Matthew Sedacca

Matthew Sedacca uses individual apartments, towers, and creative studios to tell larger stories about how money, taste, and culture shape life in New York City. He is a writer for Curbed, where he covers New York City with a focus on real estate, urban life, and how people inhabit the built environment.

Who’s buying in New York City

Sedacca’s real-estate reporting often starts with the question of who is buying and what that says about the city’s shifting landscape. In Curbed’s “who’s buying” coverage, he tracks notable purchases and uses them to illuminate how different kinds of buyers move through the market, including high-profile figures and the buildings they favor. His piece on Adam Driver buying three apartments in the same building is a clear example: the story is not just about a celebrity closing on property, but about how one buyer assembles space, privacy, and long-term bets within a single address.

Across this work, Sedacca treats sale prices, unit counts, and building details as clues to broader patterns in demand, from consolidation of multiple units into larger homes to the clustering of wealth in specific corners of the city. The tone stays accessible and concrete, rooted in deal terms and floor counts rather than abstractions, which distinguishes his coverage from commodity real-estate briefs that only list price and square footage.

Inside individual apartments and buildings

A second through-line in Sedacca’s work is close-up reporting on particular apartments and residential buildings, where he links layout and architecture to the lives imagined inside them. In his Curbed story about a pre-war one-bedroom near the American Museum of Natural History priced at $890,000, he walks readers through the apartment and its building, explaining how its pre-war character, location, and configuration relate to the asking price and the surrounding Upper West Side market.

This unit-level focus sits alongside building-level deep dives such as “Inside Olympic Tower, Where Foreign Billionaires Have Long Flocked.” There he treats a single Midtown skyscraper as a case study in how global wealth intersects with New York housing, tracing who owns there, how foreign buyers have used the tower over time, and what the building’s amenities and rules reveal about its role as a safe-deposit box in the sky. He applies a similar lens to other marquee residential projects, including coverage of the Brooklyn Tower, the borough’s tallest building, using its height and profile to explore how a new skyline reorders status and visibility in the city.

Throughout these stories, Sedacca’s reporting is distinguished by its attention to building histories, ownership patterns, and the lived experience inside specific spaces. He is less interested in generic market snapshots than in what it feels like to occupy, invest in, or simply look up at a given property, which gives communications around particular buildings, conversions, or sales a natural entry point into his beat.

Creative Spaces and cultural homes

Sedacca also writes about homes and studios as creative environments, blending real estate with art and design coverage. In “Creative Spaces: Peter Bradley - Saugerties, New York,” he profiles the painter’s home and studio, detailing how the building’s history and interior choices intersect with Bradley’s long career and daily working life. The piece moves between the physical elements of the property and the personal narrative of its occupant, showing how an artist adapts rooms, light, and furniture to match his practice.

This kind of story illustrates a recurring interest in interiors as expressions of identity rather than just assets. Sedacca dwells on textures, art on the walls, and the improvisations that turn an old structure into a distinctive creative space, giving equal weight to the human story and the real-estate facts. That approach makes his work especially relevant for stories that sit at the intersection of culture, design, and housing - renovated studios, live-work spaces, or historically layered homes inhabited by artists, designers, or other cultural figures.

Earlier reporting on work, wealth, and urban life

Beyond Curbed’s core real-estate coverage, Sedacca has reported on how people earn and spend money in other corners of urban life. In “How Much Do Cooks and Chefs Really Make These Days?”, he examines wages in restaurant kitchens, breaking down what workers at different levels of the brigade actually take home and how that aligns with the cost of living and the realities of kitchen work. In another piece collected in his archive, “Inside Olympic Tower, Where Foreign Billionaires Have Long Flocked,” he again links income, wealth, and the city’s physical fabric, this time through the lens of high-end property rather than hourly wages.

These stories, together with directory descriptions of his beat, show a consistent focus on urban, lifestyle, and real-estate themes, with particular attention to how economic structures are felt in everyday spaces and jobs. Whether he is writing about a cook’s paycheck, a billionaire’s pied-à-terre, or an artist’s studio, Sedacca tends to anchor his reporting in concrete numbers, specific addresses, and the textures of lived experience, rather than abstract policy debates. That combination of market detail and narrative texture is what distinguishes his coverage from more transactional real-estate reporting on the same beat.