Binyamin Appelbaum

Who is Binyamin Appelbaum?

Binyamin Appelbaum, a reporter for The New York Times, grew up in Newton, Massachusetts and attended the University of Pennsylvania, where he was executive editor of the Daily Pennsylvanian. Appelbaum previously worked for the Florida Times Union, the Charlotte Observer, the Boston Globe, and The Washington Post.

At the Charlotte Observer, Appelbaum led a team of reporters that helped shed light on the area's high rate of housing foreclosures and questionable sales practices by Beazer Homes USA, one of the nation's largest homebuilders. The Observer's reporting led to FBI, IRS, SEC and HUD investigations of Beazer Homes, which has since stopped making mortgage loans nationwide and stopped building homes in Charlotte.

The series won a Gerald Loeb Award, a George Polk Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in public service.

A profile of his reporting on the mortgage crisis in Business Journalism described how, well before the nation knew about the coming crisis in mortgage lending, Appelbaum "noticed a strange pattern while compiling a list of foreclosed homes in North Carolina’s Mecklenburg County --clusters were concentrated in new developments. Appelbaum wondered if faulty loans were behind the trend."