A Newsday story today questions Andrew Cuomo's repeated claims in the AG race that he doubled fair housing enforcement actions at HUD and dramatically expanded anti-discrimination efforts.
Quote from critic Shanna Smith of the National Fair Housing Alliance: "He promotes himself as the enforcement king of fair housing. But it's my opinion that he's a failure at enforcement."
Cuomo makes the doubling claim here and here.
The National Council on Disability says the claim is phony in this 2001 report, Chapter III C4. The Citizens Commission on Civil Rights calls the claim "false" in this report from 2002.
But Cuomo spokesperson Wendy Katz says Bush's HUD vouches for its accuracy, citing a couple of brief mentions of the claim in a long HUD report.....
UPDATE: Today, one of the authors of the National Council on Disability report tells us Cuomo's campaign is off-base in suggesting that Bush's HUD somehow questioned the conclusion that Cuomo's "doubling" claim was phony.
It never did any such thing, said co-author Michael Allen, a fair-housing lawyer.
“The doubling claim was mostly p.r. spin at the time it was made and it's a pale version of that now," says Allen. "No one ever came back and challenged our findings. I don't begrudge Andrew Cuomo wanting to make a claim about what he did as HUD secretary, but I don't think the facts bear him out."
Comments (1)
Nice story, John. I'm sure you've also noticed that Cuomo persists in touting his phony "historic settlement" with Smith & Wesson, "setting the stage for a potential global industry-wide settlement." You blew the lid off of that claim, too, in 2001 but he keeps spouting it. Can we expect a Part II to this expose?