New York Focus reporter Sam Mellins reflects on what he learned this year, and teases what lies ahead for 2025.
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New York is an incongruous state. We’re home to fabulous wealth — if the state were a country, it would have the tenth largest economy in the world — but also the highest rate of wealth inequality. We’re among the most diverse – but also the most segregated. We passed the nation’s most ambitious climate law — but haven’t been meeting its deadlines and continue to subsidize industries hastening the climate crisis.
As New York’s only statewide nonprofit news publication, our journalism exists to help you make sense of these contradictions. Our work scrutinizes how power works in the state, unpacks who’s really calling the shots, and reveals how obscure decisions shape ordinary New Yorkers’ lives.
In the last two decades, the number of local news outlets in New York have been nearly slashed in half, allowing elected officials and powerful individuals to increasingly operate in the dark — with the average New Yorker none the wiser.
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The state is due to unveil a “cap and invest” program — its biggest effort yet to fund climate initiatives. But fears about hiking prices may limit its scope.
A newly obtained document sheds light on how the disavowed diagnosis infiltrated the Rochester Police Department before Prude’s death.
An advisory group set up under a 2021 state law finalized its proposals to cut child poverty in half.
New York has a little-noticed tool to shift billions of highway dollars to climate-friendly public transit projects. The governor doesn’t seem interested.
Here’s a simple explanation of a complicated and archaic formula — and why the state is updating it.
New financial disclosures show when Mujica began consulting for the Greater New York Hospital Association.
A newly discovered 80-page housing package would have included good cause eviction, but legislators were dissuaded by Kathy Hochul’s opposition.
For tenants in the first upstate city to adopt rent stabilization, benefiting from the law’s basic protections is an uphill battle.
Advocates charge that New York’s restrictions for sex offense registrants are “vague, expansive, and unnecessary.” On Tuesday, they filed a federal lawsuit to strike them down.
As the state’s plans to get New Yorkers out of their cars stall, Governor Hochul is championing a highway expansion in the Hudson Valley.
From New York City to Buffalo, people are driving a lot more than they did before the pandemic.
There are at least three ways a Trump administration could try to stop the transit-funding toll.
