Reeves Wiedeman

Reeves Wiedeman is a longform features writer who covers power, business, and real estate through deeply reported narrative stories. He is a staff writer at The New Yorker and a former features writer at New York magazine, where his reporting has included major pieces for Curbed’s real-estate coverage. His property stories focus on the people, conflicts, and corporate structures that shape the built environment rather than on routine market updates.

Raider of the North Fork

In “Raider of the North Fork,” part of New York magazine’s Hamptons coverage, Wiedeman follows billionaire developer Stefan Soloviev and his insatiable appetite for land on the North Fork. The story uses Soloviev’s buying spree as its spine, treating one developer’s ambition as a way to understand how concentrated ownership can redefine a coastal region. It shows Wiedeman’s preference for framing real estate as a contest over territory and influence, grounded in specific deals and the personalities behind them.

The piece sits in a magazine context rather than a transactional real-estate report, reflecting his focus on longform narrative and the broader implications of local land battles.

The Real Estate

Wiedeman’s work under New York magazine’s “the real estate” rubric centers on the business side of property, especially companies that pitch themselves as transformative players.

In “What If Compass Is Basically Just Like Every Other Real-Estate Brokerage? Except with a nicer logo and an over-leveraged IPO,” he treats Compass as a case study in branding, capital, and whether a new brokerage model truly differs from traditional firms.

The headline and framing signal an interest in the financial engineering and marketing that underpin contemporary brokerages, rather than in listing-by-listing coverage. Across these stories, he returns to questions of hype, valuation, and risk, echoing themes from his reporting and book on WeWork’s rise and fall in the commercial real-estate world. His approach makes complex corporate structures legible through a single company or deal, keeping real estate tied to the broader business cycle.

Street Fights and Getting Around

In “The IHOP Kingpin vs. the American Revolutionaries,” published under Curbed’s “street fights” heading, Wiedeman reports on Domenic Broccoli’s attempt to expand his IHOP franchise to upstate New York and the discovery of a grave site that turned the project into a protracted conflict. The story treats a seemingly modest development as a flashpoint between commercial expansion and historical memory, showing his interest in how zoning, heritage, and local politics collide around specific parcels of land. His Curbed piece “Who’s Afraid of the Subway?” filed under “getting around,” follows every line of the subway in the days after the Sunset Park shooting, illustrating his willingness to use on-the-ground reporting to understand how people inhabit and move through the city’s infrastructure.

Taken together, these pieces show him using discrete conflicts and journeys to illuminate how public space and private projects are negotiated in real time.

The Watcher and WeWork

Outside Curbed, Wiedeman has built a portfolio of narrative investigations that often orbit property, institutions, and the promises made around them.

His New York magazine story about “The Watcher” examines a family’s dream house that becomes the focus of anonymous letters and fear, turning a single New Jersey home into a study of obsession, security, and neighborhood rumor. His reporting on WeWork, along with his book “Billion Dollar Loser: The Epic Rise and Spectacular Fall of Adam Neumann and WeWork,” traces how a company selling office space and community turned into a $47 billion story of startup excess and real-estate speculation. Longform archives and professional profiles describe his work as deeply reported narrative journalism across business, media, and urban life, with real estate and the spaces people occupy as recurring anchors.

That through-line - using houses, offices, and land deals to explain larger systems of money and power - connects his Curbed features to his broader magazine and book work.