For years, Barbara Small fought to hold onto her house in Flatbush, Brooklyn, after it fell into foreclosure. On the day it finally went up for auction, she sobbed on the train ride to the Supreme Court building in Downtown Brooklyn. The outcome would mean forfeiting her nest egg. She wasn’t required to attend the sale but she was determined to show up anyway.

She had purchased the narrow, three-story brick home on Linden Boulevard in 2005 with her father, a former transit worker who’d emigrated from Barbados via London in the 1970s. The house was a place for him to live out his retirement as well as an investment for Small and her children once she retired from the U.S. Postal Service.

Window looking into a darkened foreclosed home. A yellow sign says "LENDER FORECLOSURE" and "PUBLIC HOME AUCTION." Smaller paper signs say "Warning No Trespassing" and note a lawn maintenance company.

Fourteen years later, her father was dead and she had lost the property after a series of financial setbacks, including a tenant who stopped paying rent. In her case, the mortgage was owned by a group of investors and managed by the Bank of New York Mellon and a loan servicer named Shellpoint.

A group of strangers lined up at the courthouse to bid on the building. Like most homes in foreclosure auctions, it sold in just a few minutes. The price: a little more than $1.3 million. A court-appointed referee named Jeffrey Dinowitz — who is also an influential state assemblymember from the Bronx — calculated what the lender was owed. After creditors and attorneys took their cut, Small said she was left with around $100,000, a fraction of the property’s true market value.

“ My dad tried to help me create a legacy for myself and my kids and now I have nothing really to give them,” Small said in an interview. “Generational wealth, it’s not for me.”

But Small, 67, could have been entitled to even more money. The attorney representing BNY Mellon and the mortgage servicer had used a disputed method for tabulating interest — one that contradicts the court system’s own guidance for referees — increasing the amount they took from her by tens of thousands of dollars.

The calculation, which applied interest to a higher overall amount than Small’s existing loan, benefited the mortgage’s investors but was also a potential violation of state law.

New York Focus and Gothamist conducted an independent analysis of state court records. It shows that the method has been used in thousands of foreclosure cases like Small’s. Collectively, the result has either deprived New Yorkers of millions of dollars in additional money when they lose their homes, or burdened them with higher levels of debt. Small’s attorney Mark Anderson has sued a group of lenders and their law firms, accusing them of “systematic fraud and theft” to boost profits at the expense of former homeowners.

A bill pending with Governor Kathy Hochul could shape how much New Yorkers pay for renewable energy for years to come — but she only has a few days left to sign it and deliver the full savings promised, the bill’s supporters say.

Wind and solar developers have until Thursday, December 4, to bid for state contracts under an expedited timeline Hochul announced in September. It may be the last chance for the companies to secure contracts in time to build projects with federal tax credits, which they’ve relied on for decades and which are set to expire next year under legislation signed by President Donald Trump.

When developers submit a bid, they have to include an estimate of how much a project will cost to build and operate over the long term, including land, materials, financing, and property taxes. The lower the cost, the more likely it is that the state will approve the bid — and the less it will cost New Yorkers whose energy bills pay for the project.

A decade ago, Obamacare made it possible for Elizabeth and John to build a small business in the Hudson Valley: a fitness center for children and adults that now has 200 students. The husband-wife team was able to give up jobs that came with health insurance and buy "marketplace" insurance with subsidies from the Affordable Care Act. They later switched to the Essential Plan, a generous state program that offers free insurance to 1.7 million low- and middle-income New Yorkers.

Now, changes to the ACA — driven by Washington budget cuts — are expected to drive up John and Elizabeth’s health insurance costs by more than $10,000 a year.

They’re among the hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers who will face sharply higher premiums in 2026 due to the stalemate in Washington over federal subsidies, the tax and spending plan Republicans passed in July, and Hochul’s plan to minimize damage to the state budget while protecting low income, legal immigrants who will lose federal subsidies.

When New York abruptly backed down this month from its plans to implement a nation-leading ban on gas in new buildings, some legal observers had questions.

Lawmakers passed the All-Electric Buildings Act, which requires most new buildings to have only electric appliances, in 2023 as a step toward reducing pollution from the state’s largest source of greenhouse gas emissions and advancing New York’s legally mandated emissions targets. It was set to take effect in January.