Paul Parker lost a son in a 2002 fire at a Bronx building linked to the real estate operator. Below, he talks about the tragedy and his life since.

With a couple of police officers looking on from in front of Brooklyn Housing Court at 141 Livingston Street, members of the Brooklyn Tenants Union chanted "Si se Puede" ("Yes we can") at a rally on Wednesday.

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In 2007, 10 Pinnacle tenants sued the landlord in federal court, alleging that the company had raised rents improperly and filed eviction notices frivolously as part of a scheme to drive rent-regulated tenants out of their apartments so the landlord could raise rents or sell the units as condos or co-ops. The suit claimed that Pinnacle had violated not just state law but also the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations act, or RICO.

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So, as legislators in Albany home in on an extension of rent stabilization laws (they expire tonight but are likely to be renewed), is New York re-upping on an economic folly?

Surveys indicate that most economists think so, viewing rent control as not only inefficient but unfair, dooming tenants to poor maintenance and—because it's not means-tested--creating potential inequities between "rich tenants" and "poor landlords."

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But advocates of rent regulation are growing restless.

A straight extension of the current laws, “would not be a victory for the tenants,” said Mary Tek, campaign manager for the Real Rent Reform Campaign (R3), a coalition directed by the staff of Tenants & Neighbors, a tenant advocacy group.

R3 has planned a “mass mobilization” to Albany on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday of next week, and is also prepared to take trips every day after the June 15 if rent regulation laws are not renewed, according to the organization’s blog.

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Sometimes, the indicators are as overt as a shiny new luxury high-rise piercing a streetscape of familiar brown brick, or a rent bill that suddenly rises.

But often the clues are more subtle: The newsstand begins carrying TimeOut; the bodega starts selling Stella; the grocery offers Stonyfield.

To chart change in Crown Heights, a neighborhood that 20 years ago this summer became a national byword for interracial violence, reporter Patrick Wall went to the commercial strip in search of gentrification's footprints, both large and small--and both positive and negative.