Hannah LaClaire
Hannah LaClaire covers Maine’s housing crisis through a blend of market data, policy reporting and on-the-ground stories about how people find and keep a home. She is the housing reporter at the Portland Press Herald, focusing on real estate, development, home ownership, rental issues and affordability across the state. Her work sits at the intersection of the housing market and lived experience, tracking trends while foregrounding the people affected by them.
Tracking Maine’s housing market
LaClaire produces regular coverage of Maine’s housing market, using sales data, prices and inventory figures to explain how the market is shifting month by month.
Her midyear assessments of Maine’s housing conditions examine statewide trends in home sales, listing inventory and median prices, drawing on data from Maine Listings and the Maine Association of Realtors. In a July report, she details how increased inventory led to more sales while prices dipped slightly, citing preliminary numbers that show 1,705 homes changing hands and a median sale price of $425,000. She breaks those numbers down into clear takeaways, such as the average of 77 families buying or selling a home each business day and the highest level of listing options since early 2020.
Earlier work tracks record-setting home prices, including a May analysis noting a $425,000 median price just months after the first statewide price decrease in six years. This consistent use of statistics anchors her housing coverage in clear, digestible market signals.
Exploring affordability and housing policy
Affordability is a central theme in LaClaire’s housing coverage.
Her reporting on a statewide housing study highlights how high construction costs, wage stagnation and a competitive market have made affordability the key hurdle in every corner of Maine’s housing market. She connects those structural pressures to renters’ realities, covering research showing that more than half of Portland renters are cost-burdened, spending more than 30% of their income on housing. Legislative and regulatory responses feature prominently, from stories on bills to expand eviction-prevention programs and ease regulations to spur construction, to committee debates over code issues that have stalled hundreds of modular housing units.
She also follows efforts to repurpose public assets for housing, including proposals to turn vacant schools into apartments and state programs that channel millions of dollars to new affordable projects. Her survey-based reporting on public sentiment documents how 85% of respondents hold a negative view of affordable housing availability, pairing statistics with individual stories of buyers pushed out of the market. Across these pieces, she treats affordability as both a policy problem and a lived constraint shaping where people can reside.
Development projects and redevelopment stories
LaClaire’s beat includes close coverage of major development projects and redevelopment efforts, particularly when they carry high stakes for local housing supply. She has written on controversial Greater Portland housing developments that moved into auction after financial troubles, tracing the implications for planned units and neighborhood expectations. Her reporting on the failed Midtown housing project explains years of litigation, escalating public costs and the city’s decision to buy back vacant lots rather than pursue the original plan for hundreds of apartments.
Coverage of islands with year-round residents looks at how housing shortages for essential workers threaten the survival of long-standing communities and services.
In redevelopment pieces, she follows entities like the Maine Redevelopment Land Bank Authority as they target long-abandoned commercial and multifamily properties, including a defunct mill in East Millinocket. She also co-reports on ambitious proposals such as a plan for what would be Maine’s tallest building, explaining how mixed-use projects with hotels, residences, offices and public space could reshape central urban blocks. These stories show her attention to contentious projects, large-scale investments and the long arc of redevelopment decisions.
Business, cannabis and adjacent beats
Alongside housing, LaClaire brings a business-reporting lens to related sectors. Her profile and past work note experience covering entrepreneurship and the state’s cannabis industry, including stories on popular THC drinks and the regulatory changes that could sweep them from store shelves. She has also written culture-adjacent business features, such as coverage of a local singer’s appearance on a national televised competition, while maintaining housing, real estate and development as her core focus. This range gives her housing stories context within broader economic and consumer trends, from construction delays linked to federal procurement rules to how statewide crises reverberate through everyday business decisions. Taken together, her portfolio reflects a reporter who treats housing as both a market and a system, grounded in numbers but driven by policy and the experiences of residents across Maine.
4 more real estate journalists.
Aaron Elstein
Aaron Elstein brings a Wall Street reporter’s eye to commercial real estate. He is a senior reporter at Crain’s New York Business, where he covers large office towers, Midtown corridors, landlords, lenders, investors and regulators. His reporting shows how ownership decisions, bank balance sheets, capital markets and regulation shape property values and risk. He also covers banking, finance and Wall Street, including bank mergers and investment firms. Before joining Crain’s in 2003, he wrote Heard on the Street columns for The Wall Street Journal and covered bank mergers for American Banker. Elstein reports by closely reading footnotes, contracts, regulatory filings and legal documents. His investigative work has examined executive payments, pension funds, tax enforcement and tenant harassment. His coverage places deals, disputes and enforcement actions within broader financial and property cycles.
Aaron Moselle
Aaron Moselle covers housing and community development for WHYY’s PlanPhilly, filing for radio and the web. He stands out for connecting market data and government action to displacement, affordable homes, and the daily questions facing renters and homeowners. His core beat is housing affordability and market strain, including high mortgage rates, rising prices, tax assessments, and what they mean for buyers, sellers, and renters. He also reports on preserving and creating affordable housing, neighborhood rehab efforts, major real estate deals, and the effect of property sales on residents. His work often uses direct sourcing, plain language, and service journalism to make policy and finance clear.
Aarthi Swaminathan
Aarthi Swaminathan is a personal finance reporter at MarketWatch whose distinctive beat connects residential real estate with household budgets. She covers housing prices, affordability, mortgage rates, financing, insurance, remodeling and the costs of owning a home. Her reporting examines overvalued and fast-rising markets, ZIP-code trends, second-home sellers, builders, developers and buyers facing higher borrowing costs. She also follows Gen Z buyers, owners trapped in weakening condo markets and neighborhood conflicts over development. Her work pairs data-driven housing analysis with detailed case studies of buyers, owners and sellers. She explains complex market data in clear, accessible language and writes news features, personal-finance explainers, Economic Report stories, The Big Move and New American Playbook. She won a silver award for Best Collection of Work by an Individual Covering Residential Real Estate.
Abbey Ferguson
Abbey Ferguson stands out for reporting how major commercial moves and redevelopment plans reshape the built environment, especially the real estate deals that reveal what land and retail space are worth. She covers Central Texas commercial real estate and development for KWTX, with recent stories on land valuation, major transactions, retail redevelopment, and infrastructure planning. Her work has tracked an $80 million data center site offer in Hill County, a prospective Trader Joe’s location in Waco, and a planning project using artificial intelligence to predict traffic patterns. She writes as a news reporter, staying close to the numbers, public records, brokers, officials, and landowners. Her stories turn contract prices, appraisal data, and listing history into plain explanations of what buyers are betting on and how those deals affect surrounding property owners and nearby businesses.