Kayla Levy
Kayla Levy writes about how families, parents, and roommates build lives inside New York City’s housing, with a focus on shared homes, unconventional households, and the cultures that form around them. Her coverage for Curbed is driven by close portraits of specific apartments and houses, where parenting, partnership, and friendship are arranged around tight space and complex cohabitation. She works as a freelance journalist, contributing to New York Magazine and its verticals on housing, culture, and consumer life.
Living arrangements and shared homes
Levy’s core subject is how people structure their living arrangements, especially when many adults and children share the same roof. Her reporting often begins inside homes that function as experiments in family structure, like a no-men “mommune” organized by single mothers in Harlem.
She profiles multi-adult households such as a three-parent, five-child, seven-bedroom home in Forest Hills and a town house shared by a woodworker and a family in Red Hook, treating each address as a case study in how domestic space is negotiated.
In pieces on communal houses with six roommates or on friends improvising guest accommodations with a tent, she traces the rules, compromises, and everyday logistics that make these homes stay intact. The reporting combines floor plans, chores, and financial arrangements with the emotional stakes of sharing space, so the story of the home becomes a story about relationships under pressure.
Parenting inside unconventional households
Parenting is a recurring lens in Levy’s work, but it is always tied to the concrete realities of housing and cohabitation, not generic advice. In the “mommune” story, she shows single mothers pooling childcare, income, and emotional support inside a home explicitly organized around their needs as parents, including rules about who can enter and how labor is divided. In the Forest Hills house with three parents and five children, she documents how caregiving, bedrooms, and shared resources are arranged to accommodate a blended family, turning architectural choices into a map of family roles.
Profiles of families sharing townhouses or apartments highlight how parents carve out privacy, play space, and work areas within limited square footage. Across these stories, the reporting stays on the specifics - who sleeps where, who pays what, who watches the kids when - so that the reader sees parenting as something engineered through space, schedules, and household governance.
Roommate dynamics and domestic culture
Levy also spends time on homes where the defining relationship is between roommates rather than parents and children. Her coverage includes a Brooklyn one-bedroom shared by a domme and a submissive, where power dynamics shape not only the relationship but the way the apartment is used and decorated.
In features on large communal houses, she follows how chores, rent, and conflict resolution are organized among six adults, treating the household like a small institution with its own policies and culture. Pieces about improvised guest rooms and ad hoc sleeping arrangements show how friendship, hospitality, and boundaries play out when space is scarce.
These stories are grounded in observation and interview, focusing on how residents talk about their home, what they display, and what they hide, which keeps the coverage close to lived domestic culture rather than abstract trend-watching.
Service and neighborhood reporting
Alongside narrative features, Levy contributes to service journalism and local coverage connected to the home. She has written for New York Magazine’s product vertical The Strategist, including input on home desks, where she evaluates furniture through long-term use and fit within small apartments. Earlier in her career, she covered neighborhoods such as Astoria, Long Island City, Forest Hills, and Bayside for Patch, reporting on local issues and daily life in and around the homes and streets of those communities. That mix of product testing and neighborhood reporting informs her Curbed work, which approaches apartments and houses as both personal spaces and part of a broader urban fabric.
4 more parenting journalists.
Abigail Shrier
Abigail Shrier is a journalist, columnist at The Free Press, and bestselling author whose work centers on parenting, family relationships, and the cultural forces shaping childhood. She writes the weekly “Tough Love” advice column, where readers send hard personal and family dilemmas and she focuses on concrete situations and practical choices for parents, partners, and adult children. She also publishes essays and reported features on parenting that examine how institutions and professionals influence everyday family life, including criminalization of ordinary parental decisions and therapeutic advice that leads to “no contact” with parents. Her books “Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up” and “Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters” extend her reporting on therapy, gender medicine, and youth. She also covers education, gender, speech, activism, and censorship, approaching these subjects as reported arguments.
Alesandra Dubin
Alesandra Dubin uses parenting to examine how travel, independence, and everyday logistics shape family life. She is a digital travel and lifestyle journalist with more than 15 years’ experience covering parenting, travel, food, events, fashion and beauty, entertainment, home, and viral content for consumer and business outlets. Her work has appeared in Insider, Good Housekeeping, Parents, Esquire, Woman’s Day, Prevention, Glamour, Shondaland, AFAR, and TODAY. Her parenting beat centers on family travel, including flights, camps, hotels, destinations, and the ways parents protect their identity and relationships while caring for children. She also covers practical planning, from room layouts and prices to crowds, tickets, transit, pacing, and family-friendly dining. She reports through candid first-person stories, then draws out clear service advice and emotional insights about care, autonomy, stress, and family dynamics.
Alyson Krueger
Alyson Krueger is a freelance journalist who covers how people live, parent, gather and chase status in contemporary culture through reported narratives anchored in specific communities, events and social scenes. She writes for The New York Times and other publications and has contributed to The New York Times since 2013. Her parenting work centers on fatherhood and family rituals, using observed behavior and everyday routines to show changing family roles. She often reports on urban social life and leisure, including how people socialize and find rest in demanding environments, from city winters to shifting ski seasons. Her business and fashion stories examine the social meaning of wellness practices, marketing with superheroes, playful luxury food and gifting. She also covers major events, weddings and fan culture, paying attention to atmosphere, crowds and what draws people together.
Amie Windsor
Amie Windsor links parenting and everyday family life directly to local policy, community crises and governance decisions. She is the Opinion Editor at The Press Democrat and is described by the masthead as the Community Journalism Team Lead, drawing on nearly a decade in community journalism with sustained coverage of city hall and school boards. She writes opinion columns and reported pieces on parenting under democratic stress, wildfire displacement, transportation planning, law enforcement technology and major energy infrastructure decisions. Her parenting work treats raising children as part of civic life under political instability, showing how structural shifts enter routines, emotional labor and family conversations. Her reporting on biking and walking projects, hybrid police cruisers and dam decommissioning keeps policy and infrastructure grounded in specific projects, residents and public processes, emphasizing civic engagement, community resilience and resident-first coverage.