In New York, Sotomayor Put Focus on the Poor

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WASHINGTON — Time and again, Sonia Sotomayor challenged her fellow board members at the State of New York Mortgage Agency, asking pointed questions about its work: What of the poor? As we help build new neighborhoods upon the rubble of the old, are we abandoning those with the lowest incomes?

Ms. Sotomayor, the United States Supreme Court nominee, sat on the board from 1987 to 1992. During that time, the agency insured hundreds of millions of dollars in mortgages, leading to the construction of thousands of apartments for moderate-income New York residents. But often, these projects seemed to leave her uneasy.

“Ms. Sotomayor voiced her continuing objection to the rehabilitation of projects in low-income areas without providing for a higher component of low-income families,” according to agency minutes from March 1990. “She repeated her request for an analysis of the various economic groups in the neighborhood affected by the project.”

She ended up voting for most of those projects. But in voicing her concerns, Ms. Sotomayor offered a window into her tough and skeptical style, and into her consistent focus on the poorest of the poor, hundreds of pages of agency records show.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/19/us/19mortgage.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all