Paula Aceves

Paula Aceves is an associate editor at New York whose real-estate reporting uses long-form narrative features to show how housing, money, and policy collide in people’s lives. Alongside real estate, she works across technology, immigration, politics, and subcultures, and edits features, columns, and special packages for both the print magazine and the site. Her work is distinguished by close attention to how systems - property law, urban planning, and family wealth - shape the everyday experiences of the people inside them.

The Hamptons Issue 2026

In “The Long Island Deed Schemer,” part of New York’s Hamptons Issue, Aceves reconstructs an alleged real-estate fraud that ensnared families seeking dream homes in the Hamptons. She follows more than a dozen families who have sued broker Michael O’Sullivan and Hampton Dream Properties, detailing allegations that he misrepresented the status of properties, sold homes he did not own, and knew he could never deliver clean deeds at the prices he promised. The story walks through accusations of deed fraud, including claims that deeds were retained to secure high-value loans and that years of buyer payments were used to acquire more properties and clear other debts rather than pay down the homes themselves.

The piece foregrounds the buyers’ perspective, but stays tightly focused on the mechanics of the alleged scheme - contracts, loans, titles, and lawsuits - making the article as much about structural vulnerability in the property system as it is about one broker’s conduct. Within the Hamptons Issue, her feature stands out for treating a luxury destination as a site of legal and financial precarity rather than escapist aspiration.

Cityscape: Apartments, Offices, and Open Streets

Aceves extends that interest in how policy and markets reshape housing through Curbed’s cityscape coverage.

In “A Three-Bed, Two-Bath, One Open Street Apartment,” she reports on how a pandemic-era open-streets program evolved into a real-estate selling point, examining the way access to reimagined public space is folded into the marketing of a specific apartment. Another piece, “A Bad Office Can (Maybe) Become a Good Apartment,” looks at the challenges and complexities of converting offices into residences, following the practical and regulatory hurdles of turning cubicles into bedrooms.

Taken together, these articles show her focus on adaptive reuse and the unintended consequences of urban experiments: a temporary street program becomes an amenity, and surplus office space becomes contested housing, all filtered through the specifics of individual buildings and layouts. Her real-estate coverage here is less about prices and more about how design, zoning, and political decisions manifest in particular homes and blocks.

People With Parents With Money

Beyond physical property, Aceves reports on the power of family wealth to shape access to housing, education, and lifestyle. Her feature “14 People on How Their Parents’ Money Impacts Their Lives,” structured as an as-told-to package, gathers first-person accounts of how parental resources influence everything from school choices to creative careers. A related piece, signaled in her social posts as “People With Parents With Money,” directly addresses the disconnect between visible comfort - apartments, cars, private school - and the stories people tell about “lucky investments,” insisting on the centrality of inherited or parental support. This work underscores a consistent concern in her reporting: who can afford to live where, and how honesty about family money alters narratives of individual success. It also connects back to her real-estate coverage, framing housing not only as a market but as an outcome of intergenerational financial structures.

Immigration, Subcultures, and Food

Aceves’s broader portfolio reinforces this pattern of examining how large systems shape intimate realities. Her professional bio notes that her editing and reporting typically cover technology, politics, immigration, and subcultures, situating her real-estate work within a wider interest in the ways power and policy touch everyday life. In one widely shared piece, she spent weeks speaking with newly arrived migrants in New York moving between shelters, emphasizing the fragility of belonging and the instability of their living arrangements.

She also collaborates on cultural stories, such as a Yesteryear Issue feature in which graffiti artist Lee Quiñones revisits being a most-wanted figure in the 1980s art world, placing him within the city’s shifting creative and social landscape.

At Grub Street, she edits The Grub Street Diet column, shaping first-person accounts of what people eat in a week and, by extension, how food, routine, and status intersect in the city. Her role at New York includes editing and contributing to special packages, and she is listed among the contributors to a Yesteryear issue celebrating era-defining restaurants, further tying her work to the city’s evolving cultural and economic fabric.

Across these subjects - migration, subcultures, restaurants, and art - the through-line remains an interest in who gets access, who is excluded, and how those stories can be told clearly through individuals’ experiences.

Alongside this reporting and editing, Aceves has written for outlets including The Guardian and The Washington Post and has been recognized with a National Magazine Award for Journalists Under 30, underscoring her standing within the magazine feature world. Her work offers sources a combination of structural analysis and lived detail, making her a distinctive voice on real estate and the systems that surround it.