Brick Underground welcomes new senior writer Celia Young

This week, we are pleased to welcome new senior writer Celia Young, who will be covering news and features for New York City renters, buyers, and sellers.

She comes to us most recently from the Commercial Observer, where she reported on commercial real estate, labor, cannabis legalization, office space, and finance.

Young is most proud of her union organization coverage, including a series of articles on the first Amazon warehouse to successfully unionize. “It’s interesting to talk to people in the midst of difficult work,” she says, “and, as workers come together, I found the law intersects with unionization in interesting ways.”

Why NYC real estate is fun to write about

Born—but not raised—in New York, Young hails from Madison, Wis. There she worked for the Madison Magazine and Milwaukee Business Journal—where she covered the preparations for the 2020 Democratic National Convention prior to the pandemic.

A politics graduate of Brandeis University, Young was also the co-editor-in-chief of one of Brandeis' two student newspapers, the Brandeis Hoot.

When asked about her favorite part of covering NYC real estate, Young didn’t hesitate: “how convoluted it is.”

“It’s an intense, elaborate, ridiculous, even comical process to buy a home,” she says. “And that makes it a hell of a lot of fun to write about.”

Young says she's fascinated by the Citicorp Center engineering crisis of 1978, when a Princeton engineering undergraduate calculated that the 59-story Midtown building was at risk of collapse if wind speeds exceeded 70 miles per hour. It still stands today, she says, after repairs were made quietly at night, the crisis not having been revealed to the public until 1995. “Crazy,” she says.

“Also crown molding. I love that stuff,” she added.

Excited to take on what makes living in NYC unique

She recently moved to Crown Heights, where she lives with a roommate and two cats in a sunny row house.

“Thanks to my roommate Tessa, who is very determined and very smart, and my knowledge of a weird assortment of real estate facts and tactics,” Young says that finding the apartment “wasn’t as difficult as it could’ve been.”

Those strategies included a lot of research. Young looked up her would-be-landlords in the city's Automated City Register System to uncover how long they had owned a building and then researched residents' past complaints using two NYC Department of Buildings search tools: Building Information Search and DOB Now.

Now that she’s joined Brick, Young's particularly excited to look at what makes living in NYC unique, particularly legislation and policy.

“Brick presents information in a way that people can actually use to help themselves, to find the resources and support they need and advocate for themselves.” That’s powerful, Young says.

“When city, state, and federal agencies are each interacting with housing, journalism has a really great place there. Housing’s a worldwide issue, but it’s also intimate. There’s national policy, but it’s where you grow up, where you form core memories, where you reconnect with your friends and family. And there’s nothing quite like that," she says.

Nick DeMarchis is a New York-based software engineer and freelance writer, and a recent graduate of Bucknell University.