Housing

Governor Andrew Cuomo — who just played a historic role in securing marriage rights for gay and lesbian New Yorkers — is already being referred to as a presidential candidate for 2016, and is being touted as an "aggressive pragmatist" or "dynamic centrist." Why won’t the press pin him down on what specific outcome he sought in the battle pitting the need of millions of New Yorkers for affordable and secure housing against the desire of landlords and free market ideologues to continue to dismantle the rent regulation system?

Cuomo left the trigger points at which apartments are deregulated worse for tenants than they were 14 years ago, when then-Governor George Pataki first orchestrated legislative changes designed to destroy rent regulation.

No, not about private indiscretions. Just about what sort of leadership the widely-hailed governor is or is not exerting when it comes to the fate of the homes of more than a million families.

Faced with evidence of the ineffectiveness of its foreclosure prevention efforts, the Administration shrugs its shoulders and says it has "limited levers." The limitations are not a necessary fact of life, but a function of the view that forcing financial institutions to modify mortgages would be an affront to the dignity and sovereignty of banks.

With rent regulation set to expire next month if not renewed by the state legislature, and with New York's governor having failed to specify how, if at all, he would like the system strengthened, Remapping Debate looks back at the crucial moment when believers in market theology were able to weaken the regulation system profoundly.

With millions of homeowners still struggling to stay in their homes, the Obama administration’s $75 billion foreclosure prevention program has been weakened, perhaps fatally, by lax oversight and a posture of cooperation — rather than enforcement — with the nation’s biggest banks.

Brazen resistance to a historic 2009 federal court order is so far met by a yawn - or worse.

The Obama Administration is pursuing a new metropolitan agenda. What role do racial and economic integration play in the federal government’s vision?