About the Author
Alyssa Katz is the author of Our Lot: How Real Estate Came to Own Us (Bloomsbury, 2009), about the explosive combination of Washington politics and Wall Street greed that created the housing bubble and mortgage crisis. She is now editor of the New York World, an accountability journalism project at Columbia Journalism School covering city and state government and launching in fall 2011.
Previously, she taught journalism at New York University and wrote for The American Prospect, The Big Money, Salon, Housing Watch, Mother Jones, The Next American City and other publications. Katz also worked with the Pratt Center for Community Development, an organization that helps community-based organizations in New York City’s low- and moderate-income communities influence city planning and development.
Alyssa was editor-in-chief of City Limits, an award-winning magazine investigating the institutions and policies at work in New York City’s neighborhoods. Under her leadership, City Limits exposed major fraud in a federal mortgage program — a story that ended up as a plot on The Sopranos — the ejection of failing students from high schools, the misuse of a brownfields tax credit, corruption in an agency sheltering the homeless, and the improper awarding of welfare-to-work contracts by the Giuliani administration. It also chronicled the innovations of community development and activist organizations.
Before covering urban policy, politics and housing, Alyssa was a cultural critic for The Village Voice, The Nation, and Spin. She received her BA from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and was a 2005-’06 Revson Fellow at Columbia University.
She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband and daughter. They own their co-op apartment, which they bought at the housing boom’s peak in 2005.
How the homes we live in turned into the monsters that ate our economy and the United States became a nation obsessed with real estate.