As allegations of sexual abuse have occupied the headlines, far less has been said of the ex-governor’s aesthetic abuse of New York. And Cuomo was a serial abuser, wantonly so and without remorse. From Albany, he dreamed of the glories of Rome. Regrettably, he was only looking as far as the City of Rome in Oneida County, just over a hundred miles from Troy, New York. And yet, from his state house by Empire State Plaza, Andrew was our latter day Aeneas. If only Mario, his Anchises, had lived to see those Hesperian shores.
Just consider Dandy Andy’s many design ambitions: in 2018, the New York Post reported that Cuomo wasted $30 million on a change order to replace the tiles of the Midtown Tunnel. Why? Because he wanted his stripes, that’s why. Cuomo drew his particular blue-and-gold color scheme on everything. In doing so, he ensured that his state, from Buffalo to Plattsburgh to Montauk, would one day look like the same office of the DMV.
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With the expiration of Madison Square Garden’s lease — which sits atop our transit pipes like a toilet bowl — the governor had a chance to right a historic wrong by rebuilding Old Penn. To do so would have followed a widely popular and feasible plan that has been independently studied (that’s because the old tracks are all still in the same place).
But why fix a broken neighborhood when you can break even more? Instead, Cuomo threatened to level the existing historic buildings that still surround the station in a master-builder plan he called the ‘Empire Station Complex’. This complex might even — you know, I don’t know — contain a ‘Cuomo Station’. The governor already did much to scrub the name of Daniel Patrick Moynihan from the new station that the late senator ingeniously envisioned carving out of the old Central Post Office building across the street.
Cuomo also played a role in another architectural debacle: Cuomo is Guilty of the Subprime Mortgage Crisis Too.
It was Cuomo’s role in the subprime mortgage crisis, which he still has not been held fully accountable for. That malfeasance merits revisiting as the 13-year anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers fast approaches.
Politics is, apparently, a vocation where it does not matter if you were a complete failure in a previous role—the chances of getting promoted are still high. Cuomo’s part in the worst financial disaster since 1929 proves that.
Of course, Cuomo’s contribution does not excuse the other culprits in the 2008 recession, such as Alan Greenspan and his loose monetary policy, former Massachusetts Rep. Barney Frank, who blocked the Bush administration’s efforts to reform mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, or President Bill Clinton. But Cuomo’s role in this event must be explored because it shows that he should never have been allowed to become New York’s governor in the first place.
In the late 1990s, Cuomo was appointed Clinton’s secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Under his watch, HUD oversaw the easing of lending standards on Federal Housing Administration home loans, with the maximum size of FHA-approved loans for single-family homes in low-cost areas increasing from $86,317 to $121,296, while minimum down payments fell from 7 percent of the asking price to 3 percent.
At the time, the then housing secretary wanted to reduce redlining, a term describing home-lending practices that discriminate against ethnic minorities. Here he is in a YouTube clip admitting that by asking the banks to take on more risky loans, their portfolios were at a greater risk of defaulting. He also bragged that he sued a bank in Texas for redlining.
Susan Wachter, who served as assistant secretary for policy development and research at HUD under Cuomo, told Institutional Investor that easing lending standards was probably not a good idea.
That’s a bit of an understatement: