Washington Post taps Siegel to cover economics of housing and real estate

Washington Post business editor Lori Montgomery, deputy business editor Sandhya Somashekhar, economics editor Jennifer Liberto and Washington economics editor Mike Madden sent out the following on Monday:

We’re excited to announce that Rachel Siegel is taking on a new assignment covering the economics of housing and real estate.

This is a critical moment for the issues Rachel will cover: Housing affordability is a crisis in a growing number of cities and weighing heavily on voters’ minds as the election nears. The pandemic rocked residential and commercial real estate markets alike, and soaring mortgage rates and new fees for brokers are adding more turmoil

Rachel’s stories will offer readers a deep and comprehensive understanding of the housing crisis and its causes, and she’ll break news on the future of how and where people will live and work — and what that means for a cornerstone of the U.S. economy.

For the last four years, Rachel has covered the Federal Reserve, chronicling the steepest rise in inflation and interest rates in a generation with insight and creativity. She found ways to connect lofty policy decisions to peoples’ lives, notably through her dispatch from a sprawling homeless encampment two blocks from the Fed’s headquarters. She’s already carved out a focus on real estate, focusing on affordability even before inflation pushed rent and mortgage rates skyward — she took readers to empty office buildings in Austin and vacant labs in Cambridge, Mass., and walked them through an “urban doom loop.” She also pitched in on covering Capitol Hill during last year’s debt-ceiling crisis.

Before that, Rachel covered breaking news for Financial through the beginning of the pandemic. She joined The Post as a Metro intern in 2017, when she wrote one of her favorite stories about a man who drove shuttle buses for some of D.C.’s most vulnerable residents. She studied history at Yale, where she was also an editor at the Yale Daily News.

Rachel lives in Washington, D.C. She enjoys hosting dinner parties, hiking with her large, floppy dog, Clouseau, and visiting her friends in The Post’s foreign bureaus.

She will start her new beat on October 1.