As the foreclosure crisis has unfolded, it's become clear that blacks and Hispanics were much more likely to get high-cost mortgages than whites with similar incomes buying similarly-priced homes. But according to a new study, there's more to the link between high-cost loans—which are the most likely to lead to...

"We have four more years," Deputy Mayor Robert Lieber told a City Council hearing on Tuesday. "I don't know what we'd do in the next four years that we haven't done already."

Lieber was addressing the Zoning & Franchises subcommittee, which is considering a Bloomberg administration plan to sell the...

New Yorkers won't learn until after Thanksgiving just how much Mayor Michael Bloomberg spent on his 2009 re-election campaign. But the going estimate of "more than $100 million" seems pretty safe. And that number is so very, very large that it means the mayor's campaign was not only better budgeted...

"We've proven the experts wrong—again, and again, and again—and we're not stopping now!" said Mayor Michael Bloomberg in his victory speech last night. On at least one score, he was definitely correct: For the second election in a row, the most lavishly funded campaign in city history has totally befuddled...

Mike Bloomberg and Bill Thompson campaigned three miles from each other in Queens on Sunday, so close yet so far apart.

On a 20-minute walk-around through bustling Flushing with Comptroller-to-be John Liu as his tour guide, Thompson reached for every hand he could, accompanied by a megaphone-wielding Mandarin speaker...

Bill Thompson was making the rounds at Casa Boricua Senior Center on East 172nd Street in the Bronx today, beaming. Earlier he gripped and grinned along Third Avenue in Melrose alongside attorney general Andrew Cuomo. Before that, he flashed the pearly whites at commuters getting on or off the 2/4/5...

In the endorsement of Mayor Michael Bloomberg for re-election that ran in the Saturday New York Times, the paper wrote that Democratic challenger Bill Thompson "has spent too much of his campaign attacking Mayor Bloomberg rather than explaining how he would manage the city."

Leaving aside the inconvenient fact...

Last October, Mayor Mike Bloomberg told a crowd in London, "There's nobody that understands the private sector, I think, more than I do." That's quite a bold statement, but not really a surprising one. After all, the mayor's financial know-how is why he says we need him at...

Rudy Giuliani was once in a hilarious Saturday Night Live skit where he donned a wig and a housecoat and adopted the pronounced honk of an exaggerated outer borough accent. What made the skit perfect was that Giuliani was gently poking fun at his kind of people: the working class,...

Who knew that when Mike Bloomberg's campaign aides last year threatened to spend $80 million on his re-election run, they were playing low ball?

A year to the day after the mayor announced that he was going to seek to overturn term limits to allow him to pursue a...

From the beginning, Mayor Bloomberg has depicted last year's decision to loosen term limits as the City Council's idea. When in the late summer of 2008 he first publicly floated a trial balloon about seeking a third term, he did it by saying he'd have to "seriously think about"...

The television screens at Bill Thompson's victory party showed Mayor Michael Bloomberg giving his non-primary non-victory speech shortly after 9 p.m. yesterday. The audio, however, wasn't on. So it looked at times like the mayor was lip-synching the tunes that Thompson's DJ spun, particularly "I Got a Feeling" by the...

The news yesterday was that "Yankees power couple" Jorge and Laura Posada have endorsed Mayor Michael Bloomberg for re-election. It's unclear whether the rest of the Bombers' lineup will weigh in on the race. (Joba Chamberlain makes his endorsements in the fifth inning, and who knows when he'll see...

This question requires a "yes" or "no" answer: Are the "lightning rounds" that have become fashionable in candidate debates dumb or what?

In a political system dominated by TV ads and spin, a debate gives voters a chance to see if candidates can produce any substance or depth. What better...

A couple weeks ago, New York City comptroller and Democratic mayoral frontrunner Bill Thompson called the Bloomberg administration's housing policies "a failure." Yesterday, Mayor Bloomberg's Department of Housing Preservation and Development was trumpeting its success at meeting this year's affordable housing targets.

Could they both be right? Better yet, might...

According to the New York Post, Michael Bloomberg's comparing himself to "Power Broker" Robert Moses in a recent magazine interview is a case in which the billionaire mayor "toots his own horn."

But the tooting is accurate. When you add all that's been proposed, planned and built under...

On Monday Mayor Michael Bloomberg hosted a Gracie Mansion shindig to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the New York City Housing Authority—a.k.a. NYCHA, the nation's oldest and largest public housing system. He offered kind words for NYCHA's role in giving "many New Yorkers the foundation they need to make...

In the fabulous city depicted by Mike Bloomberg's television ads and mailers, where smiling children walk through freshly-painted school hallways, smiling cops protect us from terrorism and the mayor looks at blueprints with his sleeves rolled up, all the numbers are headed in the right direction. Crime is down,...

If schools still offered courses in rhetoric, Comptroller Bill Thompson and the Bloomberg campaign would have earned high marks for their exchanges yesterday over a comptroller's audit of the city's graduation rate.

Thompson told NY1 that the city Department of Education was "the Enron of public education in...

Mayor Michael Bloomberg is a pro-choice, gay friendly, anti-gun former Democrat whose most ambitious policy initiatives have aimed at reducing poverty and making the city more environmentally sustainable. Mississipi Governor Haley Barbour is a conservative, anti-abortion, gay marriage opponent with an A+ rating from the National Rifle Association who...