City & Region

BY BRENT ORELL Last week, the Department of Labor released the final employment report of the Trump administration, and the news there, much like all the news these days, was not good. For months, I’ve written that the key to getting the economy

BY E.J. McMAHON New York could be on the way to its first population decline in any decade since the 1970s, according to the latest estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau. The Empire State’s July 1, 2020 population of 19,336,776 was down

BY ANGELA RACHIDI Congress responded to the arrival of the pandemic on US soil in spring 2020 by passing sweeping economic relief measures, including policies directed toward supporting the needs of families. The Families First Coronavirus Response Act guaranteed paid time off

A controversial government program launched nearly a decade ago to protect airline safety has failed miserably to meet its “mission of mitigating the threat to commercial aviation,” according to a scathing federal audit sprinkled with redactions to protect “sensitive security information.” Known

BY EDWARD PINTO AND TOBIAS PETER Key takeaways: Purchase rate lock volume remains strongly above last year’s. For the last couple weeks, volume has consistently been about 30%-80% higher. Driven by ultra-low mortgage rates and a limited supply, national HPA

BY TOBIAS PETER The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed a distressing fact in the housing world: Federal home loan policies that promote risky lending in the name of providing “responsible, affordable mortgage credit access” for minority households are setting up minority

BY E.J. McMAHON Still struggling to recover from spring pandemic shutdowns, now facing the threat of renewed restrictions due to a second wave of COVID infections, the last thing New York’s economy needs is a state-mandated disincentive to put people back to

Sources close to Mayor Byron Brown tell The Chronicle that he is working to relocate the Greyhound Bus Station on North Division Street and to co-locate it at the City’s new Amtrak Station, which opened earlier this month on Exchange Street.  The

BY IAN KINGSBURY Much of New York’s highest-in-the-nation education spending is driven by a single category: special education. Of the $66.2 billion spent on K-12 education in New York in 2017-18, $15.8 billion went to special education instructional services. No other state

The Erie Canal Harbor Development Corporation (ECHDC), a subsidiary of Empire State Development, has managed an excruciatingly slow 15-year process to develop the City’s Inner Harbor — all the while developers have been chomping at the bit to invest. Now,

Good government activist Matthew Ricchiazzi is calling on Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz to sell the county’s dated convention center to Douglas Development — the owner of the adjacent Statler Hotel and Hyatt Regency properties — for the nominal price

BY IAN KINGSBURY Back in August, leaders of unions representing teachers and principals warned that the plan to allow parents to select between blended or virtual learning would produce “staffing shortages” in many schools. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio

BY BILL HAMMOND The ongoing surge in New York’s coronavirus pandemic raises doubts about the effectiveness of Governor Cuomo’s “micro-cluster” strategy. Beginning Oct. 6, the governor has imposed tightened restrictions on limited areas, or clusters, identified as having particularly severe outbreaks –

BY BRONWYN HOWELL Since the US and other governments have effectively banned the use of Chinese (read Huawei, but also ZTE) equipment from future mobile communications networks, support for open radio access network (O-RAN) architecture has risen dramatically. The Federal Communications Commission

BY ANGELA RACHIDI The American Enterprise Institute commissioned NORC at the University of Chicago to field a survey of 3,518 working-age adults in late July 2020 to learn more about the employment situation of US households and the reach of the social

BY BRETT SWANSON Every couple years, we update our original 2014 blog post that asked the question, “What would an iPhone have cost in 1991?” The purpose is to measure — at least in a rough way — the progress

Erie County District Attorney John J. Flynn announces that four defendants were virtually arraigned today before State Supreme Court Justice John L. Michalski on indictments charging them with various felony offenses for their roles in two separate homicides that occurred

BY BILL HAMMOND Coronavirus infections are again rising in New York’s nursing homes, a sign that blanket testing, tight limits on visitors and other precautions have not fully isolated their acutely vulnerable residents from conditions in the outside world. Nursing