Month: November 2019

The segregation of blacks and whites has been embedded on Long Island as firmly as the Meadowbrook Parkway.

Heading north from the South Shore bayfront, the six-lane road divides overwhelmingly minority Freeport from overwhelmingly white Merrick; then overwhelmingly minority Roosevelt from overwhelmingly white North Merrick; then overwhelmingly minority Uniondale from East Meadow, where seven of 10 residents are white.

A swath of asphalt, concrete, grass and trees framed by green space, the parkway forms a barrier between communities that are as little as 1 percent white and as little as 2 percent black. The demarcations are stark even as the road serves as a conduit for more than 70,000 cars daily.

Long Island has 291 communities Most of its black residents live in just 11

As one of the most segregated suburbs in America, Long Island is crisscrossed by racial barriers. Some, like the Meadowbrook, are visible. Some are the invisible product of historical forces including zoning regulations, mortgage redlining, the boundaries of 124 school districts, housing prices, and racial steering and blockbusting — a tactic used by real estate agents to drive up sales, and commissions, by inducing blacks to move into a white neighborhood and then warning whites that property values were about to plummet.

For three years, Newsday investigated real estate practices on Long Island using a testing system in which whites and minorities, acting as home seekers, were paired to gauge how real estate agents treated them. The probe found that white testers were shown neighborhoods with higher proportions of white residents than black testers were, while the black testers were shown homes in more integrated neighborhoods. It also showed that certain minority areas were largely overlooked for everyone.

The divides are taken for granted even in places where they dictate that black and Hispanic children will learn only with black and Hispanic children, and white children will learn only with white children, in elementary schools a mile apart.

After studying Long Island, Myron Orfield, director of the Institute on Metropolitan Opportunity at the University of Minnesota Law School, sees “hard racial barriers where black communities are next to white communities and they stay very firm.” Orfield adds: “On Long Island, there’s hard walls. It’s a tough, tough wall there. When you see those hard, differential walls, underlying that there’s usually bigotry and prejudice that’s maintaining those hard walls.”

Half of Long Island’s black population lives in just 11 of the Island’s 291 communities, and 90 percent lives in just 62 of them, according to 2017 census estimates.

The concentrated housing pattern ranks the Island near the top nationally in statistical analyses of segregation.

Researchers use a standard called the dissimilarity index to measure racial and ethnic divisions. Put simply, the index identifies the percentage of two groups – for example, blacks and whites – that would have to move so that the members of each group become evenly distributed in a particular area.

The higher the index on a scale of zero to 100, the greater the segregation. At 100, blacks and whites would be totally separate. Any score above 60 indicates high segregation, researchers say.

Nassau County’s score of 78 ranked it as America’s most segregated county among those with 1.2 million-1.6 million residents, according to data from the 2010 census, the most recent performed.

The data also ranked Nassau the fourth most segregated county in New York State, behind the much larger and urban counties of Brooklyn and Queens, as well as Wyoming, an upstate county with a little more than 40,000 residents.

“This is typical of what we call hyper-segregated patterns,” says Douglas S. Massey, a Princeton University professor of sociology and public affairs who studies residential segregation.

With an index of 63, Suffolk County ranked 10th in the nation among similarly sized counties, and 19th on New York State’s roster of urban and suburban counties, according to the census data.

Combining the two counties to measure Long Island as a whole, Brown University sociology professor John Logan ranked the Island’s black-white segregation level 10th among 50 metropolitan areas with the largest black populations in the country. He calculated the index at 69.

The Island’s segregation stands at this level despite a decline in the index from 1990 to 2010, with Nassau falling 4 percentage points and Suffolk 7 points. It also accompanies climbing segregation in already highly segregated schools.

Rising Hispanic and Asian populations have driven up the proportions of minorities in Long Island’s schools while white representations have fallen, according to a Newsday analysis of state Education Department data.

White students composed 89 percent of public-school students in 1976. In 2018, they made up a little more than 50 percent. Hispanic students increased from 3 percent to 28 percent, while Asian students’ share rose from less than 1 percent to 9 percent from 1976 to 2018.

The black student percentage was relatively steady compared to other minority groups. Black students composed 7 percent in the 1976-77 school year, hit a high of 12 percent in 2000-01, then declined to 10 percent by 2018.

The demographic shifts were not balanced across all school districts. Only a handful have absorbed most of the black students, while white students remain in predominantly white districts.

The student bodies of 47 of Nassau’s 56 school districts were less than 10 percent black in 1976. The proportion of black students has risen above 10 percent in only nine of them. As a result, districts are more segregated than they were four decades ago.

In the last school year, 80 percent of white students attended schools where, on average, whites made up three-quarters of the students. In contrast, only 16 percent of black students attended majority white schools, down from 53 percent in 1976.

Lorna Lewis, superintendent of the Plainview-Old Bethpage School District, voiced concern over how neighborhood barriers, which affect school district boundaries, can adversely impact children’s educational opportunities.

During a drive along Clinton Road in Garden City into Clinton Street in neighboring Hempstead Village, Lewis reflected on the different educational opportunities and resources available in the school districts of those two communities.

She said it was a block “that divides the opportunity.”

“To me, that should not be,” added Lewis, whose term as president of the New York State Council of School Superintendents ended June 30.

“Our education should not be designed by the pocketbook, the ZIP code, the lines that we draw,” Lewis said. “That should not be the reason for educational outcomes. It really shouldn’t. And Long Island is full of that.”

Segregation was built into Long Island from its mid-20th century birth as an iconic American suburb.

A significant presence of African Americans on the Island began with slavery. According to a recent exhibit at the Long Island Museum, the 1698 census of Long Island’s population recorded 1,053 African Americans among a population of 8,261.

The Great Migration of blacks from the South to the North seeking greater opportunity brought an influx of black people to the Island in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, well before enactment of fair-housing laws in an era “when segregation was considered to be very legitimate,” Logan said.

Many left the Jim Crow South hoping to find a better life, only to find segregation in the North as well.

Perhaps most notoriously, William J. Levitt, visionary creator of affordable suburban tracts, marketed the prefabricated, concrete-slab homes that would become Levittown with restrictive covenants barring leasing and sales to blacks.

“The tenant agrees not to permit the premises to be used or occupied by any person other than members of the Caucasian race,” one such covenant read. “But the employment and maintenance of other than Caucasian domestic servants shall be permitted.”

In a 1954 interview with the “Saturday Evening Post,” Levitt explained his racial exclusion policy this way:

“If we sell one house to a Negro family, then 90 to 95 percent of our white customers will not buy into the community. That is their attitude, not ours. We did not create it and we cannot cure it. As a company, our position is simply this: we can solve a housing problem or we can try to solve a racial problem. But we cannot combine the two.”

Eugene Burnett, who turned 90 in March, recalls driving to Levittown in 1950 to look at its brand-new houses, as so many veterans did. He and an Army buddy were interested in moving their families to the suburbs. Burnett was newly married and had been discharged from the service the year before.

“I didn’t even know where Long Island was. It took us all day to find Levittown,” remembers Burnett, who lived in the South Bronx then.

The salesman balked, telling Burnett, “It’s not me, but the owner of this establishment has not at this time decided to sell to Negroes.”

“That was a real shock to me because while we were in the service, we used to tease the southern [black] soldiers about conditions in their states,” Burnett says, adding, “I didn’t expect they could tell me that, right out in the open in the state of New York, that they were going to discriminate against me.”

After the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated racial covenants in 1948, Levitt removed the clauses from company documents in 1949 but said he would continue to accept only white families. The discriminatory practice continued until April 1968, six days after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., when the company announced it would adopt a policy of “open housing” as a memorial to King.

ERASE Racism, a Syosset-based social justice advocacy organization, noted in a report that “not one of Levittown’s 82,000 residents was African American” in 1960.

To this day, Levitt’s landmark Long Island settlement is home to few African Americans. In 2017, the census estimated the population at 75 percent white, 14 percent Hispanic, 7 percent Asian and 1 percent black.

The exclusion of blacks from Levittown and other suburban communities had financial consequences that reverberate today.

Richard Rothstein, author of “The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America,” calculated the wealth-building opportunity denied blacks who were barred from Levittown.

Rothstein wrote that Levittown homes sold for around $8,000 in 1948, the equivalent of $75,000 in today’s dollars. In 2017, the median sales price of a Levittown house without major remodeling was $350,000 and up. The current median sales price in Levittown is $460,000, according to the Multiple Listing Service of Long Island.

“White working-class families who bought those homes in 1948 have gained, over three generations, more than $200,000 in wealth,” he wrote.

Segregation hardened rapidly on the Island starting around the time of the civil rights movement, propelled by white flight, racial steering and blockbusting by real estate agents in towns that today have the largest minority populations.

Elmont, Freeport, Hempstead, Lakeview, Westbury, Uniondale and Valley Stream in Nassau County, and Wheatley Heights in Suffolk County, all experienced panicked sell-offs by white residents who believed that property values would fall as blacks moved in.

The fastest white-to-black swing took place in Roosevelt, a town of 17,000 residents on the South Shore.

In 1960, Roosevelt was 82 percent white and 17 percent black. A decade later, the white share of the population had plummeted to 32 percent and the black share had swung up to 67 percent. The population in 2017 was estimated at 1.4 percent white.

Rita Lampkin and her husband, who are African American, were part of the demographic flip. In 1968, the couple looked to move from Queens to the suburbs with their two children. Lampkin, 88, knew Roosevelt, where she worked in the public library.

She recalls that a group promoting integration advised her to consider communities where the racial makeup appeared stable rather than communities such as Roosevelt, where the black population was surging.

The family bought a Cape-style house that backs up on a stand of trees and a streambed. Asked how she felt about the exodus of whites and the arrivals of blacks, she laughs. “Well my reaction was, let them leave. The blacks are just as good neighbors.”

In 1960, Lakeview’s population was about evenly split by race, 48 percent white and 52 percent black. That year, a racially mixed group of residents complained to the state attorney general that agents from 10 real estate brokerages had gone door to door with messages about the community’s changing demographics.

A decade later, Lakeview’s even black-white split was gone: The 1970 census counted 82 percent of residents as black and 17 percent as white. The transformation was long-lasting. The 2017 census estimate put the breakdown at 74 percent black, 18 percent Hispanic, 2 percent white and almost 1 percent Asian.

Elmont also saw a dramatic racial swing.

In 1964, a white couple, Don Olson and his wife, moved with their three children from the Bronx to Elmont, a Nassau community bordering Queens. Racial change swept the area in the 1970s.

“There was blockbusting in that time,” Olson said in an interview two years ago when he was 81. Olson died last August.

“There were commercials and notices in our mailboxes, and things like that,” he recalls. “Actually, the people that left, they left overnight. They sold their houses, but they did it quietly.”

Olson stayed. He spoke approvingly of the diversity of his neighbors.

“My next-door neighbor here is from Vietnam. And my neighbor behind me is from Vietnam also,” he says, adding, “My next-door neighbor is Spanish.”

Barred from Levittown, Army veteran Burnett and his wife, Bernice, bought a home where they still live in Suffolk’s Wheatley Heights, in 1960. By then, he was a sergeant on the county police force.

They were wary through their first nights there.

“In those days they would burn your house down the night before you moved in,” Burnett remembers. “I moved in here in the middle of the night and I stayed up all night sitting at the door because I had my babies in here.”

And, he says, he had his revolver – “my .38 special” – at the ready, just in case. But nothing violent unfolded.

Asked why he would risk moving into a community where some whites objected to his family because of their race, Burnett says:

“I’m going to live my life as a free man. And the opportunity was here for my children. I didn’t want my children to go to any kind of segregated school, even though the superintendent here told me I was crazy. But look what happened. Was I crazy? Look, I got three professional children out of it.”

He lists their occupations: a son is an architect, a daughter is a physician, and another daughter is a pharmacist.

In 1976, the Wheatley Heights Neighborhood Coalition filed the first Long Island-based federal court suit alleging steering by real estate companies and agents.

Wheatley Heights was 5 percent black at the time. It was bordered by predominantly black Wyandanch and predominantly white Deer Park and Dix Hills. The suit alleged that agents showed black people homes only in Wheatley Heights while never showing white buyers there. It also charged that agents never showed properties in nearby Dix Hills or Deer Park to blacks.

Two years later, a federal judge barred practices including racial steering and boycotting or retaliating against Wheatley Heights residents.

Still, demographic changes moved inexorably through Wheatley Heights, which today is served by a highly rated school district and boasts a 2017 median household income of $111,600, one of the highest in Suffolk County. The population breakdown: 49 percent black, 21 percent white, 10 percent Asian and 14 percent Hispanic.

Fifty years after the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling struck down legally sanctioned segregated schools, the ERASE Racism advocacy group concluded in 2004 that “racial isolation is the norm for Long Island’s residential neighborhoods and racially separate and unequal is the norm for Long Island’s public schools.”

Where Hempstead abuts Garden City, the 461 black and Hispanic children of Jackson Main Elementary in Hempstead grew up for the year with just 12 white fellow students. One mile away, the 132 white children of Garden City’s Locust School encountered only five Hispanic and two black classmates.

Two schools one mile apart

Jackson Main Elementary has a dramatically smaller proportion of white students than neighboring Locust Elementary School.

White

Black

Hispanic

Asian

Other

Jackson Main Elementary School

Locust Elementary School

70% Hispanic

86% White

26% Black

Two schools one mile apart

Jackson Main Elementary has a dramatically smaller proportion of white students than neighboring Locust Elementary School.

White

Black

Hispanic

Asian

Other

Jackson Main Elementary School

70% Hispanic

26% Black

Locust Elementary School

86% White

Source: New York State Education Department, 2017-18

They live in a community that has grappled with a link between race and residence.

In 2017, after a more than decade-long legal battle waged by advocacy groups, a federal judge ruled that the Village of Garden City had “acted with discriminatory intent” by rezoning publicly owned land to prevent construction of affordable housing. Last year, the court ordered the village to pay $5.3 million in attorney fees and costs to the plaintiffs’ lawyers.

This year, Nassau County settled a separate housing discrimination case that alleged the county had steered affordable housing into minority communities. The county agreed to pay $5.4 million to promote mixed-income affordable housing.

Since then, the county has agreed to negotiate preliminary tax breaks for a proposed development of 150 apartments in Garden City on Stewart Avenue, across from the Roosevelt Field mall, 15 of which are to be affordable units.

– With Ann Choi

Long Island real estate agents sell schools as much as houses.

School district ratings are among the most zealously watched indicators of quality of life by Long Island homeowners, not least because they can influence home values.

In many of Newsday’s 86 paired tests, agents applied a laser-like focus on districts, highlighting their perceived quality when recommending places that house hunters should consider buying – or avoid.

As one real estate agent explained it: “So, more important than Syosset is schools, because everything is by schools on Long Island.”

That reliance on school ratings as a top selling point can empower Long Island real estate agents to serve as gatekeepers for 124 highly delineated districts whose test scores, graduations rates and ethnic and racial compositions vary sharply. In playing the gatekeeper role, they risk running afoul of fair housing standards because discussing school quality can become a proxy for talking about a community’s makeup.

As the National Association of Realtors stated in a 2014 post on its website, “Discussions about schools can raise questions about steering if there is a correlation between the quality of the schools and neighborhood racial composition.”

Characterizations about schools with low test scores, for example, or comments that reference a “‘community with declining schools’ become code words for racial or other differences in the community,” the post states. As a result, such comments become “fair-housing issues.”

Additionally, fair-housing experts say touting or disparaging schools can put agents in legal jeopardy because many lack the expertise to make such judgments.

“Since when did real estate agents become experts on schools?” asked Fred Freiberg, executive director of the Fair Housing Justice Center, who served as a Newsday consultant.

“It’s ridiculous because they cannot, they should not be trusted to provide objective information about schools and school performance rates,” Freiberg said.

“I might go into an area and maybe it’s not the highest scores I’m looking for for my son. Maybe it’s the music program. There could be a lot of different reasons why I would think a school was better or worse for my son that has nothing to do with test scores, certainly nothing to do with race.”

While some agents tested by Newsday told customers that they were legally barred from talking about schools, fair-housing experts say agents may provide information so long as it is strictly factual – and provided equally to customers.

The National Association of Realtors made clear that agents have a narrow pathway that involves sticking to “objective information,” not their personal opinions.

The author suggested that agents provide prospective homebuyers with school or community websites that provide ratings and data.

“The best thing a Realtor can do is guide them to third-party information, so they can make a decision on their own,” the post recommends.

Some agents touted districts as highly rated. Some denigrated districts as undesirable places to invest in homes. Whether based on facts or simply their own beliefs, some expressed perceptions about district performances that were in line with pointing buyers toward communities with substantial white populations and away from more integrated areas.

Some agents advised testers to research schools on their own through websites that provide educational performance data. One agent went further by telling house hunters to review published data to also determine community socioeconomic conditions.

“I’m not allowed to tell you where to go, where not to go. But I could tell you where to look, you know. And then you look,” RE/MAX agent Joy Tuxson told white tester Brittany Silver.

“Everything is online for the school districts. You’re going to see who graduates. How many kids. The ethnic breakdown, how many free lunches. You can get a good idea of the socioeconomic makeup of the neighborhood when you look at the school districts.”

Tuxson also made a disparaging comment about Wyandanch to the white tester.

When speaking with Silver’s paired tester, Payal Mehta, who is South Asian, Tuxson related advice she had given a family member who was house hunting.

“I sold my nephew a house, him and his bride … I said, ‘… you sent me houses with seven different school districts,'” Tuxson recalled, adding that she asked him, “‘Do you really want your future children going to Amityville school districts?'”

Asked for help finding $500,000 homes within 30 minutes of Bethpage, Tuxson provided comparable listings to both testers.

Tuxson did not respond to a letter, an email or a phone call from Newsday requesting comment.

Newsday fair housing consultant Fred Freiberg, executive director of the Fair Housing Justice Center, said that “both testers received listings in similar areas, but one or more statements made by the agent were discriminatory or involved possible steering away from predominantly minority communities and school districts.”

Noting that “the agent shared derogatory opinions about crime in the minority community of Wyandanch only with the white tester,” consultant Robert Schwemm, professor at the University of Kentucky College of Law, wrote, “Whether she was wrongly stereotyping or not, she provided greater information to the white tester than to the Asian.”

Schwemm added: “The agent’s comments about Wyandanch and Amityville schools suggest that these towns could sue for the agent’s steering whites and Asians away from them – but it would be advisable to do additional testing by black and/or Hispanic testers to see if this agent makes similar comments to these minorities.”

Kerry McGovern, vice president of communications for RE/MAX LLC, said in a statement: “We have spoken with the franchise owners whose agents were included in the inquiry and are confident they have taken this matter seriously and are committed to following the law and promoting levels of honesty, inclusivity and professionalism in real estate.”

In the Amityville school district, more than 90 percent of the students are black or Hispanic.

The district had a 77 percent four-year high school graduation rate in 2018, including 20 percent who earned advanced designation diplomas after passing at least eight Regents exams, according to New York State Education Department data.

Most of neighboring Massapequa is part of a 93 percent white school district, where 97 percent of the students graduate in four years, 66 percent with advanced designation diplomas. But some of East Massapequa is zoned for the Amityville school district.

The boundary was key to some agents.

Describing Massapequa as “beautiful,” Realty Connect USA agent Margaret Petrelli provided a white tester with a list of seven districts whose high school’s student populations averaged nearly 85 percent white. The agent did not provide the black tester with a list of school districts to consider.

“If you’re in Massapequa, you only want School District 23,” she counseled the white tester, using a Multiple Listings Service reference number, before continuing:

“You don’t want [District] 6 in Massapequa, because that takes in Amityville, and you’re not going to like those schools.”

Newsday’s consultants, Freiberg and Schwemm, concluded separately, based on information Newsday provided them, that Petrelli’s statements and actions raised evidence of racial steering and discriminatory treatment. (Petrelli also had asked the black tester for identification, but not the white tester).

Petrelli initially made an appointment to view the video of her interactions with testers at Newsday, but due to a scheduling conflict Newsday asked her to choose a different time. She answered that an alternate time would not work for her. She has since not responded to a follow-up email or phone call.

Five agents drew sharp school district boundary distinctions about choosing homes that carried addresses in the central Nassau community of Westbury.

Some of those homes are in the Westbury school district, whose student body is just under three quarters Hispanic and one quarter black. The high school graduation rate last year was 79 percent, with 23 percent earning Regent’s diplomas with advanced designation, according to the state Education Department.

Other homes are in the East Meadow school district, whose makeup is 54 percent white, 21 percent Hispanic, 20 percent Asian and 4 percent black. The high school’s graduation rate was 93 percent, with 63 percent of the graduates earning Regents diplomas with advanced designation.

Salisbury is a hamlet of just under 2 square miles that carries a Westbury address but falls in the East Meadow school district. It is bounded on the north by Old Country Road, on the west by Eisenhower Park, on the south by Salisbury Park Drive and to the east by the Wantagh State Parkway.

The majority of Salisbury’s 12,000-plus population is white, at 70 percent. Asians compose 15 percent of the population, Hispanics nearly 14 percent and blacks not quite 1 percent.

Longtime residents recall intense resistance to integration.

Diane Kremin lived in Salisbury for 42 years before selling her home in January. In her early years in the community, she remembers people saying, “I won’t be the first to sell to a black but I’ll be the second,” along with stories about people threatening, “If you sell to people we don’t like we’ll burn your house down.”

Local groups pushed for a separate ZIP code for Salisbury over the jurisdictional confusion with Westbury in the ’70s and again around 1990, said Helen Meittinis, a local civic association president.

Kremin, who is white, said she participated to distinguish the area from Westbury – where today more than six of 10 residents are minority – and to protect property values.

“Westbury schools didn’t have a good reputation because they were more black than white. It’s primarily the school system. You didn’t want to be known as Westbury,” recalls Kremin, who sold her house to a Middle Eastern couple and adds, “It’s very different today because the value doesn’t decline because of diversity anymore.”

The five agents who mentioned Westbury to customers made clear that they meant Salisbury because of its location in the East Meadow school district. Only one of the agents suggested houses – a total of three – in the Westbury school district. In comparison, the agents offered 19 houses in Salisbury.

Realty Connect USA agent Petrelli, for example, told a white tester: “You have Salisbury and Westbury. You have – which, of course, I will tell you, there’s one school district that you’ll stay away from.”

In the opinions of two agents tested by Newsday, the predominantly minority community of Elmont was an area to avoid “school district-wise” or based on “statistics.”

In the judgments of state and federal education agencies and a noted school advocacy organization, Elmont Memorial High School — one of five high schools from demographically disparate communities that together make up the Sewanhaka Central High School District – has been worthy of accolades.

The statements by the two agents, whose conduct produced evidence of steering in the view of Newsday fair-housing consultants, offer a window into how agents can guide house hunters based on negative assumptions that run parallel to race.

A largely black and Hispanic community, Elmont hugs the Nassau County border with Queens. In 2018, the student body of its high school, Elmont Memorial, was roughly 90 percent black and Hispanic. The four-year graduation rate was 96 percent, with 47 percent of the students earning advanced Regents Diplomas, down from 53 percent the year before.

The school boasted a four-year graduation rate for economically disadvantaged students that was higher than the average across all Nassau County schools: 95 percent earning diplomas, with 40 percent earning advanced Regents Diplomas, compared with the corresponding county figures of 80 percent and 35 percent.

Elmont Memorial has been recognized as a school of excellence by the U.S. Department of Education; received a New York State Excelsior Award; was named a New York State Blue Ribbon School of Excellence; and received the “Dispelling the Myth” award from the Education Trust.

“I would challenge anyone to come in and see how well our students do in Elmont and how, in terms of their graduation rate, the colleges and universities they get accepted into, the national recognition that they have received in such areas as the arts, Model UN and science research,” said Ralph Ferrie, in an interview before he retired as superintendent of the Sewanhaka Central High School District last June.

“It’s disappointing that people would look at a community and, just based upon its demographics, come to the conclusion … that that is not a quality high school.”

A researcher who analyzed Nassau County schools over five years, culminating in a 2014 report, said race factored into where white parents send — or don’t send — their children to school.

Amy Stuart Wells, a professor of sociology and education at Teachers College, Columbia University, was lead author of the 2014 report, “Divided We Fall: The Story of Separate and Unequal,” an investigation of Nassau County’s 56 school districts.

One facet of the research analyzed the relationship between home property values and neighborhood and school district demographics.

“And what you find at that time, around 2014, was that the percentage of black students in a school district decreased property value of the same quality house with the same lot size and everything else by $50,000 ,” Wells said. “So you start to understand the process by which segregation happens again and again.”

Wells studied what was happening to homes priced at the 2010 median in Nassau County of $415,000 as the percentage of black and Hispanic population rose from 30 to 70 percent.

The way the study put it: “both models indicate that a one-percent increase in black/Hispanic enrollments is associated with a 0.3 percent decrease in home values. Put another way, almost $50,000 in price would separate two otherwise similar homes, one located in a district that is 30 percent black/Hispanic, and other located in a district with 70 percent black/Hispanic enrollments (given Nassau County’s 2010 median home price of $415,000).”

She continued that people’s perceptions of an area really matter, and often that perception is “racialized.” The study showed that a white buyer is more likely “to choose the predominantly white and/or Asian school district, without ever stepping foot in the other school district.”

After interviewing real estate agents, Wells said her research team found that some held views on school districts that were not necessarily based on performance but often were influenced by the racial makeup of the students.

She said the research team looked at two school districts that had similar housing stocks and similar socioeconomic populations – but differed racially. “The real estate agents would talk about the quality of those districts,” Wells said, adding:

“And when we actually went in and looked inside the schools, there didn’t seem to be a huge difference at all in the curriculum and the quality of the teachers. So, they [real estate agents] do play an important role in steering people away from certain districts that are becoming more racially, ethnically diverse and less white, in particular.”

– With Rachelle Blidner

Correction: The section of Massapequa that falls into Amityville schools was incorrect in a previous version of this story.

In Rockville Centre, a south shore village in Nassau County, the sports fields bustle with youth soccer and lacrosse teams and the restaurants and bars downtown attract lively crowds.

The bells ring for mass from the imposing three-level tower at the Cathedral of St. Agnes, seat of the Diocese of Rockville Centre, which ministers to Catholics in Long Island’s two counties.

It’s a place where generations of families settle, attend well-regarded schools and have a quick train ride into the city.

While attending the highly rated schools is a benefit open to all, where you live in Rockville Centre makes a difference.

For some, a Tudor-style home on a wide, leafy street is an option. The median price for a home in Rockville Centre was $615,000 in 2017, according to the 2013-17 American Community Survey done by the U.S. Census Bureau. The Multiple Listing Service of Long Island put the median price at $612,500 in June 2019.

Otherwise, you may live on the West Side.

That’s where the majority of black families reside in Rockville Centre, in public housing created by a 1960s urban renewal project that uprooted the black community there and was among the most contentious of such projects on Long Island.

Hispanic residents are concentrated in apartments, live over stores or in smaller homes.

Heading still west across Peninsula Boulevard is another section with a Rockville Centre ZIP code made up mostly of black people, although children there attend schools in the predominantly minority Malverne district.

Rockville Centre does not have the whitest complexion on Long Island – 75 percent of its residents are white, compared with 90 percent in Garden City and 86 percent in nearby Oceanside, for example, according to U.S. Census figures.

A Newsday investigation of home-selling practices on Long Island, however, found this community to be one in which white home buyers were significantly more likely to be offered a listing than were minorities.

Tonya Thomas, her husband and two daughters are a black family that has lived in a highly desirable area of Rockville Centre since 2004. They landed in the village after they looked for homes on the North Shore and Garden City but couldn’t find a suitable place within their budget.

They also experienced resistance in some of those communities, Thomas said, including people not answering the door for scheduled showing appointments or arriving to an address to find that the home supposedly had been sold just minutes before.

When told of Newsday’s findings involving Rockville Centre, she said it was not surprising given Long Island’s history with segregated neighborhoods.

“Although my husband and I did not have a negative house-buying experience in Rockville Centre, I cannot say that that was the case for many communities that we visited on Long Island,” she said. “It took us two years to find a house.”

She said Rockville Centre is a wonderful community with lots of amenities where her family has been “blessed” to have great neighbors and an excellent school district where her children have thrived.

“It can be challenging finding a community that provides all the resources and experiences that one wants for their family,” Thomas said. “We all, no matter who we are or where we come from, want the same things.”

The black-white racial history of Rockville Centre began early in the 20th century in a neighborhood on the village’s West Side.

Black families, many of them Southern migrants working as domestics or laborers, found modest housing in an explicitly segregated area north of Sunrise Highway up to Lakeview Avenue, and east of Peninsula to North Centre Avenue. Ernestine Small, now 82 and living in senior housing in Uniondale, recalled growing up in the West Side neighborhood in the 1940s and ’50s, the daughter of a bank caretaker and a domestic who came north in search of a better life. Not all the housing was run down, she said, and the neighborhood was active and cohesive.

“Our life was good,” she recalled in an interview. “I came out of a working family. My father had a beautiful garden, and all he raised my mother canned and cooked, so we had plenty.”

She joined her community’s all-black Girls Scout troop and 4-H Club, and she was active in her church, St. Paul AME, which was then on Randall Avenue, she said. “I had the love and support of my community and my church.”

For the 1960s urban renewal, the original plan devised by village trustees would have replaced housing and stores in the black neighborhood with commercial and office space and some middle-income housing – with no new housing for the displaced residents of more modest means.

Demolition started in late 1961. By 1963, the federal and state housing agencies forced the village to include moderate-cost and public housing in the plan and produce an accurate count of residents who would be eligible for it.

The first houses demolished in the renewal area belonged to black and white middle-income homeowners in the northern section, from Maine Avenue to Lakeview, west of North Centre Avenue. First down were the homes of the two leaders of the homeowners association formed to protest the inclusion of these well-kept houses in the renewal area.

What happened to the two families – one white, one black – goes to the heart of the racial reality in the village at that time.

The West Side Property Owners Association was led by black attorney Clem Ransom and white pharmacist Charles Benincasa, neighbors across Maine Avenue. When it became clear their houses would be demolished, they looked for homes elsewhere in the village.

In a Newsday article the month his house was razed, Clem Ransom said he and his family had moved out of the village to integrated Hempstead. They had failed to find an available house in Rockville Centre, didn’t want the stress of essentially “blockbusting” a white block and were disgusted by the village’s treatment in any case.

The Benincasas, on the other hand, were able to find a home a few blocks away on Lakeview Avenue.

Richard Benincasa, now of Merrick and a pharmacist like his father, said the family never considered leaving Rockville Centre.

“I would have been sorry to leave Rockville Centre but that never occurred to me,” he said, recalling he was a teen at the time, attending parochial school in the village. “My dad had a business in town and he wanted to stay. My life didn’t change at all … I don’t know what happened to the black families in the neighborhood.”

What happened to the black homeowners was dispersion and displacement. Many bought homes in Lakeview, Hempstead, Freeport and other communities where blacks were clustered.

Ruth Ransom, 94-year-old widow of Clem and now living in an apartment in Hempstead, recalled the events of 1961 clearly. These events “leave a permanent, almost indelible memory. I can see that house, and feel a sense of loss,” she said in a recent interview.

“I realize it was just a reflection of what goes on – the powerful people do what they want, they have their own agenda and protesting doesn’t move their needle very far.”

Her husband, she said, was born in Greenwood, Mississippi, and received a law degree from Fordham Law School. He had a law office in Harlem, and she worked for a time as a legal secretary.

The loss of their house had a pronounced effect on her children, a daughter who was in junior high school and a son in elementary school. Ronald Ransom, now a retired probation officer living in Virginia, recalled the big house on a large corner lot with wonder and affection.

“We were probably well off considering we had this house, a great huge house almost like a castle to a kid,” he recalled. “I felt comfortable and accepted at school and really I didn’t know that black was something to be different. I found that out when I got to Hempstead.”

Now he thinks his educational opportunities would have been greater had he remained in the well-off community of Rockville Centre, he said. He’d have had greater opportunities to join extracurricular activities, he said, noting that opposing teams appeared better prepared and better equipped than his school’s teams.

“In Hempstead, they steered kids to general education and they landed jobs in the sanitation department,” he said.

But one black man who did go to Rockville Centre schools isn’t sure Ransom would have been better off staying. Prince Shaheed Scott, 23, grew up on the West Side with his mother, Sabrina. He said he got along fine with his classmates but that was because everyone was divided along racial lines. Academically he doesn’t think black students had the same opportunities or institutional encouragement and support.

“I left the district as soon as I could,” Scott said. “It was not good for me and probably many black students.”

Today, black students make up 6 percent of the Rockville Centre schools’ population and Hispanics 13 percent, according to New York State Department of Education statistics for the 2017-18 school year. This compares with 49 percent black and 25 percent Hispanic in the neighboring Malverne district.

In 2018, 78 percent of black graduates received Regents diplomas with advanced designation in Rockville Centre, compared with 95 percent of white graduates and 69 percent of Hispanic graduates. The number for black students was a steep rise from 2017, when 47 percent received advanced Regents diplomas.

All of the 2018 rates far exceeded the state average of 33 percent, the statistics show. “The equity issue is the elephant in the room, and we as a nation have to learn to deal with it,” said school superintendent William Johnson. “It starts with public education. We are the gateway for many of these children. We work hard and diligently to make sure children who come from families who struggle share the aspirations of their classmates.”

That means hand scheduling every class to reflect the community at large, he said, and to provide all students access to the same classes with the support they need.

The impact of the urban renewal project lingered. A 1966 report by the Nassau County Commission on Human Rights found evidence of racism and noted the drop in the number of black residents as a result of the project.

The Rockville Centre school district was ordered by the state education commissioner in 1977 to produce an integration plan affecting 4,000 students in six elementary schools, based on complaints by five couples made the previous year that the Floyd B. Watson School had more than 50 percent minority enrollment. The plan was enacted in 1978.

A decade later, the village police force and village government were ordered by a court to pay out hundreds of thousands of dollars to compensate a black youth beaten in an arrest.

Scott said there is a dichotomy of being in the community but not of the community. Growing up, he said, he and his friends could meet a suspicious eye from white residents when going for a slice of pizza in the village, and there was always the chance for those who live on the West Side to be targeted by police for common youthful behavior.

“For the white kids, they never seemed to be bothered by those things,” Scott said.

He said Rockville Centre is a nice place to live but not everyone is welcoming.

He said he would not buy a home there.

Briana Britt is 30 and grew up on the West Side, a third-generation resident. She still lives there with her three daughters, ages 14, 8 and 1. She echoed what Scott said about the social climate in high school and how it reflects the greater outside community.

“The black kids hung out with the black kids and the white kids hung out with the white kids, that’s just the way it was,” she said.

She said she remains in Rockville Centre because of the quality of the education the district offers, saying it outweighs the challenges of being a black resident of a predominantly white community.

“I don’t always feel comfortable,” she said. “Sometimes I feel out of place at places like the grocery stores around here.”

She said she feels profiled going into an area home goods store and is sometimes followed by security at a local drug store.

“I don’t steal so I don’t have a problem with it,” she said. “But it’s noticeable.”

Dyondra Wilson grew up on the west side of Peninsula in Lakeview, but her ZIP code is Rockville Centre. She attended Malverne High School. Still, she said she feels like Rockville Centre is home, with options to dine out, shop, go to the movies, the train and attend church.

“There have been a few incidents, but I feel comfortable there,” said Wilson, 25. She is a 2018 SUNY Stony Brook graduate with a degree in journalism.

Wilson was set to start a new job teaching English in South Korea and thinks growing up in a community where she stood out will help her. “Being different, standing out, doesn’t bother me,” she said. “It’s just the way that it is, so you can’t worry about it.”

Tonya Thomas said it’s important everyone knows that learning about and living with people from different cultures and ethnic groups only enhances one’s life experience.

“Encouraging and embracing diversity not only better prepares our children for the world they’ll be leading and living in in the future, but it also makes a community stronger.”

For a relatively small place, Merrick has produced a lot of notable people, from Lindsay Lohan to Ben and Jerry of ice cream fame.

There is also Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist, and Amy Fisher, the “Long Island Lolita.”

The 1980s and ’90s pop idol Debbie Gibson is a native, along with fashion designer Michael Kors. “The Godfather” author Mario Puzo grew up in Merrick, as did Roone Arledge, former president of ABC Sports/News with its signature “ABC Wide World of Sports” show.

It is a place that a Vanity Fair writer once famously dissed, declaring in a piece on the troubled actress Lohan that “no one aspires to live in Merrick” and it is “easy to see why Lindsay would want to escape.”

Proud locals more than take exception, defending the community as a great place to raise a family, with top schools, a beautiful bayfront park, a 45-minute train ride to Manhattan and a five-minute drive to Jones Beach.

“What is so wonderful about Merrick and really so different about Merrick is that it continues to attract new generations of people who come to Merrick, I think, hoping that they are going to continue a tradition of a community that is harmonious to a large degree,” said Rabbi Charles Klein, longtime leader of the Merrick Jewish Centre.

His is one of four synagogues in the community of 22,000 people, a remarkable figure in a region where many synagogues are shutting their doors or merging with other temples.

Yet while residents describe it as harmonious, it is also largely homogenous. For decades Merrick has been a mostly white community. In 1980, it was 98.8 percent white. Now it is about 88 percent, according to 2017 U.S. Census data.

In Newsday’s paired testing of Long Island real estate agents, Merrick emerged as one of three communities, with Levittown and Rockville Centre, for which some agents sent listings almost exclusively to white customers but not to their matching minority home seekers.

“When I was in school” in the 1960s and ’70s, “it was lily white,” recalls Richard Kessel, the former consumer advocate-turned-head of LIPA, and a longtime Merrick resident. He said he could recall just one black student in his elementary school.

On the other side of the Meadowbrook Parkway – Merrick’s western border – are two heavily minority communities: Roosevelt, which is 54.7 percent black, 42 percent Hispanic and 1.4 percent white according to 2017 census figures, and Freeport, where Latinos made up 43 percent of the population, black people 29.6 percent and white people 24 percent.

Merrick does not blend much with those communities, according to some residents, but does so much more with its neighbor to the east, Bellmore, also a largely white community. Merrick and Bellmore are so intertwined, the bond has become institutionalized. Their school districts merge at the junior and senior high school levels, forming the Bellmore-Merrick Central High School District and combining students who attend three high schools.

Leaders such as Charles Rosenblum, president of Temple Beth Am on Merrick Avenue, said his synagogue welcomes people of any race, and they often come – to bar mitzvahs and other events. Some African Americans have even joined the synagogue as members, he said.

But when asked why Merrick remains so white, with two heavily minority communities next door, many residents have no clear answer.

Kessel, like others, speculated that perhaps housing prices in Merrick were too high for many minorities. The Multiple Listing Service of Long Island in November listed the median price of a home in Merrick as $580,000.

“Merrick was and still is pretty segregated,” he said. “I don’t think there is any question about that. Been that way for a long time.”

“The Meadowbrook Parkway was like a natural divide between Merrick and Freeport and Roosevelt to some extent, too.”

Residents do see some signs Merrick is becoming a little more diverse. The community is now about 2.6 percent black, 2.5 percent Asian and 6.4 percent Hispanic, according to 2017 Census data.

The 2019 senior class president at Wellington C. Mepham High School in Merrick, Gabriela Daza, is of Puerto Rican and Colombian descent.

Daza told a recent conference organized by the nonprofit ERASE Racism that Mepham has offered events and programs celebrating minority cultures, such as a Middle Eastern and South Asian Night. Mandarin was recently added as a foreign language course, and the school held an event highlighting the plight of refugees and warning of the dangers of Islamophobia.

Still, she said the school curriculum is “very Euro-centric” and that blacks, Hispanics, Middle Easterners and people from India often are lumped together by other students simply as “people of color.”

The main drag in Merrick, Merrick Avenue, includes some of the core institutions of the community. Near the corner of Sunrise Highway is the town’s main library, followed on Merrick Avenue by Cure of Ars Roman Catholic Church and two synagogues — Congregation Ohav Sholom and Temple Beth Am.

On the other side of the street is the Long Island Mar Thoma Church, a Christian church made up mainly of people of Indian descent who bought an Episcopal church in 1994. The groups draw its congregants mainly from outside Merrick, though a few live locally.

Cure of Ars Roman Catholic Church. Credit: Newsday/Yeong-Ung Yang

Long Island Mar Thoma Church. Credit: Newsday/Yeong-Ung Yang

Despite the preponderance of synagogues, Catholics still makes up a large percentage of Merrick’s population, according to community leaders, although official numbers of the religious breakdown were not available. There is another large parish in North Merrick, the Roman Catholic Church of the Sacred Heart, with several thousand congregants.

Merrick has a number of notable landmarks that give it local flavor.

Not far from the library is a community known as Merrick Gables. It is made up of Spanish-style stucco and red-tile-roof homes built in the 1920s and ’30s, when movie industry executives in California hoped to create a “Hollywood East” in New York, said Lawrence Garfinkel, president of the Historical Society of the Merricks.

The effort was led in part by William Fox, whose movie production company eventually became 20th Century Fox. The homes were to be offered to Hollywood stars, executives and technicians to make them feel like they were still back in California, Garfinkel said.

The project ended, however, during the Great Depression. Several hundred homes were built, and many still exist.

In recent years, Merrick Gables has served increasingly as a location for movie and TV scenes, including for the HBO miniseries “Mildred Pierce,” and an FX miniseries called “Fosse/Verdon.”

Farther north in Merrick is a neighborhood known as The Campgrounds. Starting in 1867, railroad man Charles Fox donated 60 acres to the Methodist movement to hold summer revivals that attracted thousands, Garfinkel said.

The campground was laid out in a circular fashion, with small bungalows built around a spot for a tabernacle, he said. Some later were turned into small homes. That earned the community another nickname: “Tiny Town.”

The revival thrived until about 1900. Several of the original homes still exist, along with a house reserved for the preacher. A main street near the area is called Camp Avenue.

For many residents today, the gem of Merrick is the Norman Levy Park and Preserve, created on the site of a former landfill near the Meadowbrook Parkway. It features the highest point on the South Shore, with views of the Manhattan skyline on a clear day. A 500-foot fishing pier juts into Merrick Bay, and rangers walk hungry goats around the park’s hiking and jogging trails to keep the grass, bushes and weeds from overgrowing.

In February 2016, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo invoked Martin Luther King Jr. as he announced a “groundbreaking” drive against discrimination in home sales and rentals.

The governor told an enthusiastic audience at the Convent Avenue Baptist Church in Harlem that the state would sponsor paired testing across New York – a technique that uses undercover investigators – to crack down on real estate agents and landlords who fail to treat white and minority customers equally.

“We’re going to investigate it,” Cuomo vowed. “We’re going to find it. We’re going to ferret it out. We’re going to punish it and we are going to prosecute it because it is illegal.”

Added Cuomo, who formerly served as secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development:

“There will be people who will be unhappy because it’s going to be disruptive to a lot of the big players in the housing industry who like it the way they now have it.”

Three years later, Cuomo’s unprecedented drive as governor – now described by his administration as a “pilot program” – entailed the expenditure of $65,000 and conducted 88 paired tests of upstate and Westchester-area landlords for discrimination in apartment rentals.

The results included a $6,000 fine against a landlord charged with refusing to rent to disabled individuals using emotional support animals; a $15,000 settlement by a landlord charged with refusing to rent to black applicants; and a pending court case against a landlord for allegedly refusing to rent to individuals who use service animals.

Cuomo, who as New York attorney general oversaw 200 tests of real estate industry practices, has not allocated funding for additional testing as governor.

The governor’s enforcement foray illustrates the cost of paired testing investigations, as well as the wide gap between their limited use and the documented prevalence of hidden discrimination.

In a summary of Cuomo’s actions to combat bias in housing, the governor’s office noted that he signed legislation this year banning discrimination based on source of income, such as housing subsidies or child support. In July, he directed the Department of Financial Services to investigate whether Facebook allows housing advertisers to discriminate.

A senior adviser to the governor also said the administration has investigated landlords to deter discrimination on the basis of immigration status and other factors.

“This administration takes housing discrimination very seriously and this Governor has enacted more protections against it than any other governor in history,” Rich Azzopardi, senior adviser to the governor, said in a written statement.

“Every complaint received is thoroughly investigated and we urge any New Yorker who believes they have been the victim of housing discrimination to contact us immediately.”

On paper, real estate agents are subject to investigation and discipline by multiple levels of government. But at each rung on the enforcement ladder, the agencies lack the capacity to use the primary tool for uncovering fair housing law violations by real estate agents.

Surveyed by Newsday, the executive directors of large nonprofit fair housing watchdogs that rely on government funding, including in Detroit, Cleveland, St. Louis, Miami, New Orleans, New York and Houston, unanimously said their budgets are too small to support sustained paired testing of discrimination among residential real estate agents.

Said Rodney H. McRae, executive director of the Nassau County Human Rights Commission, an agency that employs only a five-person staff and is located in one of America’s most segregated suburbs:

“We do not do any testing.”

Although expensive and time-consuming, paired testing is effective. When testing is part of fair housing investigations, cases are seven times more likely to result in a finding of discrimination, according to a 2012 U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development budget report.

Erin Kemple, executive director of the Connecticut Fair Housing Center, which tests for rental discrimination, said the group generally found bias in as many as six of 10 tests.

“Usually, we show pretty high degrees of steering,” Kemple said.

In rental steering, a landlord with multiple complexes will, for instance, direct African American renters to buildings in black neighborhoods and funnel white customers to complexes in chiefly white neighborhoods, she said.

On the most basic level, the testing process entails recruiting and training testers, dispatching testers to engage with selected landlords or real estate agents, documenting the interactions, assessing the results and, if warranted, filing charges.

Building a case can involve multiple tests, particularly when preparing to accuse a real estate agent of racial or ethnic steering.

In the New York metropolitan area, experts estimate the cost of testing a landlord for rental discrimination at $2,400 per test, while testing a real estate agency for discrimination in home sales can range from $3,000 to $6,000 per test.

The cost of extensive testing is far too high for nonprofit Long Island Housing Services, Nassau and Suffolk’s leading anti-discrimination organization.

Executive director Ian Wilder said more than a decade has passed since the group conducted large-scale testing of agents and landlords, adding that the 19-person agency would need to “double our funding to bring on that kind of staff” to do the work.

Nonprofits like Long Island Housing Services and New York City’s Fair Housing Justice Center investigate 70 percent of housing discrimination complaints in the United States. That’s followed by state agencies at 24 percent and HUD at 5 percent. The federal Department of Justice investigate the small remainder.

In the three decades from 1987 through 2017, HUD filed a total of just 28 cases related to racial steering in all of New York State. Asked through a Freedom of Information Act request for a list of home-sales steering cases brought on Long Island, a HUD representative said there had been none.

Typically, victims of housing discrimination never realize that they were victimized.

Turned away by a landlord who says an apartment has already been rented, a would-be tenant has little hope of knowing whether the story was true. House hunters usually have no way to judge whether a real estate agent is racially or ethnically steering them to neighborhoods deemed suitable for their backgrounds.

“It is rare that we actually get a complaint from someone who thinks they’ve been discriminated against in housing,” Kemple said.

Dawn Lott, executive director of Suffolk’s Human Rights Commission, said housing discrimination represents “a fraction” of the agency’s work. Charged with combating all forms of bias, ranging from discrimination based on age to sexual orientation, Lott’s agency has just a four-member staff.

In Cuomo’s housing discrimination crackdown, the state provided $15,000 to Housing Opportunities Made Equal in Buffalo for 20 paired rental tests; $20,310 to Syracuse-based CNY Fair Housing for 33 tests; and $30,000 to Westchester Residential Opportunities for 35 rental tests.

M. DeAnna Eason, executive director of Housing Opportunities Made Equal, called the one-shot nature of Cuomo’s funding “a real shocker” and said the lack of ongoing funding for testing is “really a disappointment.”

Around the time Cuomo announced the anti-discrimination campaign, his administration made two changes aimed at improving how the state polices real estate agents.

The governor empowered the Department of State to more easily impose discipline such as fines, license suspension and revocation when an agent has been found by a court or agency to have discriminated.

The second change made by the Cuomo administration increases communication between two agencies that handle bias complaints.

Before 2016, two state agencies with different missions worked independently to regulate the real estate industry.

The state Division of Human Rights, whose mission is to enforce the state human rights law, has jurisdiction over investigating discrimination cases. In its 2017-18 fiscal year, housing cases made up 10 percent of its caseload, while employment made up 84 percent. It is headed by Commissioner Angela Fernandez, who was appointed by Cuomo and approved by the legislature earlier this year.

The Department of State, which licenses real estate agents and brokers, holds the power to impose discipline, up to revoking an agent’s license. It is headed by Secretary of State Rossana Rosado, who was appointed by Cuomo and confirmed in 2016.

Starting in 2016, the Division of Human Rights began notifying the Department of State when it receives or resolves a discrimination complaint, so the Department of State can “flag the issue” on the agent’s record, and discipline the agent if warranted, the spokesman said.

Despite the increased communication, the process remains complex.

• Step one: File complaint.
• Step two: Investigation by DHR staff, and possible resolution through a form of mediation.
• Step three: If warranted, DHR finding of probable cause to believe discrimination had taken place.
• Step four: Hearing before administrative law judge or in court.
• Step five: If appropriate, finding of wrongdoing and possible penalties.
• Step six: Referral to Department of State for possible fines, suspension or revocation of real estate agent’s license.
• Step seven: Department of State deliberations over the evidence and degree of possible punishment.

Civil rights attorney Mariann Wang, of the New York City firm of Cuti Hecker Wang, was skeptical that any change would shorten the time between a probable cause finding and agent discipline.

“Given how long Division of Human Rights complaints go, and how long they sit, I have a hard time believing that it’s going to efficiently be conveyed to another agency,” Wang said. “But I hope I’m wrong about that.”

State records show few examples of the state imposing heavy sanctions on real estate agents or brokers who discriminate.

New York has more than 133,000 licensed real estate brokers and agents, including nearly 27,000 on Long Island.

From 2015 through August 2018, the state Department of State reached a final resolution in 504 complaints against real estate agents and brokers, state records show. The overwhelming majority were not about discrimination but about allegations such as failing to complete required continuing education, operating without a proper license or collecting an unearned commission.

The Department of State said it has handled five discrimination cases referred by the Division of Human Rights under the 2016 process.

In one case, the Division of Human Rights reached a 2016 agreement with broker Arthur Zagelbaum of Ben Art Realty Corp., a New Hyde Park-based real estate management company, requiring fair housing training and a written anti-discrimination policy.

The same year, Ben Art settled with the nonprofit Long Island Housing Services. The group said that testing had shown that the landlord was illegally refusing to rent to people who receive subsidies for people with disabilities.

In a 2017 consent order with the Department of State, the broker, whose company has more than 300 rental apartments on Long Island and in Queens, agreed to pay $1,000 and abide by the terms of the Division of Human Rights settlement.

Ben Art did not respond to requests for comment.

In May, the Department of State imposed a $1,000 fine – the statutory maximum – on an upstate landlord who refused to waive a pet deposit for a service animal. The landlord had reached a 2017 settlement with the Division of Human Rights, agreeing to change its policies and pay $1,300 to the housing advocacy group that brought a complaint.

The Department of State closed two of the five fair housing cases, one because the broker involved died and the other due to lack of evidence. A fifth bias case is pending.

In addition, the Department of State has referred eight discrimination complaints against real estate agents or brokers to the state Division of Human Rights. Two cases were closed when the people who brought the complaints failed to respond or declined to proceed, officials said.

The other six complaints are pending, officials said.

The Department of State spokesman said Secretary of State Rosado declined to be interviewed for this story since “fair housing enforcement is squarely within the purview of the Division of Human Rights, not the Department of State.”

The state Division of Human Rights received 544 housing discrimination complaints in 2017. Of those, 425 – that is, nearly four out of five – were dismissed or discontinued. Of the remaining cases, 97 – less than one in five – were resolved in settlements or after a form of mediation. Two cases resulted in an order favoring the complainant after a public hearing. Twenty cases – 4% – are still pending at the agency or in state court.

The outcome statistics were similar on Long Island. In 2017, the agency received 82 housing discrimination complaints on the Island, of which 64 were dismissed or discontinued, 15 were settled or resolved through a form of mediation, and three are pending in state court.

Over the past two years, the division has brokered settlements that include three separate cases in which Long Island landlords paid amounts ranging from $5,000 to $19,200, as well as a $6,000 settlement with a local condominium and its board, state officials said.

Diane L. Houk, who is of counsel with the law firm Emery Celli Brinckerhoff & Abady LLP, called the Division of Human Rights “woefully underfunded” with “high dockets and low staff.”

Houk said the division’s investigatory work “was very uneven. It really depended on the investigator you were assigned.”

By contrast, she said, a few decades ago the state had its own testing program. For instance, in 1986, after the state received complaints about a Long Island broker, the agency sent one black couple and one white couple to inquire about homes on the same day. The black couple was denied access to homes for sale in Franklin Square and other largely white areas, while the white couple was shown the homes; the Department of State suspended the broker’s license for two months, court records show.

“There’s no reason the burden of regulating an industry should fall on a private individual who’s been discriminated against,” Houk said. Fair housing enforcement, she said, is “a question of the state taking the power it has and implementing it.”

– With Mark Harrington

Real estate agents associated with Long Island’s biggest brokerages had more than 200 opportunities to suggest houses to paired testers in eight overwhelmingly black and Hispanic communities during Newsday’s fair housing investigation.

The agents largely avoided the minority communities, recommending homes there only 15 times. But when they did offer listings in minority communities, they sent those listings more often to minority buyers than to whites.

Freeport, Elmont, Hempstead, Brentwood, Central Islip, Uniondale, Roosevelt and Wyandanch fell 211 times within the home search areas presented by testers to agents – for example, 30 minutes from Hempstead at a top price of $450,000 or 20 minutes from Brentwood at a $475,000 maximum.

The eight predominantly minority communities ranged from 73 percent minority Freeport to 97 percent minority Roosevelt. Although houses were on the market with prices that ranged from $400,000 to $500,000, the agents directed all but a small share of testers to communities with larger proportions of white residents.

“I think what you’ve described is steering based on racial composition of a neighborhood. The fact that everybody is steered away doesn’t make it acceptable,” said Greg Squires, a professor of public policy at George Washington University in Washington who has served as a consultant to fair housing groups and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

“You could argue that this does not show discrimination against the home seekers because everybody was steered away from these neighborhoods,” Squires added. “If in fact that’s the case, what it suggests is discrimination against certain neighborhoods because of the racial composition of those neighborhoods.”

Newsday tested agents who worked with the 12 companies that dominate the market: Douglas Elliman Real Estate, Century 21 Real Estate LLC, Charles Rutenberg Realty Inc., Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage on Long Island, Coach Realtors, Daniel Gale Sotheby’s International Realty, Laffey Fine Homes, Keller Williams Realty, The Corcoran Group, Signature Premier Properties, Realty Connect USA and RE/MAX LLC.

Altogether, they have 218 branch offices in Nassau and Suffolk counties but no offices in the eight communities where most of the Island’s racial minorities live. The average white population in the towns where the top real estate brands have their offices ranges from 75 percent (Century 21) to 86 percent white (Keller Williams).

Asked by letter why they have no presences in the Island’s predominantly minority communities, representatives of only three of the 12 companies responded: Daniel Gale Sotheby’s, Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage on Long Island and RE/MAX LLC.

Katherine Heaviside, a spokeswoman for Daniel Gale Sotheby’s, said the firm had “grown over the years to over 28 locations. While we are not in every community, we look forward to expanding into many more locations in the years to come.”

Spokeswomen for Coldwell Banker and RE/MAX noted that with the technology available today, customers can connect with agents’ services without having to go to a physical office.

The RE/MAX representative, Kerry McGovern, said the company operated a franchise in Freeport from 2000 to 2010 and in Hempstead from 2005 to 2017.

McGovern also said: “We do not share actual figures of this nature but can confirm RE/MAX agents have had many listings and have closed transactions in each and every one of these neighborhoods in the past year.”

Coldwell Banker spokeswoman Roni Boyles said the firm’s “market share has steadily increased year over year from 2016 through 2018 collectively, in the communities you named: Elmont, Freeport, Hempstead, Roosevelt and Uniondale.”

The 12 biggest firms on average have had a smaller market share in the eight minority communities than they do across the Island. They’ve controlled more than half the listings Islandwide. But in the minority communities, the biggest firms’ market share has ranged from about a fifth in Wyandanch to a third in Freeport and Elmont.

Agents associated with smaller, locally based brokerages service most of the listings in the eight minority communities. Roy Clark, an agent with LI Community Realty Inc. in Brentwood, said large brokerages overlook areas like Brentwood, Central Islip and Wyandanch.

“They don’t really make advances here,” said Clark, who has worked in the area for nearly 15 years.

When agents from the larger firms have contacted him about showing a house hunter one of his listings, Clark added, “I have not experienced any white buyers at all being brought by any large company.”

Clark said when he used to work at one of Long Island’s largest brokerages, “they didn’t really venture too much into areas that were areas of color. I don’t know if it was a fear factor or what. I don’t know why they didn’t.”

Lenora W. Long, a broker based in Hempstead for 18 years, said she has noticed trends like those experienced by Clark: white agents working for the Island’s biggest firms contacting her about her listings in Hempstead on behalf of a black or Hispanic client.

“I’ve never had the experience of an agent from the North Shore or South Shore bringing a Caucasian looking for a home in Hempstead,” Long said. “It’s usually black or Hispanics shuttled into Hempstead.”

Jim Blais, who is white and a resident of Hempstead Village’s Ingraham Estates development, said he has witnessed the phenomenon described by Long.

“There are roughly five houses in the last two or three years that have gone for sale or have been sold and what I’ve noticed is that you see only black or Hispanics coming to look at the houses,” Blais said. “I have yet to see a white family coming by.”

Newsday’s home search criteria included geographic areas and maximum home prices. The maximums started at $400,000 and ranged into the millions.

To determine how often agents could have selected houses in the predominantly minority towns, Newsday confirmed that the towns were in requested areas and determined through Zillow, the online house search service, that the market included houses at designated prices on the dates when testers met with agents.

The analysis excluded tests that sought homes costing more than $500,000, because home prices in the eight minority communities typically fell between $400,000 and $500,000.

All told, 37 of Newsday’s 86 test zones covered at least one of the eight minority towns. Many of the tests covered several closely located communities – for example, Freeport bordering Roosevelt and Uniondale just a short drive from Hempstead – giving agents the opportunity to recommend houses in multiple towns in a single test.

The average number of listings they recommended in other Long Island communities was more than double the average in the eight predominantly minority towns.

In the few instances when agents suggested homes in the predominantly minority neighborhoods, they gave minority buyers nearly four times as many listings as they gave white buyers (115 to minority buyers and 32 to white buyers).

Agents recommendedRoosevelt, Uniondale, Hempstead and Brentwood only 10 times.

But suggested Bethpage, Commack, East Northport and Hauppauge
80 times

The imbalance in how often agents from the 12 largest firms recommended homes in predominantly minority areas compared with their focus on predominantly white areas becomes evident in their approach to individual communities.

Agents suggested Bethpage, Commack, East Northport and Hauppauge to buyers a total of 80 times, averaging 135 listings each time. The communities range from 83 percent to 90 percent white.

In contrast, agents recommended Roosevelt, Uniondale, Hempstead and Brentwood a total of 10 times, averaging 26 listings each time. The communities range from 1 percent to 21 percent white.

Antoine Thompson, executive director of the National Association of Real Estate Brokers, a group of black agents, and an agent in Buffalo, said, “Racial biases and the profit motive together exacerbate steering in the real estate industry.”

In one case, black tester Ryan Sett and white tester Steven Makropoulos asked Coach Realtors agent Adelheid O’Brien for help finding $400,000 houses within 30 minutes of Bay Shore, where she was based. She avoided neighboring Brentwood for both men.

“You don’t want to have Brentwood school districts,” O’Brien told Makropoulos.

The Brentwood student body was 96 percent minority, with a predominance of Hispanic children. She did not counsel black tester Sett to avoid Brentwood.

Additionally, Newsday’s two fair housing consultants saw evidence suggesting broader steering. In total, O’Brien provided the white tester double the number of listings she gave the black tester, 14 to 7. She placed the white tester’s listings in tracts that averaged 84 percent white, compared with 70 percent white for the black tester.

“Based on the agent’s comments to the testers about school districts and the location of listings the agent provided to the testers, it appears the agent was steering the white tester to areas with a larger white population [general and student] but not the African American tester,” wrote Newsday consultant Freiberg.

O’Brien did not respond to requests for comment. Coach Realtors owners Lawrence Finn, Georgianna Finn and Whitney LaCosta viewed recordings of the tests and declined to comment.

Channeling home buyers toward some towns and away from others can have economic consequences, as the practices reduce demand in some places to the detriment of homeowners and drive it up in others to the benefit of both homeowners and of agents who can reap larger commissions on sales.

“Their financial well-being is directly tied to the value of the homes in the area in which they specialize,” Jacob Faber, an assistant professor of public service at New York University’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, said of real estate agents. “So, this kind of creates this powerful financial incentive for real estate agents to participate in this reproduction of segregation.”

Faber co-authored a 2017 study with Max Besbris titled, “Investigating the Relationship Between Real Estate Agents, Segregation, and House Prices: Steering and Upselling in New York State.”

The study noted “when real estate agents are incentivized to concentrate in already non-Hispanic white, wealthy areas and upsell buyers within those areas, they likely play a role in the production of prices and segregation in those areas.”

Clark, the Brentwood agent, says also that limiting the supply of buyers in a community has “a negative impact on homeowners looking to sell a property in the overlooked communities.”

“The more people that come to view your property, the more chance of having a bidding war,” he said. “And the more of a chance of you getting your asking price.

“But, as a result of steering, you do have a problem. The one that would probably really be able to bid a really good price on your house is not going to be there because you’re being steered in a different direction. So, yeah, it does. It really affects the sellers. It has a great effect on the sellers.”

The annual growth rate for home values in the predominantly black and Hispanic towns was lower than for Nassau and Suffolk counties as a whole, as well as for nearby individual predominantly white communities, according to a Newsday analysis using the Federal Housing Finance Agency price index.

On average, homes in the black and Hispanic neighborhoods had an annual appreciation rate of 3.05 percent between 1990 and 2017. The Islandwide average was 3.35 percent per year: For Nassau it was 3.53 percent and for Suffolk 3.15 percent, excluding the Hamptons.

Over time, seemingly small deviations can produce substantial differences in the accumulation of wealth.

As one example, consider how two homebuyers would have fared if they had purchased homes for the median sales price of $165,000 in the Town of Hempstead in 1990 – one buying in overwhelmingly white Merrick, the other in neighboring, largely minority Freeport.

With houses in Freeport appreciating at an average rate of 2.87 percent from 1990 to 2017, the homeowner there would have wound up with a property valued at $354,222. Merrick enjoyed a higher average appreciation rate, 3.44 percent, over the same period, pushing the value of the house there to $411,220 – resulting in a greater wealth gain of $56,000 over a Freeport home during the period.

Remarks by one agent reflected how agents avoided pointing customers toward largely minority communities.

Twenty-three days apart in April 2017, Richard Helling and Kelvin Tune consulted agent Judi Ross in the Keller Williams office in Massapequa Park. Each sought a house within commuting distance of Manhattan with a $500,000 top price.

Ross offered to send each man house listings and advised both to research school district report cards for information about educational opportunities.

In her view, she told both customers, the law barred her from providing information about schools.

“Legally I’m not allowed to say that’s a good district or a bad district, you know, because I could get in a lot of trouble,” she told Helling, adding while speaking with Tune: “I can get fined if I start directing you to specific districts.”

On a house tour with Helling, however, Ross repeated that she felt constrained not to discuss school quality but then named largely minority towns that she avoided.

“So, do the school report card and then you can decide which, you know, like I said, legally I get in big trouble if I . . .,” she said, adding:

“There’s a few districts that I know, I’d like, not, like, I won’t look in those towns. You know like Freeport and Baldwin and Amityville, which is part of Massapequa schools but it’s just certain parts of Massapequa…. so, I wouldn’t go near them.”

The black and Hispanic student proportions of Baldwin, Freeport and Amityville range from 76 percent in Baldwin, to 89 percent in Freeport, to 91 percent in Amityville, a community located a little more than a mile from Ross’s office.

Ross’s treatment of the two testers prompted two fair housing consultants for Newsday to conclude that the agent’s comments, coupled with listings that sent the white and black testers to different areas, suggested evidence of different treatment and steering.

Ross declined to be interviewed. She now works for Douglas Elliman Real Estate. An attorney with Kasowitz Benson Torres, a law firm representing Douglas Elliman, said Newsday’s characterization of Ross’ comment about not looking in the communities of Freeport, Baldwin and Amityville “is wrong and taken out of context.”

The lawyer, Jessica T. Rosenberg, said Ross “never referenced the racial makeup of the district or alluded to race. Ms. Ross was merely speaking to her understanding of the school’s rating, which has nothing to do with race, and to the geographical fact that those districts are further ‘east’ and thus even further from Manhattan. She ‘wouldn’t go near them’ for purposes of the tester’s desire to be within 45 minutes from Manhattan.”

In fact, Freeport and Baldwin are to the west of the listings Ross provided to both testers, and thus a closer commute to Manhattan.

Freeport Schools Superintendent Kishore Kuncham, upon learning of Newsday’s test results that included agents disparaging the Freeport school district, said: “If such a thing has been happening, I would say it’s absolutely unfortunate.” He continued, “I have been told many times that real estate agents are supposed to present information, facts, to the buyer, by law or by ethics that they are not supposed to make any such comments or make preferences over one district or the other.”

Freeport school officials have for years invited real estate agents to a luncheon to inform them about what is happening in its schools, Kuncham said. “We invite the real estate agencies in Freeport, Baldwin, neighboring districts to truly talk about our schools,” Kuncham said in a recent interview. He said district officials talk about “all the amazing things that are happening in Freeport.”

Kuncham touted more than 30 college credit-bearing courses in collaboration with Farmingdale State College, “and our students can walk away with one to one-and-a-half years” of college credits that can lessen their college tuition bill once they enroll. He said Freeport High School students have at least 27 Advanced Placement courses and other “world class opportunities.”

Freeport Village Mayor Robert Kennedy said he didn’t necessarily agree with Newsday’s findings that agents avoided selecting listings in Freeport to prospective homebuyers, “because many of the real estate agents I know do recommend Freeport, and Freeport houses do move quicker than probably any other neighborhood. I’m married to a real estate agent in the village of Freeport and her business is doing very well in Freeport.”

Hazel Gibbons has glowing praise for the Freeport neighborhood she has called home for nearly 25 years.

“I chose to live in Stearns Park because it’s beautiful,” Gibbons said. “It has canopies of trees. The homes are stately. People take care of their property.”

She also liked that it was an “integrated community, but with no [white] flight.” Gibbons is black.

The fact that Stearns Park, so many years later, remains integrated was satisfying to Gibbons, who is retired after a 30-year career in hospital administration.

“Perhaps it’s more people recognizing that it doesn’t matter, the color of your skin,” she said. “It’s who you are. And in that community, there are many people who are doctors, lawyers, teachers, principals. They’re in all walks of life, talking to each other.”

Reaction from some Hempstead village officials ranged from disappointment, to complaints about media portrayals they say emphasize only the negative side of their community, to, perhaps, a certain degree of weariness.

Hempstead Village Mayor Don Ryan, for example, said in a recent interview that crime in the village is declining.

“So, I think that negative perception does seem to persist even when it’s largely unfounded,” Ryan said.

Village statistics provided to Newsday show decreases in most violent crimes: homicides (down 33 percent from 2017 to 2018, going from six to four); rape (20 percent decline, going from five to four); and assault (a preliminary figure is given showing a 7 percent drop, from 176 in 2017 to 164 in 2018). There was, however, an 11 percent increase in robberies during the period (rising from 96 in 2017 to 107 in 2018).

While homicides dropped between 2017 and 2018, according to statistics the village provided this year, the number of homicides was up to six in early August, with county officials and other law enforcement outside the village pointing to warring factions among several gangs. That led to an agreement for increased patrols in the village utilizing New York State Police and Nassau County police.

First District Court, where criminal arraignments are held, is in Hempstead and could be a factor in the perception that Hempstead is plagued by crime, said Village Attorney Cherice Vanderhall.

“Someone’s being arraigned, you see a name, you see Hempstead, New York, without regards to the fact the person may live in Bellmore, the crime may have happened in Massapequa, or Seaford, or what you have you,” Vanderhall said. “You still see Hempstead, New York.”

Told a majority of agents did not recommend housing options in predominantly minority communities in Newsday’s paired testing investigation, Hempstead Deputy Mayor Charles Renfro responded with a hollow chuckle. “I’m laughing to keep from crying because I think it’s very unjust, some of the things that happened in the minority neighborhoods,” he said, growing serious.

“We get everything here,” Renfro said, ticking off homeless shelters and drug treatment facilities, for example. “And I think it’s unfair to judge us, particularly if you don’t know us or talk to us about the situation you think might be a problem here.

“Now grant you, our school district is not where it should be, and I don’t think you would find anyone saying that it is. But I do believe we are making progress.”

In the end, Renfro and Gibbons had a similar message. It boiled down to, as Renfro said, “Come and talk to us. Come and visit.”

“Talk to me,” Gibbons said. “You might find out that we have more in common than you might want to think.”

The hallways and classrooms in the Stewart Manor School in Nassau County are colorfully and imaginatively decorated for the season – recent holidays, science projects and historical figures all share space.

As they do at countless other elementary schools on Long Island, students seamlessly mix as they learn their ABCs, eat lunch and participate in myriad after-school activities.

Academically, Stewart Manor school consistently scores at or above state standards in English language arts and math.

But there is one thing that sets this school apart: It is the most racially diverse on Long Island.

According to the state Department of Education, the racial breakdown of students was 26 percent white, 22 percent black, 27 percent Hispanic and 20 percent Asian for 2017-18.

The students’ evenly distributed population stood out after a team of Newsday reporters analyzed data gathered during a three-year investigation of Long Island’s residential real estate brokering industry.

In tests, some real estate agents expressed perceptions about school districts that were in line with pointing potential buyers toward communities with substantial white populations and away from more integrated areas. Newsday visited Stewart Manor School and interviewed students in the spring of 2019.

Nirvana Moonsammy, then a sixth-grader, saw a different world each school day than most Long Island children. While the diversity around her was “pretty cool,” she said, it was just a part of life.

“I don’t think it’s a big deal because we’re all used to each other’s cultures,” Nirvana said. “I have some Hispanic friends, Asian friends, white friends, friends of all religions. I like some activities from Mexico and some food like churros.”

The academic success of the Stewart Manor School speaks for itself.

“Children are children, learning is learning,” said Albert Harper, superintendent of the Elmont Union Free Elementary School District. “If you’re working hard, and have a good curriculum, great administrators, great teachers, children will learn.”

Harper pointed out that the district has students who hail from more than 50 countries and speak about 60 languages. The district is the largest elementary school district in Nassau County, serving close to 4,000 children from pre-kindergarten through sixth grade in six schools.

Overall, district enrollment in 2017-18 was 6 percent white, 43 percent black, 30 percent Hispanic and 18 percent Asian, according to the state.

The average student makeup for Long Island schools was roughly 51 percent white, 10 percent black, 28 percent Hispanic and 9 percent Asian.

The Stewart Manor School, the northernmost in the district, educates about 350 students from Stewart Manor, New Hyde Park, Elmont and South Floral Park.

Principal Hope Kranidis said she is proud of her school and its racial diversity – something she pointed out has always existed – and touted the school’s embrace of diversity in other ways, including in its programs and teaching strategies. But Kranidis and her staff were most proud of the education they impart along with the ancillary programs that go beyond the books.

“We have high expectations, and we set those expectations for every child,” said Kranidis, who has been principal at Stewart Manor for 20 years. “Every child is entitled to an equal and free education, and we do our very best to provide children with that kind of education by setting high standards. And our children are reaching and meeting those standards.”

Stewart Manor School is an intimate building with generally two sections of each grade. This past year, however, there was a bump with a third section of kindergarten added.

It was Taco Tuesday during the visit to the kindergarten class of Jenna O’ Leary and Tracey Theobald.

But before lunch, students received reading instruction. They all wore paper hats that read, “We are a box of crayons, each of us unique, but when we get together, the picture is complete.”

They participated in a lively and interactive discussion, in English with a heavy dose of Spanish words mixed in, of “I Love Saturdays y Domingo,” a book about a little girl whose heritage is both European American and Mexican American.

One of the central discussions in the book is what the protagonist has for breakfast. When polled about which they would choose if offered the same options – pancakes or huevos rancheros – the students enthusiastically responded.

It was close, but pancakes won.

Later in the morning, another instructional initiative encouraged critical thinking, creativity, innovation, inquiry, collaboration and communication.

Erin Guzman, who was in fourth grade, was paired with Arianna Moise, who was in kindergarten, as they investigated: What do animals need to survive?

“I really like helping her on the project,” Erin said. “It’s like teaching your younger siblings.”

Arianna smiled shyly and nodded her head yes when asked if it was nice to work with Erin.

In 2006, Stewart Manor was designated a federal Blue Ribbon School. The program was launched in 1982 and each year recognizes schools with outstanding instruction, teacher training and student achievement.

“It actually motivated us all,” Kranidis said. “Teachers challenged themselves to research, implement and share best practices.” Kranidis also praised the many nonacademic programs that help enrich young lives.

An annual event called Proud to Be Me that allows students to share something about their culture – or, this time, their talents and skills – was among the first orders of business that day.

The school was buzzing as students traveled the building, visiting each classroom and showcasing their talents in singing, sports, dancing, origami and even one student’s handiwork in solving a Rubik’s Cube in a minute and 20 seconds.

“It’s fun and it allows the children to share something about themselves their classmates may not know,” Kranidis said. “It can also inspire those who didn’t participate to try next year.”

Vanessa Buchanan, a third-grade teacher, said Kranidis sets a happy, warm and trusting atmosphere in the building that makes meeting high expectations achievable.

Buchanan said the diversity allows the celebration of people coming from different ethnicities, religions, cultures and even learning styles – while also pointing out its other aspect.

“With diversity you also want to highlight the fact that we’re all the same, we’re all human,” she said.

Fifth-grade teacher Therese Irving said being able to use diversity as an educational tool was key in her selecting to teach in the district.

“One of the things that spoke to me was … how much the students would get beyond the textbook when they are able to work together from different walks of life, and bringing in their own personal experiences,” Irving said. “That’s not something you can necessarily teach from a textbook. It’s just authentic.”

School board member Michael Cantara, whose two sons attend Stewart Manor school, points out that many communities and school districts on Long Island can be grouped by race or religion. Some children end up being the only student in a class or school from a certain ethnic group, which can make the child feel “misunderstood or alienated,” he said.

“I like this school that we have kids from everywhere,” he said. “It’s not just one child.”

While it’s just part of the environment in a Stewart Manor classroom to have such diverse students learning together, the mix likely will be a little different when they move on to their next schools.

The school’s students will move up to the Sewanhaka Central High School district, which comprises five high schools that cover grades 7-12: Sewanhaka High School, Elmont Memorial High School, New Hyde Park Memorial High School, Floral Park Memorial High School and H. Frank Carey Junior-Senior High School. Kranidis said the students from Stewart Manor are mostly zoned to go to Sewanhaka and Floral Park Memorial high schools.

Sewanhaka is 13 percent white, 31 percent black, 32 percent Hispanic and 23 percent Asian. Floral Park Memorial High is 53 percent white, 13 percent black, 15 percent Hispanic and 19 percent Asian, according to 2017-18 state figures.

Attending such a racially diverse elementary school prepares students for the world, administrators, teachers, parents and even students said.

“We’re all the same,” said Ava Kolenda, who was in third grade. “It’s not like if you come from the UK you’re smarter than if you came from India. People are not only from America.”

Stewart Manor graduate Nicole Kolenda, Ava’s mother, who also has a son in the school, said because her children are biracial she and her husband found it important to have them in a place where the students reflected them, so they could focus on education and friendships.

“I wanted my children to go somewhere where they would feel comfortable,” she said. “They are not standing out from looking different.”

While proud of Stewart Manor school’s mix, she said it’s a bit disappointing that diversity is still a story in 2019.

“I think it’s important to talk about it and I don’t think we do enough of that,” she said. “Not act like it’s nothing … this is still an issue.”

Serving as gatekeepers to homes, schools and communities, some real estate agents made the key to the front door easier to reach for whites than for minorities.

Typically, these agents provided ready service to white customers they encountered in Newsday’s investigation, offering homes to consider and conducting house tours while taking on faith that the white house hunters had the financial capability to purchase.

In contrast, they denied similarly full service to minority customers, refusing to provide listings or tours unless the customers showed proof of financial capability.

In seven of Newsday’s 86 paired tests – 8 percent – the agents’ conduct produced evidence of unequal treatment amounting to the denial of equal service to minorities.

Black buyers experienced the evident denials most frequently – in five of the tests. One tester was Hispanic. One was Asian.

The five tests that produced evidence of the denial of equal service to black testers occurred among 39 black-white tests – a rate of almost 13 percent.

No agent in any test placed greater obstacles in front of a white buyer than a matched minority customer.

Posing as first-time home buyers, white and minority testers separately asked agents to start their searches by suggesting house listings and by providing tours of properties for sale. No agent flatly refused service to anyone.

Instead, seven agents imposed conditions on minority buyers that were seemingly reasonable until matched against service they provided to white buyers.

One condition involved securing preapproval or prequalification for a mortgage loan. Preapproval certifies that a lender has found a buyer creditworthy up to a certain amount based on a credit check and documentation submitted by the buyer. Prequalification indicates that a lender has preliminarily offered a similar judgment without yet conducting a full financial review.

Another condition entailed granting an agent the exclusive right to represent a buyer. Exclusive broker’s agreements stipulate that an agent will be a buyer’s sole representative and typically guarantee that the agent will be paid a commission, either from the proceeds of a sale or directly by a buyer.

The law permits agents to employ both stipulations equally with all customers. But it bars agents from imposing them only on members of one group and not another.

One example: Although a black customer told Laffey Real Estate agent Nancy Anderson, “My uncle is actually a loan officer so we crunched the numbers with him,” Anderson refused to provide house tours, emailing, “I need to have the preapproval before we see the listings.”

Black tester

Refused house tours without preapproval

White tester

Escorted on house tour without preapproval

In contrast, she escorted a paired white buyer on house tours after he assured her, “I got a buddy of mine that works at Roslyn Savings & Loan.”

Anderson did not respond to a letter informing her of Newsday’s findings or to invitations by letter and email to view video recordings of her meetings with testers. When reached by telephone, she said, “I have no comment to you at this point.”

Mark Laffey, named on Laffey Real Estate’s website as principal owner, and Philip Laffey, described as overseeing Laffey Real Estate, did not respond to letters, emails and telephone calls requesting interviews or comment.

Experts say real estate agents may more efficiently manage their time if they require buyers to produce a mortgage preapproval or a prequalification letter before providing house listings or taking the customers out on a tour.

“If you are really worried about your time, you’d require everybody to be prequalified,” said Dorothy Brown, a law professor at Emory University School of Law who focuses on issues of race and legal policies.

“White people get turned down for mortgages too, so why wouldn’t you?”

Based on facts presented to them in Anderson’s case, Newsday’s two fair-housing consultants, Fred Frieberg, executive director of the Fair Housing Justice Center, and Robert Schwemm, professor at the University of Kentucky College of Law, saw evidence of unequal treatment.

Freiberg wrote: “The agent’s refusal to provide service to the African American tester is an example of disparate treatment based on race. The agent told the African American tester that a preapproval letter was a condition of being shown homes but did not impose this same condition on the white tester.”

Schwemm concluded: “Evidence of blatant discrimination (inferior treatment of the black tester) regarding not showing houses before receiving a preapproval letter.”

Newsday’s tests compared how agents interacted with people of different races or ethnicities in individual situations and therefore may not necessarily shed light on how any individual agent treats white and minority customers in general.

As one illustration, Realty Connect USA agent Reza Amiryavari provided service to black and white customers without preconditions in a test that Newsday disqualified because recording equipment failed. In a subsequent test, Amiryavari required a Hispanic buyer to meet conditions that indicated a denial of equal service when compared with the white buyer.

Reflecting on what she had learned from serving as a tester, Brittany Silver, who is white and an actress, said:

“A Caucasian person with money coming in to spend it really could never do anything wrong.” She added: “I don’t think that person will ever be questioned. I think that I am privileged because I’m white.”

Following is evidence of disparate treatment at work in four case histories, as affirmed independently by consultants Frieberg and Schwemm, who rendered similar judgments on all seven tests that produced evidence of the denial of equal service to minorities.

The opinions of Freiberg and Schwemm are based on data provided by Newsday. Their judgments are not legal conclusions.

The case histories each include the experts’ findings, and responses of agents and the companies they represent.

TEST 93

Agent places no obstacles to white buyer’s home search but spurns black buyer

One customer was white, the other was black.

The white tester was just past 50 years old. He was born and raised in Seattle, studied biology and worked in Hawaii, held a human resources post at the University of Alabama and then helped deliver consumer services for a Long Island nonprofit organization.

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His name is Richard Helling. He used the alias David Owens in this test.

The black tester was also just past 50. He was born in upstate New York, came of age working summers in Virginia tobacco fields and built a career as a federal employee. His name is Kelvin Tune. His undercover alias was Andre Henry.

Over the course of two months from 2016 to 2017, Helling and Tune engaged separately with real estate agent Aminta Abarca in the Garden City office of Keller Williams Realty of Greater Nassau.

Each customer told Abarca he was married with a child. Each said he was a first-time home buyer who was moving out from the city and was in the market for a $550,000 home within a 45-minute commute of Manhattan. Each asked Abarca to recommend house listings and to arrange tours of selected homes.

Test 93 The house search Within 45 minutes of Manhattan and up to $550,000

Black Tester:

Kelvin Tune

Listings Given:

13

Census Tracts:

43% white on average

White Tester:

Richard Helling

Listings Given

19

Census Tracts:

61% white on average

Abarca told both testers they could research schools through a website that provides information on community “demographics.”

Abarca escorted Helling to inspect six properties in a seven-week period without setting any conditions on her service.

In contrast, she refused to show houses to Tune unless he signed an exclusive agreement empowering her to serve as his buyer’s agent.

Home sales agents typically represent sellers and seek the highest prices for them. A buyer’s agent searches for houses and negotiates instead for buyers rather than sellers. Abarca explained that her buyer’s contract would both obligate her to work for Tune and entitle her to a commission for her services.

Abarca’s differing treatment of the two men came to the fore most vividly on Jan. 19, 2017. That day, Tune visited Abarca’s office after choosing three houses to tour from listings she had sent.

She rebuffed him, saying: “So the way I work is when I take someone out I sign them up to be a client. So that is the only way that I’m going to be working with people is if they’re my clients, then I will take them out.”

Abarca added: “It’s not company policy. It’s my policy. In other words, this is my business, OK? This is how I make my money. Nobody gives me money.”

“So my word is not good enough?” Tune asked.

“This is how I do it,” Abarca responded.

It was how she did business with Tune – not with Helling.

A few hours after snubbing Tune, she left a voice mail inviting Helling to continue touring houses:

“Hi David, how are you? This is Aminta. Just calling to see if you started to do some house hunting now that the holidays are over.”

Still later that day, Abarca told Tune in a text message that he should inform his wife that “agent only take Clients (sic) that have a buyer contract with her. To show them homes.”

Tune responded: “Thanks. I will explain to her that this is your firm policy.”

“Yes. Thank you,” Abarca wrote back.

Additionally, Abarca provided listings that located Helling in neighborhoods that were 61 percent white, compared to 43 percent white for Tune. Among the differences: Abarca recommended heavily minority Baldwin and Elmont only to Tune.

Experts’ Opinions

Freiberg: The agent treated the testers differently by requiring the African American tester to sign an exclusive agreement before she would provide a home tour while she took the white tester out for a tour without requiring such an agreement.

Neither tester asked the agent for information about demographics and yet the agent urged the testers to investigate the demographic make-up of any community or school district they were considering. She also provided more listings to the African American tester in areas where there were larger African American student populations, an indication of possible steering.

---

Schwemm: Evidence of blatant discrimination (inferior treatment of the black tester) regarding not showing houses before an agency agreement was signed. Plus, blatant evidence of differential treatment and steering. There are lots of examples of the white tester getting listings in white areas that black tester did not get, and black tester getting listings in more minority areas that white tester did not get.

Agent and Company Responses

Abarca did not respond to a letter informing her of Newsday’s findings or to invitations by letter and email to view video recordings of her meetings with testers. She did not return a phone message seeking comment.

Keller Williams associate broker Gary Bauman viewed the video recordings and declined to comment.

Asked for comment about the actions of four Keller Williams agents, including Abarca, chief executive officer Gary Keller responded through the firm’s national spokesman, Daryl Frost, who said in an emailed statement:

“Keller Williams does not tolerate discrimination of any kind. All complaints of less than exemplary conduct are addressed and resolved in partnership with our leaders to ensure compliance with our policies, as well as with local, state and federal laws. In addition, we require all Keller Williams agents to take the National Association of Realtors Code of Ethics training, developed in accordance with the Fair Housing Act, before they earn their Realtor’s license and thereafter, every two years to maintain it. Every Keller Williams franchise also receives extensive industry training and resources that reinforce best practices in fair housing.”

Watch videos of the test

TEST 30

Agent offers white buyer tours, won’t give black buyer listings without mortgage prequalification

Cindy Parry and Johnnie Mae Alston are peas-in-a-pod baby boomers who retired after successful careers. As young women, they each wanted good jobs and had dreams of traveling.

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Parry went to law school and fulfilled her wanderlust by living in Paris before returning to New York for a post with the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Alston signed up with the state Office of People with Developmental Disabilities and climbed through 10 positions over 35 years while also visiting Europe and setting out to tour America’s 50 states. She has made it to 45.

Parry is white and Alston is black, but both are comfortable in two racial worlds.

With her early roots in the strict segregation of Goldsboro, North Carolina, Alston attended all-black schools until her family moved to Long Island’s Selden community when she was a young girl. There, she became the lone African American among all-white classmates.

Parry crossed the racial divide in the opposite direction. Until eighth grade, she attended classes that were all-black, except for her, in Wyandanch. Then, Parry’s family moved five miles to Lindenhurst, where the schools were all-white.

“That was truly culture shock,” she laughs.

Parry and Alston met as paired testers in Newsday’s investigation. By comparing their experiences, they learned that, concealed in the ordinary course of business, the service afforded to two accomplished women of similar bearing – except for race – can be starkly different.

One month apart in the summer of 2016, Parry and Alston met separately with real estate agent Anne Marie Queally Bechand in Signature Premier Properties’ Cold Spring Harbor office. They were searching for $500,000 homes within 30 minutes of Northport, where the population was more than 90 percent white.

Test 30 The house search Within 30 minutes of Northport and up to $500,000

Black Tester:

Johnnie Mae Alston

Listings Given:

0

White Tester:

Cindy Parry

Listings Given:

79

Parry encountered a gracious woman who took time to explain the house-hunting process, promised to provide listings and arranged dates to tour properties.

“She took me right away, didn’t make me wait even five minutes,” Parry recalls, adding: “She addressed every question I may have asked. She offered things for me to think about.”

In contrast, Alston remembers resistance, including Queally Bechand’s refusal to provide listings or a house tour unless she prequalified for a mortgage. Speaking of Queally Bechand, she says:

“Well this lady, when I walked into her office, she already had me pegged. She shut me down before I could get started.”

Transcripts of the meetings recorded on video show how Queally Bechand treated the two women.

Two minutes into Alston’s meeting, the following exchange took place:

QUEALLY BECHAND: I won’t take out anyone unless you have a prequalification letter so I need to know [crosstalk] prequalified for a mortgage.

ALSTON: Oh, so that means I can’t go out to see anything.

QUEALLY BECHAND: I won’t – I won’t do it. You can try another person, but I don’t have the time to do that, because I need to know that you’re serious, and that – I really need a prequalification letter. It also shows on that your price range.

ALSTON: Yeah. My price is at 500,000.

QUEALLY BECHAND: OK, but I need to have the bank say, yes, that’s your price range.

Later, after Alston stated that she has $100,000 to put down, they had this exchange:

QUEALLY BECHAND: Oh, isn’t that nice? Oh, that’s wonderful.

ALSTON: OK. So, I don’t come back until we get that.

QUEALLY BECHAND: Yeah.

Later, responding to Alston’s email query, Queally Bechand confirmed:

“I have to run my business like this unfortunately, otherwise I can will [sic] never know who is a serious buyer.”

In contrast, Queally Bechand opened Parry’s visit by gathering information about the types and locations of houses that might be of interest. The mortgage prequalification issue passed quickly in this exchange:

QUEALLY BECHAND: Have you talked to a banker yet?

PARRY: We’ve – we’ve done some preliminary talks, you know, about getting preapproval, but if you have someone that you recommend that we work together –

QUEALLY BECHAND: Yes.

PARRY: – I’d be very interested in talking to them.

QUEALLY BECHAND: That would be perfect.

Later Queally Bechand added: “I’ll give you a couple of references, and you will obtain a preapproval from the mortgage lender.”

She said Parry would be “a very, very good buyer,” committed to set up “a radius search” for available houses and asked: “What is your availability? When can you start looking at houses?”

Saying, “I’m available all summer so you’re going to get sick of me,” Queally Bechand promised, “I’ll make sure my car is sparkly clean” when they drove from one house to another.

She said Parry should expect to tour “at least five” homes.

The transcript of Queally Bechand’s conversation with Parry extended across 7,800 words – more than three times longer than her 2,400-word conversation with Alston.

She sent Parry 79 house listings, escorted her to see four houses and invited her to see more. She sent Alston no listings and offered no tour.

Summarizing her impressions at the time, Alston said of Queally Bechand:

“This woman had no intentions – she looked at me and she had already decided. ‘There ain’t no way I’m taking you out because you don’t even look like you got money.’ And the thing is, she didn’t even give me a chance to tell her what I had.”

After listening to Parry describe her experience with Queally Bechand and discovering that the agent had told Alston mortgage prequalification was necessary but had given Parry 79 listings without it, Alston responded:

“I was lied to, walked over, stomped. She did me in. She did me in. I’ll never forget this woman, as I said. I’ll never forget. Very fancy, very beautiful woman, but she did me in .”

Experts’ Opinions

Freiberg: The agent’s refusal to provide service to the African American tester is an example of disparate treatment based on race.

The agent told the African American tester she didn’t take customers on house tours without a mortgage prequalification letter and refused to provide any home listings, while the same agent agreed to provide home listings and arranged to show homes to the white tester.

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Schwemm: This feels like steering 30 years ago when steering was more overt but agents could offer a pretense of providing equal service: “Of course, I’m giving you service, both black and white. But if you’re the black buyer, you’d be more comfortable in the black or integrated areas; and, if you are white, you certainly would be more comfortable in the different white areas.”

Agent and Company Responses

Queally Bechand did not respond to a letter informing her of Newsday’s findings or to invitations by letter and email to view video recordings of her meetings with testers. Queally Bechand did not return a call seeking her comment.

Kathleen Viard, listed as a co-owner of Signature Premier Properties, viewed Queally Bechand’s videos at Newsday with two branch managers, brokers Richard Halloran and Claire Leface. They declined to comment.

Watch videos of the test

TEST 78

Agent gives white buyer listings and house tour, requires Hispanic buyer to sign contract

Pedro Jimenez is a computer and internet specialist who grew up among fellow Dominican immigrant families in Corona, Queens. He participated in eight undercover tests in Newsday’s investigation. In five of them, the tests suggested agents denied Jimenez equal service or provided house listings that showed evidence of steering.

Read more Read less

Jimenez, 45, met Realty Connect USA agent Reza Amiryavari at the company’s Levittown office in April 2017, 10 months after matched white tester Richard Helling had consulted Amiryavari. They each sought $600,000 houses within an hour of Manhattan.

Amiryavari turned the conversation toward finances when meeting with Helling.

“We’re very comfortable with $600,000,” Helling responded in a money-related discussion that encompassed 250 words.

Test 78 The house search Within an hour of Manhattan and up to $600,000

Hispanic Tester:

Pedro Jimenez

Listings Given:

14

Census Tracts:

67% white on average

White Tester:

Richard Helling

Listings Given

39

Census Tracts:

64% white on average

Amiryavari noted Helling’s need to secure mortgage preapproval but brushed by the requirement in looking forward to quickly touring houses.

When Helling said of mortgage preapproval, “So we should have that very soon,” Amiryavari responded, “Very good. So, you don’t need that – this right now, so – but you’re gonna – we’re gonna do this.”

Amiryavari offered Helling the possibility of signing a contract that would give Amiryavari the exclusive right to represent him as buyer’s agent. He indicated that he would help Helling whether he signed such an agreement or instead chose to work with Amiryavari as an agent who pitched him houses on behalf of sellers.

“You don’t have to do it,” he told Helling, referring to a buyer’s contract. After the meeting, Amiryavari provided Helling 39 house listings in communities stretching from Franklin Square on the west to Syosset on the east. He escorted Helling to tour homes in Carle Place and East Meadow.

While on the tour, he counseled Helling to look at 65 percent white Franklin Square over 85 percent minority Elmont even as he offered a definition of the prohibited practice of steering.

“And then there’s also Elmont. You don’t want to be – I don’t think you should be in Elmont. I think you should probably just be Franklin Square,” Amiryavari said, while they were in 69 percent white East Meadow.

He added: “I think you want to stay in Franklin Square, if you go there. Here, great. East Meadow, OK, no issues, as far as, you know, the feedback that I get from, you know, buyers, and I’ve looked stuff up. But, technically, as a real estate agent, we shouldn’t tell you, the buyers, which school district is better. Really, we’re not supposed to … School district-wise only. Because there’s something called steering, you know, like steering.”

“Like a car or something?” Helling asked.

“No, like a horse, you know, facing somebody toward whatever you want them. So, in our business, they say, if you do that, that’s not right. And it’s not right, some agents do it, but it’s not correct. Because the buyer should kind of – we gotta give you information, basically.”

Amiryavari is the agent who was tested more than once by Newsday after an equipment failure. In the disqualified test, he provided listings and a tour to a black customer without requiring mortgage preapproval or an exclusive agent’s agreement, the conditions he later imposed on Jimenez.

When Jimenez met with Amiryavari, he asked where Jimenez and his wife worked and about their family. He said he would ask “one question that is really important,” adding, “And it has to do with finance.”

The agent explored Jimenez’s family income and expenses, did a calculation intended to show Jimenez what he could afford and declined to accept Jimenez’s assertion that he could carry a $600,000 purchase with $120,000 down.

“Because the bank guy, you know, he’s gonna ask you for your docs,” the agent said. “Ask you for your bills and all of that, and they’re gonna kinda crunch the numbers. And they’re gonna come – come out with the right number.”

Amiryavari’s discussion of Jimenez’s financial capacity extended for 1,300 words, five times longer than his back-and-forth over Helling’s finances.

While Amiryavari had given Helling a choice of whether or not to designate Amiryavari as his exclusive buyer’s agent, Amiryavari informed Jimenez that signing such a document was a must for gaining his services.

He told Jimenez that the contract would enable Amiryavari to be “like your buddy” in searching out the best houses and prices and would put Jimenez on the hook for paying a 2 percent commission if the seller refused to pay the fee.

“Because we have to make sure the buyer is serious, and they really truly want to buy a home,” Amiryavari explained, adding that he prefers not to spend time showing a selected property to a less committed potential buyer.

When Jimenez indicated that he needed to know more about the quality of Amiryavari’s service before signing an exclusive contract, Amiryavari pressed a computer button that sent Jimenez 14 housing choices in Syosset.

“Let me just send it right now and then – this is only Syosset, OK?” Amiryavari said, to which Jimenez responded simply, “OK.”

In contrast, Amiryavari had offered Helling 39 house choices in communities that extended 15 miles from Franklin Square through New Hyde Park, Mineola, Carle Place and Hicksville to Syosset.

His snap action, focusing on Syosset only, provided Jimenez with listings in tracts that averaged 67 percent white, 4 percentage points higher than he offered to Helling.

As they wrapped up, Amiryavari promised to send Jimenez the name of a bank to start the process of getting mortgage preapproval. He told Jimenez they would sign the exclusive broker’s agreement at their next meeting.

The following day Amiryavari texted the name of a “mortgage contact” at Bank of America. Jimenez returned a text thanking Amiryavari for the information and asking:

“Reza, my wife asks what’s the best plan for going to see a home? Should we plan on Friday?”

Amiryavari responded: “What I suggest is to contact the mortgage officer first and get pre-Preapproved [sic]. Once Preapproved we can start looking at homes. Thank you.”

“So that has to come first?” Jimenez asked.

“Yes,” Amiryavari answered.

On learning how his experience with Amiryavari compared with Helling’s, Jimenez said:

“I’m surprised to find that I was definitely scrutinized more over my financial capability, and, yeah, that the listings that were provided to me were not only less, but also concentrated in a particular area as opposed to being more dispersed and more varied.”

Helling’s judgment: “He showed me more listings. He showed me listings in a much, much broader set of areas, set of neighborhoods than he showed Pedro. And then just the willingness to just take me at my word, and move forward, take me on tours, and he was throwing up all the barriers about what Pedro had to do before he would even begin to start working with him.”

Experts’ Opinions

Freiberg: While the agent took the white tester out to view homes without requiring any prequalification or an exclusive listing contract, the same agent declined to take the Hispanic tester out to view homes unless he was first prequalified by a lender and agreed to sign an exclusive listing agreement. In addition to this differential treatment, the agent made statements to the white tester that suggests steering, by the agent’s own admission.

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Schwemm: Strong evidence of steering here, plus discriminatory (inferior) treatment of the Hispanic tester.

Most of the Hispanic-only listings are in one area to the north and most of the white-only listings in two other areas to the west and in the center. But this is not a “classic” case of steering because the target area for the Hispanic listings is not more diverse.

The agent provided inferior treatment to the Hispanic tester with respect to the discussion of financial issues and refusal to show houses without having received mortgage preapproval.

Agent and Company Responses

Informed by letter about Newsday’s findings, Amiryavari made, but canceled, an appointment to view video recordings of meetings with testers. He did not respond to a follow-up email or phone message seeking comment.

Realty Connect broker owners Michael Ardolino, Bart Cafarella, Fern Karhu and chairman Kevin McClarnon did not respond to letters describing Newsday’s findings regarding Amiryavari and additional Realty Connect agents.

Watch videos of the test

TEST 09

Agent drops preapproval policy for white buyer, holds firm with black buyer

Niguel Williams-Easter is an actor from West Hempstead in his mid-20s. He has appeared in commercials and short films. He’s black.

Read more Read less

Steven Makropoulos is also an actor in his mid-20s. From Massapequa, he has traveled the country in theater productions and at theme parks. He’s white.

They each sought the services of Plainview-based Charles Rutenberg Realty agent Edwin Torres in searching for $400,000 houses in the Brentwood area.

Test 09 The house search In the area around Brentwood and up to $400,000

Black Tester:

Niguel Williams-Easter

Listings Given:

0

White Tester:

Steven Makropoulos

Listings Given

20

Torres told both men that he required customers to get mortgage preapproval from a bank before he provided listings or house tours.

He explained that he had invested time helping some house hunters only to discover they could not afford to buy, and that sellers and their agents often balked at showing houses to people who were not fully prepared to make a deal.

“So, it’s very important for you to get that preapproval and to make sure that the taxes are indicated on that preapproval,” he told Williams-Easter. “Once you do that, you can email it to me and let me know.”

“The first thing that you do when you’re going to apply for a home or want to look at homes is you get prequalified,” Torres told Makropoulos.

Still, both men asked Torres to send house listings.

He said yes to Makropoulos in this exchange:

MAKROPOULOS: Is it possible to for you to start sending me some listings?

TORRES: I can send you I can send you listings in those areas.

MAKROPOULOS: In those areas?

TORRES: I would say like based on your income, a ballpark figure, I would say anywhere between two and 350 I’ll send you. That’s the bracket that I’m gonna put it in.

MAKROPOULOS: OK.

TORRES: And when you receive it, you’ll be able to view them.

MAKROPOULOS: Yeah.

TORRES: But, like I said, I need that [preapproval], OK?

MAKROPOULOS: Gotcha.

Torres said no to Williams-Easter in this exchange:

WILLIAMS-EASTER: OK. So, you need that [preapproval].

TORRES: Definitely.

WILLIAMS-EASTER: Absolutely.

TORRES: Absolutely.

WILLIAMS-EASTER: Can you look at listings or anything?

TORRES: I don’t really know what to show you.

As requested, Torres selected homes for Makropoulos to consider. He located them in Deer Park, Brentwood, Bay Shore and West Islip. He also took Makropoulos to see one of the 20 houses while still pressing him to secure preapproval.

The agent responded differently when Williams-Easter followed up by texting a request for listings that could lead to house tours.

Torres texted: “I don’t know if there was a misunderstanding when we met. But I’m awaiting your preapproval first and at that time I will start sending properties to you based on your approval.”

Experts’ Opinions

Freiberg: The agent’s refusal to provide service to the African American tester is an example of disparate treatment based on race. The agent refused to select home listings or show homes to the African American tester until he obtained a preapproval letter from a lender, while the same agent waived this preapproval requirement for the white tester providing him with home listings and a home tour.

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Schwemm: The evidence shows blatant discrimination. There was inferior treatment of the black tester regarding the preapproval requirement. And there was a continuation of blatant discrimination with many listings provided to white tester vs. none to black tester.

Agent and Company Responses

After viewing video recordings of his interactions with testers, Torres said he provided listings and a tour to one tester and not the other because the white tester seemed more “pushy” and eager to engage in searching for a house to buy.

“One seemed a little bit more eager than the other. That’s the bottom line,” Torres said, adding:

“Sometimes you may make a decision that may be interpreted incorrectly. That’s the only thing I can tell you. You learn and then you implement. Is there a chance that you can say something that is misinterpreted? I think so. And that’s basically what I see here.”

Torres also said that he has adopted a firmer policy: “So now if you don’t have a preapproval, I’m not going to show you a house.”

Joseph Moshe, founder of Charles Rutenberg Realty, viewed Newsday’s recordings of three Charles Rutenberg agents, including Torres. Subsequently, he offered no comments.

Watch videos of the test

Sources: Demographic data in maps from Census Bureau 2016 American Community Survey five-year estimates.

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Back to main story Part 4:
Bypassed Communities

The young white man was an actor, the young black man a drug store worker. They were going undercover with constructed identities – new families, new ages, new addresses, new incomes, new jobs. The white man was cloaked as a building contractor, the black man as a piano tuner.

Married without children to a working wife with a household income of $125,000, their essential personas were interchangeable – except for the black-and-white distinguishing factor of race.

One month apart in the spring of 2016, each strapped a tiny camera to his chest with a miniature lens that peeked through a button hole of his shirt. Then, with the camera running, each separately met with one of Long Island’s 27,000 licensed residential real estate brokers and agents.

Posing as first-time house hunters in the spring of 2016, white actor Steven Makropoulos and black drug store worker Ryan Sett led a 25-member platoon of white, black, Hispanic and Asian New Yorkers into Newsday’s investigation of residential brokering.

Ordinary folks stocked the platoon: a 20-year-old college student, a 69-year-old lawyer, teachers, a computer tech, actors and more. All were recruited by Newsday to work as paired testers in the hope of measuring how often, if at all, agents provided unequal service to white and minority house hunters.

Collectively, they went undercover with agents for 16 months and recorded 240 hours of video in 109 tests conducted from April 2016 to August 2017. A professional court reporter created typed transcripts of the meetings between testers and agents. Newsday journalists reviewed the transcripts for accuracy and used them to verify that testers had, in fact, presented matching profiles to agents.

This is the story behind the three-year investigation.

How paired testing works

Fair-housing violations are determined by the courts. Enforcement authorities generally file charges after subjecting an agent to several paired tests to establish a pattern, but they do bring cases based on a single test when an agent has openly expressed bias.

Newsday tested each agent only once. Falling short of proving legal wrongdoing, the results provide a single comparison of customer contacts and offer no insight into an agent’s general professional conduct.

Collectively, however, the individual test results, bolstered by statistical findings, form a body of evidence suggesting the extent of discriminatory practices by agents in Long Island home sales.

Additionally, read side by side, some matched transcripts uniquely revealed the hidden disparities experienced by minority house hunters without their ever knowing they had been disadvantaged.

Paired testing has been central to investigating housing discrimination for almost half a century. Enforcement agencies, including the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and the U.S. Justice Department, rely on undercover testers to determine whether real estate agents deny equal opportunities to home hunters based on race or ethnicity.

In fact, enforcement of the Fair Housing Act, as well as of state and local anti-discrimination statutes, is often powered by paired testing.

Two testers of the same gender and age bracket – but of different races or ethnicities – are given matching personas. The profiles typically include the same family status, education level, type of job, level of income and credit score. After being matched in a pair, the testers separately tell a real estate agent that they are searching for houses with identical qualities, prices and locations.

The personal characteristics and search terms are drawn to be as identical as possible, bringing race or ethnicity to the fore if an agent treats, say, a white and a black tester differently.

Courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, have recognized testing as a tool for uncovering disparate treatment since the 1970s, the decade after passage of the Fair Housing Act. They have stated that testing can produce evidence of discrimination that is otherwise unavailable, while imposing limited burdens on agents who are tested. They have also granted testers standing to file discrimination suits based on the results of their undercover work.

In the early era of testing after passage of the landmark Fair Housing Act in 1968, discrimination was far more blatant. Today, practices such as the outright refusal to sell houses to African Americans have given way to the hidden disparities of denying equal service to minority house hunters and “steering” minorities and whites to different neighborhoods.

“Without testing, it would be very difficult to uncover what is going on in today’s housing market,” said Carla Wortheim , executive vice president of the Metropolitan Milwaukee Fair Housing Council. “Housing discrimination today is done with a smile and a handshake instead of that door being slammed in the face.”

Who does paired testing

The Department of Housing and Urban Development provides funding to fair housing advocacy organizations across the country with the goal of stemming discrimination in home sales or rentals.

Enforcement often targets major landlords or real estate brokerages. Typically, the investigating organization subjects a landlord or brokerage to several tests to gather the evidence necessary for a court action alleging fair housing violations.

HUD also uses paired testing roughly every 10 years to study housing discrimination nationwide. The department has increased the volume of the testing it does for research, not enforcement, purposes, from 3,264 paired tests in 1977 to 8,047 paired tests in 2012. HUD’s testing covers both rental and sales discrimination.

The department’s 2012 research fielded 135 sales tests across the New York-Northern New Jersey region, an area with a population in excess of 20 million people. The region covers Long Island, New York City, the city’s northern suburbs and close-in counties across the Hudson River.

Although Nassau and Suffolk are among the nation’s most segregated counties, that 2012 research bypassed them entirely, according to the Urban Institute, a social policy think tank that aggregates paired-testing surveys for HUD.

How testers were trained

Newsday’s prospective homebuyers – the testers – were a diverse group: white, black, Asian and Hispanic.

The Fair Housing Justice Center in Long Island City, an organization that has the nation’s most extensive paired-testing experience, trained the testers to interact properly with the agents. Executive director Fred Freiberg served as a paid Newsday consultant for that work and his organization was compensated for helping to design the testing. He was not paid to evaluate test results.

Newsday paid testers $16 an hour and reimbursed travel costs.

Freiberg provided multiple daylong training sessions for testers. Additionally, a member of his staff helped develop testing protocols for Newsday’s investigation and assisted in analyzing test results.

Newsday provided the testers with aliases and written profiles of the characters they were to portray as they “shopped” for homes on the Island, focusing only on purchases rather than rentals. For Hispanic testers, the aliases used common Hispanic surnames. The United States Census Bureau defines Hispanics and Latinos as people of Cuban, Mexican, Puerto Rican, South or Central American or other Spanish culture or origin regardless of race.

The profiles included, among other details, occupation, spouse’s occupation, whether or not they had children, the children’s ages and year of schooling. The identities also included supposed income, credit scores, how much money testers had in the bank, how much money they were prepared to spend on a house and how much money they had to put down.

To be convincing to real estate agents, testers also memorized a phone number, fictional address and credit card accounts.

Some researched which subway line they would take from a supposed city apartment to get to a supposed job, or how long it had taken them to drive from a home in the city to a job on Long Island.

Newsday reporters drilled the testers: How much were they able to spend on a home? What would their down payment be (usually 20 percent of the purchase price)? What was their occupation and their spouse’s? What school did their children attend? Why were they looking for a house search in a particular area?

Reporters also outfitted each tester with a video recorder concealed in clothing or a handbag. The recorder was turned on for the duration of meetings. If an agent escorted a tester on a house tour, the tour was similarly recorded.

Following the same protocol, Newsday assigned a second tester to arrange a meeting with the same agent. If the first tester was white, the second tester would be black, Hispanic or Asian, and vice versa. The median time between tests was 57 days.

Newsday later verified that agents had houses to sell when meeting with testers, based on analyses provided by Zillow, the online home search site.

Zillow draws an inventory of available homes daily from the Multiple Listing Service of Long Island, the computerized system used by agents to track the market and select possible houses for buyers. MLSLI said that it does not maintain its own database of past daily inventories, as Zillow does, and so could not provide the same type of tallies.

While Zillow’s figures do not exclude properties that had been taken off the market because, for instance, owners had signed sales contracts, its inventory of homes was similar for white and nonwhite testers.

On average, according to Zillow, 304 homes were available on dates that white testers spoke with agents and 296 when black, Hispanic and Asian testers met with them. In more than 90% of the matching paired tests, Zillow showed more than 100 houses on the market when each of the two testers met with an agent.

Further bolstering the reliability of Zillow’s statistics, MLSLI and Zillow both count the inventory of homes available for sale on a monthly basis. Their numbers were highly correlated.

Zillow’s inventory figures rose and fell with the numbers published by MLSLI during Newsday’s testing period, with Zillow showing on average 6 percent more available homes in Nassau than MLSLI and 26 percent more in Suffolk as inventories expanded and contracted month by month.

Testers asked agents to find houses in general areas rather than request particular communities or properties. For example, one criteria called for locating houses within an hour’s commute from Manhattan; another sought houses within 30 minutes of Garden City.

The testers also used maximum purchase prices that Newsday had determined fit the designated market.

The object was to give agents the discretion to select among communities with widely varying populations, some overwhelmingly white or minority, and others with more mixed demographics. Typically, agents searched the Multiple Listing Service of Long Island electronic database of houses for sale to locate listings for each tester in an undercover matched pair.

“You need groups of people that are trained that say exactly the same thing,” said Myron Orfield, director of the Institute on Metropolitan Opportunity at the University of Minnesota Law School, of paired testers. “They usually say, ‘I have no preference for neighborhoods, I don’t know anything about an area.'”

Why tests were recorded

Strictly following rules set by New York law, Newsday recorded all tester interactions with agents.

The state’s Penal Law permits one person who is participating in a conversation to record other people who participate in the conversation without their knowledge. As summarized by the Digital Media Law Project, “if you operate in New York, you may record a conversation or phone call if you are a party to the conversation.”

Thirty-seven other states and the District of Columbia similarly permit individuals to record in-person conversations with others without seeking their consent, according to the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.

When conducting once-a-decade research into the extent of discrimination, HUD does not equip its testers with taping equipment and instead relies on their reports of agents’ actions. Enforcement authorities similarly rely on tester reports and testimony while conducting investigations in states that bar undercover taping. In states that permit such taping, including New York, investigators often record conversations between testers and agents.

Newsday’s video and audio recordings captured crucial conversations and conduct that are normally beyond view and could not be documented any other way.

Each is a snapshot of an agent one-on-one with a tester. Some snapshots found instances when agents served both testers equally. Other snapshots recorded evidence indicating apparent disparate treatment of minority testers. As individual moments – not repeat looks of the kind generally used to enforce the law – the recordings show only what happened there and then, not an agent’s broader conduct.

How test areas were chosen

To capture broad swaths of Long Island, Newsday divided most of Nassau and much of Suffolk into 10 zones that included housing markets with affordable homes as well as million-dollar mansions and places where large groups of minorities live closely to white populations.

Four zones studied how agents served house hunters in areas where white and minority communities abut one another. Those were drawn around Greenlawn and Northport, Bay Shore and West Islip, Hempstead and Garden City and Brentwood and Commack.

Three zones surrounded communities with highly rated schools and reasonably affordable houses: Syosset, Bethpage and Port Jefferson.

Two keyed on higher-priced areas in an attempt to assess how a customer’s willingness to spend millions of dollars for a house influenced whether agents differentiated between white and minority buyers: Nassau County’s Gold Coast and the Hamptons in Suffolk County.

The largest zone encompassed Western Nassau, which garnered listings that stretched from the Queens border to the east beyond Wantagh Parkway.

Collectively, the testing gathered house listings in communities that extended from the New York City line, across the full width of Nassau County, and then 30 miles into Suffolk County, reaching the communities of Miller Place, Coram, Medford and Patchogue, plus the Hamptons, still farther east.

Newsday conducted no tests in the remainder of Suffolk County, a territory that stretches roughly 45 miles from Yaphank through Orient Point on the North Fork. The population density there is comparatively lighter than in locations within commuting distance to New York City, and white residents compose a greater share of the population than on the Island generally: 84 percent to 66 percent.

The size of the territory and its dominant concentrations of white residents limited the possibility that agents could direct white and minority buyers to areas with significantly different demographics.

Cumulatively, Newsday’s test zones encompassed 83 percent of Long Island’s population, including 80 percent of the white population and 88 percent of the minority population.

How agents were chosen

Long Island has more than 27,000 actively licensed real estate salespeople and brokers, making the Island home base for one out of every five agents in New York State. Salespeople and brokers are both familiarly known as agents, but brokers have greater authority, including the power to supervise salespeople and execute certain transactions.

Their workplaces range from mom-and-pop shops to offices affiliated with well-known chains. Newsday’s investigation focused on 12 brands that represented more than half of the Island’s home sellers in 2017 and ranked at the top in the numbers of salespeople they deployed.

The dozen logged $15 billion worth of transactions on Long Island in 2017, with Douglas Elliman Real Estate first on the list at $4.2 billion, according to The Real Deal trade publication.

In addition to Douglas Elliman, the investigation tested agents affiliated with:

• Century 21 Real Estate LLC
• Charles Rutenberg Realty Inc.
• Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage on Long Island
• Coach Realtors
• Daniel Gale Sotheby’s International Realty
• Laffey Fine Homes
• Keller Williams Realty
• The Corcoran Group
• Signature Premiere Properties
• Realty Connect USA
• RE/MAX LLC

Newsday tested each brand at least three times at offices located in 27 communities. Tests of agents associated with two of the firms — The Corcoran Group and Daniel Gale Sotheby’s — produced no evidence of disparate treatment.

How data was evaluated

Newsday studied the information gathered by the tests through twin lenses.

One lens studied each agent’s interaction with paired testers for evidence that an individual agent had offered disparate treatment based on race or ethnicity, including through the listings the agent provided.

The other lens analyzed the agents’ 5,763 listings for evidence that, as a group, the agents had directed white and minority buyers to different neighborhoods, also based on race or ethnicity.

To accomplish the parallel goals, Newsday enlisted two nationally recognized authorities in fair housing standards and an expert in statistical analysis.

• Fred Freiberg, who co-founded the Fair Housing Justice Center in 2004. Previously, he had led a national testing program for the Civil Rights Division of the United States Department of Justice, as well as two national paired testing programs for the Urban Institute. He was paid for his help organizing the testing and training the testers. He was not compensated for evaluating test results.
• Robert Schwemm, the Everett H. Metcalf Jr. professor of law at the University of Kentucky College of Law. Schwemm is the author of “Housing Discrimination: Law and Litigation,” widely accepted as the definitive treatise of the subject. Schwemm assisted on an unpaid basis.
• Isabel Elaine Allen, a fellow of the American Statistical Association, professor emeritus of statistics at Babson College in Massachusetts and professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California San Francisco. Newsday paid Allen.

Generally, fair-housing standards require real estate agents to provide equal service and information to all customers, to give all customers equal access to housing and to avoid directing customers toward or away from neighborhoods based on race or ethnicity, a phenomenon commonly called “steering.”

The placement of listings and the transcripts of the interactions between testers and agents served as guides for identifying evidence of disparate treatment between white and minority house hunters.

The transcripts revealed, for example, what an agent told both testers about communities or schools, as well as whether an agent escorted both testers to tour houses on comparable terms.

Plotting the 5,763 listings in census tracts signaled whether individual agents directed white and minority buyers to neighborhoods with differing racial or ethnic compositions. The mapping also helped measure whether the agents had done so collectively.

After reviewing video recordings and transcripts, Newsday set aside 23 tests. A common reason was that one paired tester had veered slightly off script, often by wrongly describing the area where the tester was looking for a house. For example, in one instance a white tester specified houses within 30 minutes of Bethpage while an Asian tester requested homes within 20 minutes from Bethpage.

Because of the 10-minute difference in search terms, Newsday ruled out comparing the agent’s responses to the two testers. Similar variations required disqualifying tests as lacking the apples-to-apples quality necessary to make valid comparisons. The disqualifications, which also included recording failures, reduced an initial roster of 109 tests to 86 matched pairs.

Data from more than 80 paired tests – a big enough number to give the results weight – can reveal “significant problems” in a residential real estate market, said Erin Kemple, executive director of the Connecticut Fair Housing Center, which conducted 300 tests with HUD grants earlier this decade.

“We can’t say that every time someone looks for housing they’re going to be discriminated against,” Kemple said. “What it does is give a picture of how people are treated at a particular time. I think that, yes, that’s significant.”

Each foray into testing is different and always includes some tests showing inconclusive results, or tests that don’t get counted because of tester error.

“They’re human,” Kemple said of testers.

Thirty of Newsday’s 86 matching cases showed no evidence that agents had treated testers disparately. Newsday asked Freiberg and Schwemm to review the remaining 56.

They did so independently and were not informed of each other’s findings until publication of the investigation. They made their judgments based on Newsday test summaries, transcript excerpts and listings maps, including neighborhood demographic data. The opinions they offered do not represent legal findings.

Newsday counted a test as showing evidence of disparate treatment only when Freiberg and Schwemm both rendered such a conclusion. Read their opinions on each test here.

Separately, Newsday analyzed the listings to compare, for example, how many listings agents gave to white, black, Hispanic and Asian testers – and to determine whether the agents had cumulatively directed white and minority buyers to areas with different racial or ethnic populations.

One important caveat: Determining disparate treatment by real estate agents is not an exact science. Reviewing a map of listings to assess whether an agent “steered” a white buyer and a black buyer to impermissibly different areas can entail subjective judgments.

Clear cut: An agent makes an explicit statement of racial attitude and directs a black customer to a largely black neighborhood and a white customer to a largely white community.

Less clear cut: An agent speaks appropriately and focuses both a white and a Hispanic buyer on adjoining communities, one town with a comparatively high Hispanic population, the other town with a comparatively low Hispanic population.

The agent provides the Hispanic buyer with listings in both places but concentrates the listings in the town with the higher Hispanic population. Conversely, the agent gives the white buyer listings in both places but concentrates the listings in the town with the higher white population.

“Can I convince a white judge and jury that race is a factor in how this person was treated, yes or no,” said Pamela A. Kisch, executive director of the Fair Housing Center of Southeastern Michigan. “Yes, that’s a judgment call based on my experience…We have got to be pretty sure this evidence is very good.”

The mounting test results revealed this to Kelvin Tune: A black man who ventures into house hunting on Long Island risks suffering hidden discrimination by real estate agents.

He saw that the risks can be high.

“Do I feel like I’m sitting on the back of the bus? Yes,” Tune said after discovering evidence that six agents had subjected him to disparate treatment when compared with matched white house hunters.

An African American who came of age working summers in a Virginia tobacco field, Tune, 54, served as a tester in Newsday’s investigation of possible discriminatory practices in Long Island’s residential real estate brokering industry.

Over the course of nine months ending in July 2017, Tune met with nine agents in offices that stretched from Franklin Square on the west to East Setauket on the east, from Great Neck on the North Shore to Massapequa on the South Shore.

He adopted the identities of a tax consultant or financial adviser whose wife was employed in jobs that included child psychologist, nurse and financial portfolio manager. Often, Tune used his real name. Other times, he went by the aliases Andre Henry or Kelvin Liggon.

He expressed interest in houses ranging from $400,000 in one test to $5 million in another. Four times he posed as a would-be commuter hoping to ride the Long Island Rail Road no more than 45 minutes or an hour. In other instances, he told agents he wanted to live within a half hour of Bethpage, Brentwood or Port Jefferson to be near a workplace or his elderly mother.

Overwhelmingly, Tune felt that the agents had provided proper service until, in joint interviews with white house-hunting partners, Tune learned that seven of his nine tests had produced evidence of disparate treatment:

• an agent had urged his white counterpart to consider listings in Plainview but had told him nothing was available;
• an agent had warned his partner about gang violence in Brentwood but had given him 27 house listings there;
• an agent had escorted his counterpart on house tours but refused to take him without an exclusive broker’s agreement;
• an agent had directed his white counterpart to houses in overwhelmingly white communities after disparaging predominantly minority areas;
• an agent had broken a commitment to show him houses while showing homes to his white partner;
• an agent had told his white counterpart that she avoided the word “steer” but also advised, “I have to say it without saying it, you know?” She said nothing similar to him.
• an agent warned his white counterpart against living close to Queens communities with immigrant populations, citing a “safety factor,” without providing similar information to Tune.

All told, five of Tune’s agents directed his white counterparts to neighborhoods with higher proportions of white residents. The gap averaged 21 percentage points, with the smallest differential 7 percentage points and the highest 55 percentage points.

“Is it discrimination? Yes,” Tune said. “But it is the way of the world.”

Five of the seven agents declined comment.

A lawyer for Douglas Elliman agent Judi Ross wrote that, in telling Tune’s counterpart that she never looks for houses in the predominantly minority communities of Freeport, Baldwin and Amityville, she “never referenced the racial makeup of the district or alluded to race” and “was merely speaking to her understanding of the school’s rating, which has nothing to do with race.”

The same lawyer, representing Douglas Elliman agent Donna Rogers, wrote that, in telling Tune nothing was available in his price range in Plainview, Rogers may have misinterpreted his “willingness to do a renovation” and was influenced by his mentions of traffic.

Tune learned early about life for black Americans.

He spent summers in Virginia with his grandmother, stringing tobacco on the farm where she worked. Starting from age 11, he’d hop onto a pickup truck for the drive to fields where foremen treated black and white workers differently. The black workers then went home to houses, like that of his grandmother, lacking basics like a tub and a toilet.

The labor taught Tune to appreciate the life he led in Albany, New York, where his Virginia-born parents had migrated and where he was born and raised.

Yes, he lived in segregated neighborhoods and attended segregated schools.

Yes, he held an after-school job in a diaper laundry where the black workers did the dirtiest work of counting soiled diapers as they arrived.

But anger and hatred had no place in his household. Speaking of his parents and grandparents, Tune said they shared little about life in the Jim Crow era.

“They tried to make me respect the person,” he remembered, adding that “growing up they tried not to make me an ugly person. They tried to make me into a respectful person. And I get that.”

So perhaps it’s not surprising how hard Tune works to get “the big picture,” to try to peer into the motivations of the real estate agents who, evidence suggests, may have discriminated against him in two-thirds of the tests in which he participated.

Perhaps they assumed he could better afford a house somewhere else.

Perhaps they were just looking to protect their business in the whiter neighborhoods by keeping him out.

Perhaps they assumed he would prefer to live among, as he said, his own nationality, that it was just a fact that people prefer to live among their own kind.

Tune lives in Rocky Point, a largely white community where he had the opportunity to buy an affordable condo near his workplace. He uses the condo as a place to lay his head, he said, and doesn’t socialize there or even feel comfortable enough, as a black man, to attend the community’s annual St. Patrick’s Day Parade.

So maybe that’s what real estate agents are thinking too, he suggests.

“We all are human beings, they all have hearts,” he said. “But also, bottom line, they need to make a dollar.”

Eventually, as the results mounted, Tune concluded that perhaps the agents weren’t giving him “the big picture” that he had attempted to discover about them.

“I’m asking them for guidance, and they never gave me the options, they never gave me the big picture,” he said. “Don’t give me 60 degrees of the circle, give me 360 degrees of the circle.”

What he most resented was the loss of opportunity to decide where he would want to live. “They should not be making that choice for you,” he said.

Tune said he accepts that racial discrimination might change in form but never disappear.

“Not hurt, not at all,” he said, adding: “You just got to take it. You can’t let it get to you.”