Like many New York City mayors before him, Zohran Mamdani is trekking up to Albany on Wednesday to beg the state for money. But the new mayor is arming himself with an unusually provocative argument: that state leaders have systematically deprived the city of what it’s owed, and that it’s time to fix the imbalance.

“New York City is the economic engine of this state,” Mamdani said at a recent press conference, where he made a case for tax increases on the wealthy and corporations to help cover the city’s growing budget gap. “While we contribute the majority of state revenue growth, we do not receive the same proportion of state funds.”

The argument was a preview of Mamdani’s testimony at Wednesday’s annual “Tin Cup Day,” where the mayor and his aides will ask Albany leaders for tax hikes — and potentially other forms of aid — as part of the upcoming state budget.

On Thursday, New York Focus reported on a Brooklyn foreclosure auction that ended with Emigrant Bank acquiring a Windsor Terrace home for $100 after an allegedly inflated minimum bidding price may have chilled the bidding.

It was a Thursday in Brooklyn, the day when investors descend on the borough’s Supreme Courthouse, angling for deals borne of others’ financial ruin.

Next on the day’s docket of foreclosed properties: a five-bedroom home on a tree-lined street in Brooklyn’s Windsor Terrace neighborhood, featuring a balcony, yard, and two-car garage. The minimum bidding price was set at $1.737 million.

As Washington has tightened its grip on social services, New York officials have said little about how they plan to adapt the state’s safety net amid a growing affordability crisis.

That may change during Thursday’s budget hearing in Albany, which will provide a rare opportunity for officials at the Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance and the Office of Children and Family Services to lay out a vision for addressing historic federal cuts while also supporting the state’s most vulnerable New Yorkers.

Counties are bracing for a host of policy changes to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program that are expected to overwhelm understaffed social services departments and take a bite out of local budgets. At the same time, child care providers are wondering whether the state’s universal child care plan will leave them behind.

Here are five questions we’d pose to the state’s human services leaders.