This month, more than a million New Yorkers with children are receiving checks in the mail from the state. The payments of up to $330 are a one-time supplement to the state’s child tax credit, passed as part of the state budget negotiated by the legislature and Governor Kathy Hochul this spring.

But one Albany-area Republican senator wants the state to go further and permanently give all new parents a $1,000 “baby bonus.”

“When I hear younger people in particular talk about starting a family, cost is a big factor in that and often cited as one of the reasons why they could be discouraged from pursuing a family,” state Senator Jake Ashby, who represents a district between Albany and the Vermont border, told New York Focus. “So I thought that this legislation could be helpful in addressing that.”

In the final hours of the legislative session in June, lawmakers voted, after no debate, to renew New York City’s largest commercial real estate subsidy, which provides more than $500 million a year in tax breaks for new construction and renovation projects.

The renewal came as a surprise to the city’s Independent Budget Office, which has been preparing a study assessing whether the Industrial and Commercial Abatement Program is actually inducing development and supporting other city objectives. ICAP was set to sunset in 2025, but the legislature just extended it by an additional four years at the request of New York City Mayor Eric Adams.

“There was not any outreach to our office regarding the renewal of ICAP,” said Alaina Turnquist, a budget and policy analyst with the IBO, which is still planning to release its study. “Our evaluation was timed with the 2025 expiration. … We did not expect the program to be renewed a year earlier.”

It may seem like ancient history, but 2023 was supposed to be New York’s “year of housing.” For months, Albany seemed poised to finally address the state’s long simmering crisis of high rents, unaffordable mortgages, and homelessness.

Instead, in early June last year, the legislative session ended in failure and acrimony after multiple attempts at reaching a housing deal failed. Legislative leaders blamed Governor Kathy Hochul for opposing a housing package they said they’d put together, while Hochul’s office shot back that legislators had never introduced a major housing bill, let alone passed one.

The claim that legislators had never introduced a bill was true. But it was misleading.

In fact, legislators had written a 14-part proposal containing measures ranging from new tenant protections to boosting office-building-to-housing conversions. That draft bill was never made public, but New York Focus obtained two nearly identical versions of it, both dated to the final days of the legislative session.