following renters pushing back against landlords and tracking “desperate home sellers” using concessions in unaffordable markets. A second strand of her coverage focuses on relocation, remote work, and cheap cities as everyday economic strategies. She regularly uses rankings and lists, such as best and worst states to buy a home and Rising Stars of Real Estate, and reads city housing and migration shifts as signs of broader economic change.
Alec Lazenby
Alec Lazenby covers how provincial politics and government decisions shape housing, real estate and the wider social fabric. He reports for The Vancouver Sun from the provincial legislature. His work examines HousingHub, middle-income rentals, affordability, stalled projects, empty condos, developer layoffs, municipal housing targets and land use. He also covers health, addiction, safer supply, involuntary care, water rights, resource management, Indigenous rights and Crown land. Lazenby connects policy language to specific buildings, rents, projects, services and people. He explains financial, regulatory and market pressures, then follows how institutions, professionals, developers, municipalities and affected communities respond. His reporting tests government goals against practical outcomes and shows how policy reversals, construction costs, interest rates and political accountability shape housing and public life.
Amir Ali
Amir Ali links housing, disputes, and oddball neighbourhood stories in case-based, street-level reporting for Daily Hive. He holds a senior editorial and writing role, listed on the masthead as part of Vancouver leadership and described as a staff writer. His core beat is real estate, especially the rental market and housing affordability, tracking rent ranges, market shifts, and how pressures land on people trying to stay housed. He also covers crime, civil tribunals, and mental health, explaining decisions and conflicts in plain language that focuses on timelines, behaviour, and outcomes. Ali writes offbeat hyperlocal features, traffic and transport disruptions, business, food, and general local news, often turning infrastructure, small businesses, and civic systems into tangible stories. A former radio producer, he brings tight pacing and clear stakes to written pieces and maintains an active social media presence as a broadcaster and writer.
Andrea Yu
Andrea Yu is a freelance journalist whose real estate coverage for The Globe and Mail uses detailed buyer case studies to show how specific budgets translate into real homes and condos. She focuses on affordability, treating each purchase as a clear before-and-after narrative where price, unit type, location and lifestyle needs are all visible. Her Home Run series follows individual buyers or households through a defined budget and search, then documents what they actually buy and the compromises they make. Her housing reporting feeds into broader coverage of affordability and access to housing. Alongside real estate, she maintains a wider portfolio across business, culture, design, health, food, drink and travel for general-interest magazines, drawing on prior staff roles and formal journalism training to keep her stories precise on numbers and grounded in everyday life.