The Newsletter
Four free newsletters a week. Original reporting, the weekly City Cost Index, and the kind of side-eye the algorithms will never serve you. Delivered before your second coffee.
412,000 city dwellers read it. 38%+ open rate. Reader-supported, no fluff.
Four Newsletters, One Subscription
Each edition has its own editor, its own beat, and its own promise. Pick them all — they're free, and you can unsubscribe from any single one in two clicks.
FLAGSHIP · WEEKDAYS
Monday — Thursday · 6:30 AM ET · ~5 min read
The morning brief your group chat will be quoting by 9 AM. One original story, one data point from the City Cost Index, one thing to read, one thing to argue about. Edited by Senior Writer Marcus Chen out of our Brooklyn newsroom.
Solves: "I'm too busy to read five newsletters and I still want to know what's actually going on."
DATA · WEEKLY
Fridays · 8:00 AM ET · ~7 min read
The numbers behind the headlines. Rent, groceries, transit, and wages across 87 U.S. metros, refreshed every Tuesday. Includes our proprietary City Cost Index dashboard and the moves readers are actually making.
Solves: "Is my city getting more expensive, or am I just tired?"
LONG READ · WEEKLY
Saturdays · 9:00 AM ET · ~15 min read
One original feature per week on the housing crisis nobody else is covering: landlord algorithms, vacant-office conversions, the real math of rent stabilization, and the tenants organizing against both.
Solves: "I want the long version, not the take."
CULTURE · WEEKLY
Sundays · 10:00 AM ET · ~8 min read
What to do, watch, eat, and skip — written by people who actually live in the city and pay the prices. No influencer listicles. One sharp recommendation, one pansy critique, and the underground show you missed.
Solves: "I have one night off and I don't want to waste it."
Sample Issue
A peek at last Tuesday's Daily Dish. Same format every weekday — tight, opinionated, skimmable in five minutes, worth your second coffee.
By Marcus Chen, Senior Writer · Reporting from Brooklyn, NY
An eight-month investigation into 41,000 rent-stabilized units finds that turnover has cratered, that the city's "vacancy decontrol" loopholes are doing exactly what they were designed to do, and that the tenants most at risk are the ones least likely to know they have rights.
By Priya Adeyemi, Data Editor
Rent is up 11.2%, groceries are up 7.8%, and transit is up 4.1%. Wages? Up 2.4%. The gap is the story — and it's the story in 73 of the 87 metros we track.
By Jenna Wexler, Editor-in-Chief
We crunched 14,000 reader-submitted offer letters against our Cost Index. The "geoarbitrage" premium is collapsing in 11 of the top 15 metros — and most candidates are still negotiating like it isn't.
This issue went to 412,000 inboxes on a Tuesday morning.
Get tomorrow's in yoursBy the Numbers
Newsletter subscribers across our four weekly editions.
Average open rate — top 2% of Substack-adjacent publications.
Paying members fund the work. No outside venture capital, ever.
Monthly readers on the site (Similarweb-verified, Dec 2024).
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The Fine Print, Honestly
The questions our editor gets in replies every week, answered once, plainly.
Yes. All four newsletters are free, forever. We make money two ways: a small number of display ads on the website (clearly marked, never in the email body), and 22,400 paying members who get the searchable archive, our Rent vs. Regret calculator, and ad-free reading. The newsletter is the front door, not the upsell.
Up to five per week, but realistically fourteen per month. Daily Dish runs Monday through Thursday. Cost Index Weekly on Fridays. The Lease on Saturdays. Culture Circuit on Sundays. No "we miss you" blasts, no re-sends, no "quick favor" surveys.
Of course. On the signup form, each edition is its own checkbox. Most readers take all four because the rhythm is built to complement itself (the Daily Dish teases the Saturday long read), but you can unsubscribe from any single one without losing the others. Two clicks, no email to support, no "are you sure" survey.
Every edition, fully searchable, going back to our first issue in October 2017. That's 2,340+ original articles indexed by city, beat, and cost-of-living data point. The archive is free for paying members ($7/month or $60/year) and previewable for everyone else on the website.
Eighteen full-time editors, reporters, and data journalists in Brooklyn — plus a bench of 30+ regular contributors across the cities we cover. Our masthead is on the About page. No pseudonyms, no AI-generated bylines, no "staff writer" placeholders for people who don't exist.
We use it for spell-check, transcript cleanup, and the first pass at data extraction from public filings. Every word in the newsletter is written and edited by a human. If that ever changes, we'll say so in the masthead — and probably write a Cost Index Weekly about it.
One Last Thing
Hand over your email. Pick which editions you want. We'll have the kettle on before you do.
