Matthew Sedacca

Matthew Sedacca is a writer at Curbed who covers New York City real estate through the stories of individual apartments and the buildings around them. His coverage stands out for treating listings, co-ops, and condos as narrative subjects, blending price and layout details with architecture, history, and the lives of the people who live there. He works inside New York Magazine’s home and real-estate site, which focuses on interior design, architecture, renovations, and housing markets.

New York City listings and apartments under a million

Sedacca is a regular voice on Curbed’s coverage of New York City apartments in the mid-market range, often around or under the $1 million mark. He writes recurring “NYC Apartments Under a Million” pieces that spotlight specific units, such as a Gramercy studio with casement windows listed for $725,000 and additional apartments in Boerum Hill in the same price band. In another installment he covers a big, bright three-bedroom in Morningside Heights priced at $850,000 alongside an “estate condition” one-bedroom in a Brooklyn Heights brownstone, pairing market information with plain descriptions of the buildings and their condition.

His listing stories focus on concrete details—price, square footage, architectural features, and neighborhood context—rather than lifestyle slogans. In a pre-war one-bedroom near the American Museum of Natural History priced at $890,000, he leans into the age of the building and its proximity to a major cultural landmark, treating the apartment as part of a specific block and building rather than an abstract investment. Across these pieces, the through-line is a practical, grounded look at what a buyer is getting for the money, framed by the texture of the surrounding streets and housing stock.

Biography of a Building and archival deep dives

Sedacca is the author of Curbed’s “Biography of a Building” series, which reconstructs the full life story of individual buildings, from their original design and tenants to their present-day uses. New York Magazine won a National Magazine Award for Leisure Interests in 2021 for this series, underscoring how his work elevates real estate coverage into long-form narrative reporting. In public posts about the series, he highlights his reliance on archival records, showing that the reporting draws on historical documents as well as contemporary observation.

These building biographies distinguish him from a typical real-estate beat reporter. Instead of stopping at price histories or recent renovations, he traces decades of change in ownership, use, and reputation, situating a single structure within the broader story of New York City. The work is still grounded in real estate—who lives there, what units cost, how the building is marketed—but the lens is wide enough to capture zoning decisions, architectural trends, and social history. For stories that hinge on the character of a property or its evolution over time, this approach gives him a strong foundation.

Resident narratives and distinctive homes

Alongside market-focused pieces, Sedacca writes narrative features about unusual homes and the people who shaped them. In “The Rooftop Chalet on West 78th Street,” he follows a young architect who once dreamed of airlifting a house onto a Manhattan high-rise and instead built a chalet-like structure on a rooftop, turning a standard building into a personal architectural experiment. The story centers on design and construction choices but keeps the human story in view—the aspiration, the compromise, and the lived result.

In Curbed’s “How I Got This Apartment” franchise, he profiles residents and the paths that led them to their homes, including longtime Tribeca tenants whose careers and neighborhood history are intertwined. These pieces emphasize the mechanics of getting into a coveted space—timing, negotiations, relationships—while documenting how the apartment has changed over time. Across these narratives, he treats real estate as a stage for work, art, and daily life rather than an abstract market category, which makes his coverage well suited to stories where a home or building is inseparable from the person in it.

Co-op advice, building politics, and global wealth

Sedacca also contributes service-oriented pieces that address the practical frictions of living in New York City buildings. In one Curbed column he offers practical advice to a co-op resident disturbed by new neighbors’ exhibitionism, engaging with house rules, privacy expectations, and what residents can reasonably ask of their boards and fellow tenants. This kind of coverage shows an interest in building politics and everyday conflicts, not just transactions.

His work extends beyond mid-market apartments to the upper reaches of the condo world. In a piece for REDEF, “Inside Olympic Tower, Where Foreign Billionaires Have Long Flocked,” he examines a midtown high-rise that has drawn wealthy international buyers for years, exploring what makes the building attractive to that clientele and how it fits into New York’s luxury market. By looking at both co-op etiquette and trophy towers, he covers the spectrum from resident-level concerns to global capital flows into Manhattan real estate.

Outside Curbed, his bylines have appeared in outlets such as The New York Times and Vox, where he has reported on topics beyond housing, including world news and other beats. That broader reporting background informs his real estate work, especially when a building’s story touches on business, politics, or international finance. Taken together, Sedacca’s coverage focuses on the lived reality inside New York City’s buildings while staying attentive to the money, history, and governance that shape them.