Opinionated, passionate, thoughtful, thorough: Curbed, a publication devoted to real estate, urban life, architecture and design, strove for decades to detail how the literal streets and neighborhoods of our cities evolved and changed, for better and worse.
Since December 2025, a significant portion of the site’s national coverage and vast network of city-specific beats has been taken offline, the latest in a string of digital publications, alternative weeklies, and local media sites that remain difficult or impossible to access due to ownership decisions.
Vox Media, the owner of Curbed, allowed a large portion of the site’s archives to go dark and currently has no plans to restore them. It cites a change in its content management system as the reason for pulling the plug.
A Vox spokesperson told AN: “Vox Media recently completed a migration of many of its websites from its proprietary Chorus CMS, which had powered Curbed, to WordPress, and no longer supports Chorus. When Curbed was folded into New York Magazine in 2020, it began publishing on New York’s Clay CMS. We regret that we don’t have a solution for publicly maintaining the Curbed archive. Anyone looking for clips should contact [email protected].”
Like the cities it chronicles, Curbed changed and evolved over time. It arrived in 2004 in New York City and quickly set itself apart with a gossipy, obsessive, and observant tone and take on urban life and real estate. The New York City site would seed similar sites in many major cities: Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, D.C.
In 2013, Vox Media purchased Curbed. This merger included the launch of a national site dedicated to more criticism, features, home design, and national coverage. In 2020, Vox Media re-launched Curbed as a part of New York Magazine, which it had recently acquired. It subsequently shut down the other city sites but kept the archive of the site’s pre–New York Magazine era online. Today Curbed continues to publish New York–focused stories; its editor, Sukjong Hong, is a former managing editor of AN.
This latest change means that thousands of now-historic regional urbanism stories are not readable, linkable, and searchable. Like one of the many development dramas covered by the publication, pleas in support of historic preservation and the public good seem to have been ignored by corporate decisionmakers.
Curbed’s editors knew there was so much value–culturally, historically, and civically–in having local reporters and critics doggedly follow the ins and outs of development, architecture, design, and culture. The sites essentially created a free archive of early–20th century municipal history.
Below, former staffers, along with contributors, critics, and commentators, reflect on the value and impact of Curbed, and what the loss of its archive means for history, criticism, and the larger conversation around cities.
What They’re Saying
Inga Saffron, writer and critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer, AN contributor
I loved Curbed and was a faithful reader, but I can’t put my finger on any specific story that I cited in my work. One of the best things about Curbed is that it gave me a larger context to understand the things I was writing about in Philadelphia: housing affordability, gentrification, fast casual architecture, etc.
I’ve been thinking a lot these days about the value of archives, what gets preserved and what doesn’t. Because I’ve been working on a book about the history of American newspaper buildings, I’ve been spending my days reading 19th- and 20th-century newspaper stories, which have been preserved by the Library of Congress Chronicling America and Newspapers.com. I’ve also been visiting in-person archives. Every time I sit down at one of the big wooden tables in one of these places, I feel so grateful that somebody in the deep past had the foresight to cut out a crumbly piece of newsprint, stick it in an envelope and file it alphabetically. Archivists are heroes.
Who’s doing that for our digital production? It’s not just the historical content of websites like Curbed that is being lost to future generations. A few years ago, the Inquirer was forced to overhaul its production system. In the process, pretty much every story published before 2016 was taken off the web. Fortunately, you can still read the print version on Newspapers.com, but the print photos are usually greatly inferior to the web version. These archives are our civilization’s collective memory. To lose them at a time when AI and bad actors are doing such damage to the historic record is heartbreaking.
Kelsey Keith, MillerKnoll creative director, Curbed editor-in-chief 2015–20, AN Interior contributor
When a business entity acquires a media outfit, they bear a responsibility to the public to abide by the ethics of journalism. Which include the preservation of one’s own history of reporting. Removing 15 years of reported history on American cities, housing, architecture, construction, and real estate development is an act of erasure. It’s not only destructive to our collective history, it is self-destructive to the integrity of Vox Media.
Diana Budds, former senior design writer at Curbed, AN contributor
Our cities, and the major developments that shape them, take place over years and decades—far longer than the breakneck news cycle. Curbed doggedly covered this beat at a time when local news was hollowing out. Importantly, this was writing and editing from people who knew their cities like no one else. It was also fun to read. I’d love to share essays from authors like Roxanne Gay on tiny houses and the shrinking American dream of home ownership, Taffy Brodesser-Akner on the existentialism of choosing paint colors, and Pulitzer Prize–winner Alexandra Lange on the sets of Succession, but the links to them have disappeared. It’s a shame that turning off a content management system means that a history of thought related to design, architecture, and cities disappears.
Vanishing knowledge is only half of the problem. When trustworthy, easily searchable sources no longer exist, we’re left with opaque algorithms that aggregate content from websites that require a staggering amount of discernment to parse—if readers even bother to make that effort. This isn’t unique to Curbed, but the loss of its archive is an especially visible symptom of broader changes to the media landscape. Affordable housing, transportation justice, and issues related to public space affect every single person and while the legacy of our present-day experience extends further than the lifespan of a digital platform, a missing chunk disconnects us from our history. It’s disempowering. If we can’t shape our future from an informed perspective, whose future will we eventually live in?
Kate Wagner, The Nation architecture critic, creator of McMansion Hell, AN contributor
I wasn’t a staffer at Curbed, but I was on retainer from 2017 up through the pandemic. I wrote a column for the old Curbed about the intersection of architecture and mainstream culture, mainly through mass media television shows and emergent design trends. I guess I would describe it as being an architectural culture critic. Curbed was the first place I ever published outside of my own blogs and websites. It’s essentially what took me from being a humor blogger to being a serious voice in architectural media and was my first experience working in the world of magazine publishing. My editor Sara Polsky was great at her job and the first person who ever took a red pen to my work and who ultimately made it better, and the rest of my work better by showing me what real editing could look like. I can’t overstate how pivotal and essential Curbed was to my formation as a writer and thinker. I cut my teeth there, and my teeth are sharp now.
I am devastated by the loss of information, expertise and work on behalf of so many writers and thinkers, work that has been tossed in the internet trashcan, by whom I do not know. So many years of rich documentation of changes in urban life across each of the urban sections, and, by extension an archive of development throughout the 2010s. I am honored to have written for Curbed during that era. It is hard to imagine a world without it.
Alexandra Lange, Curbed architecture critic 2015–20
I’m struggling with this question because I’m not ready to put Curbed, and the free, easily accessible Curbed archives, in the past tense. The great thing about Curbed was the belief that editors like Kelsey Keith, Amy Plitt, Sara Polsky, and Asad Syrkett (to name the ones I worked with most frequently) had that a wide general audience was interested in history and criticism and snark about design. I was the first Curbed architecture critic, a position that had historically only been associated with legacy media, and they all helped me figure out how to adapt the role for a digital platform, transforming the scope of the position from one focused on one city to one focused on larger forces of urban change—which is where the majority of architecture criticism has traveled today. It was never enough to say, “Little Island is a dumb idea,” but instead that contemporary landscape design has become increasingly fussy, that the kind of parks billionaires want to put their names on aren’t doing the job of a public park, and that the city is going to end up holding the (fancy little designer) bag.
I won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 2025 for a series I wrote for Bloomberg CityLab. Several of those stories were directly preceded by work I did for Curbed that is now offline, including “No loitering, no skateboarding, no baggy pants” and “A journey to Isamu Noguchi’s last work.” You don’t get good at this job without practice and editors who let you take risks, and Curbed gave me both.
Finally, I am aggravated as a sometime architectural historian that taking this archive offline is going to make that work more difficult and potentially obscure the rise of several female critics—me, but also Karrie Jacobs, Alissa Walker, Diana Budds, and more.
AJ LaTrace, former Curbed Chicago editor
During the development boom that followed the Great Recession, Curbed’s city sites became primary, real-time records of urban change across the country.
In Chicago, as dozens of new hotel high-rises, office buildings and apartment towers reshaped the skyline—and as millennials flooded into the city and legacy corporations returned downtown—Curbed tracked proposals, revisions, and construction through detailed maps and ongoing coverage, often long before projects were completed. Along busy corridors like the West Loop and Milwaukee Avenue, the site documented development and housing pipelines in a way no other outlet consistently did. This wasn’t just a record of buildings, but of change as it happened.
Through early-access, magazine-quality photo tours, aspirational home features, and explanatory reporting, Curbed gave readers firsthand insight into how spaces were designed, marketed, and lived in—while also serving as an on-ramp for emerging voices in architecture and design criticism. At the same time, Curbed captured the social and political texture surrounding growth: city council meetings, neighborhood zoning fights, mega-developments, preservation battles, and civic rituals—including Chicago’s infamous parking dibs.
With reporting read with equal intensity by critics, developers, and everyday residents—and a comment section feared equally by aldermen and architects—Curbed functioned as a shared civic reference point. Losing this archive risks erasing a primary source record of how the city changed—and how people understood that change in real time.
Alissa Walker, Curbed urbanism editor and critic 2016–20, AN contributor
It’s particularly puzzling as Curbed itself is not dead, yet all the backlinks in its stories now are?
Christopher Hawthorne, senior critic at the Yale School of Architecture and proprietor of the Punch List newsletter and website
Back in the day, when I was working at the Los Angeles Times as its architecture critic, the local Curbed site wasn’t always factually reliable or especially kind to me personally. (IIRC when I was selling my house in 2012 in Eagle Rock, an absurdly tiny hillside bungalow on two parcels I bought in vain hopes of replacing it with a four-unit project, they ran an item that included interior photos with utterly conventional staged furniture, in the “Live Laugh Love” vein, from a company hired by our agent—but without noting or even inquiring about that fact, leaving me to be absolutely flayed in the comments for my design taste.) But the site was nonetheless an indispensable resource not just for its lively editorial voice but as a counterweight, ideologically and otherwise, to the slow-footed dominance of my employer, and the sometimes-retrograde politics of its flagship daily, in the Southern California publishing landscape. I think back on that iteration of Curbed as one of the last manifestations of a moment when it still seemed possible (rather than terribly naïve) that the internet would be a force for diversification and democratization in media (rather than their deeply depressing opposites). And in a larger sense of course it’s a blow to collective memory and local history when digital archives of this kind—however much Hawthorne-chiding snark they contain!—disappear from public view.
Samantha Weiss-Hills, former Curbed contributor, current Domino Magazine managing editor
I wrote the House Calls column at Curbed for nearly two years; it was published across the city sites since we featured spaces throughout the U.S., and sometimes abroad. Under such wonderful and astute editors as Kelsey Keith, Asad Syrkett, and Mercedes Kraus, I felt invested in all the ways you hope as a freelancer—to be a more observant writer, seek out more original stories, and how to be a better editor myself. The role solidified that my favorite topic is the home and its inhabitants and allowed for a more creative approach to the form: to look at home tours like profiles instead of just describing architecture and interiors.
When I found out that the archives had been taken offline, especially without clear communication to writers, editors, and various contributors, it felt like a gut punch. To lose years of work in an instant, especially such personal stories, underscores the precarity that journalists working in the digital space face today.
Brock Keeling, former Curbed San Francisco editor
Beyond the insult of stripping bylines from writers navigating a collapsing job market, the erasure of Curbed archives is a blow to historical records. For the Bay Area and San Francisco, the region I called my beat, essential stories have simply vanished into the digital void.
We’ve lost Chris Roberts’s exposé on the toxic-waste coverup in Hunters Point (San Francisco’s predominantly Black neighborhood), as well as the late Alice Wong’s vital reporting on how wildfires and policies affect disabled denizens. Practical resources—guides on using transit, cycling, and applying for affordable housing—have disappeared, the latter proving as elusive as the housing itself. Adam Brinklow’s interviews with lawmakers of housing-starved Palo Alto have evaporated. Alexandra Lange’s essential review of Apple’s UFO-shaped headquarters is gone; it should be required reading for tech and design students. Lost, too, are the deep dives into SF’s design language, from residential architecture to subway Brutalism to Flintstones-shaped mansions, along with insights from marquee figures like Kara Swisher and Marc Benioff.
This isn’t only a loss of content, but a breach of public trust. Every citation to these deeply reported pieces is now a dead link, rendering months and years of research useless. This mass deletion creates a vacuum where misinformation can flourish, allowing less-than-noble interests to step in and rewrite a region’s narrative in the absence of a factual record. It’s more than a bummer for a handful of so-called coastal elites; it’s the intentional dismantling of local histories.
Jay Koziarz, Curbed Chicago 2016–20
My tenure at Curbed Chicago coincided with a construction boom that peaked with 60 tower cranes dotting the skyline—a sharp contrast to today with fewer than 10. At the time, Curbed’s city-based reporting allowed readers to track how their built environment was evolving, with an approach that was both incremental and highly contextualized.
The work was grounded in fact but infused with a healthy dose of levity and occasional criticism, which kept readers engaged in a way real estate business trades or buttoned-up design journals never could. The city sites didn’t approach the built environment as an abstract concept or academic exercise but rather wrote about what was literally happening on the readers’ own block.
The Curbed network of sites allowed local stories to be amplified through a wider national lens, exploring issues in design, development and urbanism. What could a seemingly inconsequential legal battle over a controversial stretch of protected bike lanes teach readers outside of that specific community? A lot, actually, when covered and framed properly.
With real, flesh-and-blood reporters on the ground in cities across the country, Curbed leveraged its network to localize national trends while simultaneously elevating local stories to a national stage. I felt a distinct sense of accomplishment whenever one of my city-focused stories was picked up by the broader network—it affirmed what was happening in my city mattered not only to people like me who lived and worked there, but also to the wider national, and even global, conversation.
Asad Syrkett, Curbed deputy editor 2015–19
Many will (rightly) talk about Curbed and its day-one snark and sense of humor. But let’s get some commotion for its variety: Under Kelsey Keith, a (very good) real estate blog also became an ambitious place for stories about urban planning and development, interiors and architecture, quizzes (hello 2016 digital media) and criticism. In design media, it was one-of-a-kind. So grateful for the time I had there and the editors, writers, and reporters I got to learn from.
Michael Abrahamson, assistant architecture professor, University of Utah
I’m currently running a seminar where we’re focusing on the work of Alexandra Lange. A lot of her work originally appeared in Curbed. I have a syllabus with particular texts that I want my students to read, just to get a sense of the breadth of different tones and approaches that you know someone who calls themself a critic might take. You can read it on the Internet Archives, but the formatting is all messed up, the images sometimes won’t appear, and the links are dead. It limits your understanding of what the context is and how you should situate this piece of writing.
Not just Alexandra’s writing, but all writing there is an important document of a decade of critical writing on architecture, which is in short supply. I was pursuing a master’s degree in criticism in 2009, 2010, and that was the moment when people were worried about the future of architecture criticism. This was a time when blogs were alive and well but nobody was getting paid. I feel like Curbed was one of the places where people started to get some income for doing this work. From a historian’s perspective, if people start writing a history of the 2010s without access to all that writing, I don’t know what we’re going to write about.
Lockhart Steele, Curbed cofounder
It’s just another reminder of the fleeting nature of life, and the internet. Ashes to ashes, bits to dust.
Patrick Sisson is a Los Angeles–based writer and reporter focused on the trends, tech, and design behind cities today. He is a former contributor to Curbed.
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