From the November issue: New York’s real estate market is at something of a crossroad. For more than a year now, the industry has been dealing with the fallout from Wall Street and the credit crisis, leaving brokers, developers, city officials and everyone in between groping for strategies to keep financially afloat. While it’s hard to fault real estate professionals for throwing any ideas they have at the problem to see which ones stick, some of those approaches have worked better than others. This month, The Real Deal dissected some of the biggest policies and proposals that are being used — or considered — to help shore up the industry.

Home foreclosure rates are rising in luxury markets, according to data from Zillow.com, making waves in the mortgage lending community. As John Courson, CEO of the Mortgage Bankers Association, told CNBC, the key issue in this crunch is whether credit availability among lenders will improve. “It’s clear that we are seeing proposals that are probably more dramatic … as we’ve seen since the 1930s when the banking system and the financial system in our country underwent massive changes,” Courson said. [more]

The New York City housing market slump is less a crisis of real estate than it is a crisis of debt, according to Robert Knakal of Massey Knakal Realty Services. In a blog post yesterday, Knakal said that the market needs to “go through a massive deleveraging process” before it can improve, because “properties simply cannot support the debt loads that currently exist.” Unfortunately, tight credit among lenders and banks makes refinancing debt and mortgages increasingly difficult. Subsequently, Knakal said, the market downturn could extend further than many anticipated. “As things play out, it is becoming more apparent that our distressed asset flow will not be in the form of an early 1990s-like tsunami but rather a series of rolling waves extending as far as the eye can currently see,” Knakal said.