Times Insider explains who we are and what we do and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.
Since its relaunch last year, Living In, a column from the Real Estate desk at The New York Times, has spun out a kaleidoscopic collection of stories about distinct locales across the country. Destinations have included a fire-resistant enclave, a tiny thumbprint of a town with outsize charm and an artists’ quarter that flourished around an old trolley stop.
In its earlier form, the long-running column, which has been around since at least the 1980s, toured only the Big Apple and the commutable areas around it, offering data, details and practical insights into quaint, livable neighborhoods.
With a bit of restructuring and a broader scope, each story is now more digestible, opening with an “impressionistic” narrative and closing with a trim list of things to know about a city, the column’s editor, Michael Kolomatsky, said. The idea is that readers, who may be looking to move, get to know a place better and understand what it’s like to live there.
In an interview, Mr. Kolomatsky shared insights into the series’s revamp and where he’ll turn his explorer’s lens to next. This conversation has been edited and condensed.
How do you pick a place for Living In?
When we first thought about the relaunch of the column, we looked at a lot of data: Where are our readers? Where are people moving? Where are the population shifts? It was a real sky-view analysis that quickly fell away because it was very hard to be comprehensive. There are so many measures you can use. Every town, every city, is changing all the time.
So we’re not here to make a huge analysis of where the next hot spot is. It’s more about painting a portrait of a particular place and finding an interesting peg to hang it on.
We covered downtown Detroit, for example, which has faced hard times but is really coming back. We did Bywater, a small neighborhood in New Orleans that is benefiting from a kind of funky revival. The houses are all colorful and painted. There are bars popping up. It’s a cool place where young people go.
We have a lot of readers in California, and it’s a huge real estate market. So we wrote about Escondido, a suburb of San Diego, where there is a community of homes being built from fire-resistant materials.
The smallest place we’ve done is Amenia, which is a little town in upstate New York. I think there are five restaurants there. We left one out, and they complained.
I imagine scoping out a locale, and learning its ins and outs, is rather arduous. How do you choose your reporters? What guidelines do you give them?
That was tricky. We decided against flying reporters all over the country. We don’t have a lot of our own reporters on the Real Estate desk, and so we use a lot of freelancers. The idea was to find people who are locals, who don’t need to parachute in and learn everything at once as newbies. I tell reporters that, first and foremost, we want a sense of the place; we want to know what makes it distinct. I don’t expect an encyclopedic portrayal in 450 words, as that’s impossible.
Apart from California, what other locations are you focusing on this year?
We’re going to be looking at more points out west. The most recent column is out of Whitefish, Mont., which is a beautiful ski town. A lot of the inhabitants depend on the tourism industry and are seasonal workers. In some cases, they can’t even afford to live there anymore. So there’s an interesting story behind the story.
We’re also going to some places that may be less obvious. There’s a little arts district in Las Vegas. The city has residential areas, something that many people maybe don’t know about.
How do you uncover those offbeat places like Amenia?
We heard about Amenia from a freelancer. It has this kind of funky drive-in. It has some restaurants that are getting good reviews and, in a way, everybody is sort of looking for a place like this that’s beyond the beaten path.
What discoveries surprised you?
I was simply unaware of some places, like the Bishop Arts District in Dallas. I mentioned the fire-resistant housing in Escondido. I had never heard about an entire subdivision of this kind going up. And I was surprised at how nice downtown Detroit is now. There’s always a surprise for me. I learn something new every time I read a story.
The post Treasure Hunting for Cities With a Story to Tell appeared first on New York Times.
