Month: November 2019

Vickie Perlongo remembers the first time her daughter saw a black person.

Perlongo, who is white and lives in Levittown, took her then-preschool-age daughter shopping in the mid-1980s to a Radio Shack where a black man was working.

“Why is his skin a different color?” the daughter asked.

“She’d never seen a black person before because she grew up here, and I was surprised,” said Perlongo, 66, a retired nurse who has lived in Levittown for more than 40 years. “I said, ‘Never say that out loud.'”

The incident speaks to how few minorities lived in Levittown, a suburb famous for being both the first of its kind and for policies that kept minorities out.

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

While Levittown is still predominantly white, it is becoming more diverse, data show.

“You don’t see it on the streets,” said Janet Gonzal, a Hispanic stay-at-home grandmother who was one of 31 Levittown residents or workers interviewed about the makeup of the community. “You see it at school pickup.”

The 2010 U.S. Census had Levittown’s population as 88 percent white. By 2017, census estimates put Levittown’s population at 75 percent white, 14.6 percent Hispanic, 7 percent Asian and 1 percent black.

The school population has become even more diverse: as of 2018-19, roughly 69 percent of students in the Levittown and Island Trees districts are white, with 19 percent Latino, 10 percent Asian and 1 percent black.

All this is a noticeable shift from 20 years ago, when the community’s population was 97 percent white, according to census data.

Of those interviewed – two-thirds white, the rest divided among other races and ethnic groups – the majority welcomed the change, saying diversity strengthens communities.

Jon Probstein, president of the Levittown Chamber of Commerce, praised Levittown’s growing diversity.

“My children are exposed to something I was not exposed to and I think it makes them better people,” said Probstein, a white lawyer and actor.

Yet on some blocks, the neighbors still look the same as they did decades ago, residents said.

Beatrice Marin, 70, has lived in the same house her whole life, almost as long as Levittown has existed. Only one family of color — a black family — has ever lived on her block, and they left after a year.

“The houses have been renovated, but as far as the people, they haven’t changed that much,” said Marin, who is white and works in information technology at Nassau Community College.

The current demographics of Levittown reflect its history, residents said. The developers of Levittown prohibited people of color from moving in through contract clauses, a common practice at the time. Restrictive racial covenants were recommended by the Federal Housing Administration to create homogenous communities. The U.S. Supreme Court struck them down in 1948, but William Levitt kept them.

Levittown’s restrictive racial covenant read: “The tenant agrees not to permit the premises to be used or occupied by any person other than members of the Caucasian race. But the employment and maintenance of other than Caucasian domestic servants shall be permitted.”

Levitt developed more than 17,400 partially prefabricated Cape Cods and ranch-style houses in planned communities with parks, pools and schools.

Levitt explained his racial exclusionary policy in the 1950s. “But I have come to know that if we sell one house to a Negro family, then 90 or 95 percent of our white customers will not buy into the community. This is their attitude, not ours. 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.”

All of the people who moved into Levittown in its first years were white. And many of them passed on those homes to their children and relatives, maintaining the demographics, residents said.

“There aren’t that many people moving out to give people the opportunity to move in,” said Pat Patane, a white resident of 30 years who is co-president of the Levittown Community Council. “People, once they move [here], they love the whole environment and they don’t want to leave.”

Residents say they came to Levittown for their own piece of the American dream, where they could afford a house in a good school district. The census put the median home value at $367,700 in 2017. Neighbors say they know each other, throw block parties and deliver baked goods to new residents. People gather at eight public pools in the summer.

Most residents spoke warmly of the place they call home and described it as a family-oriented, friendly and welcoming place.

Satwinder Baryana, who moved to Levittown three years ago, said there are five families on his block who live in houses they got from relatives.

“It’s good for me because everybody knows everybody. It brings me into the community,” said Baryana, 35, a sales executive of Indian descent.

But it can also be hard to break into groups who have known each other for decades, some residents said.

Gonzal said she still feels new to Levittown even after five years. The first time Gonzal’s granddaughter came to the Levittown library, “all the other little girls ran away,” which Gonzal attributed to the girl’s skin color.

“It’s that type of town — you either fit into a clique or you’re independent,” Gonzal, 57, said. “For newcomers, it can be intimidating.”

All but one of the 20 white people interviewed said they either had no issue with increasing diversity or welcomed it. Four even expressed feeling like they had missed out on valuable life experience and growth without it.

But in candid conversations about race and demographics, some older white residents used descriptors that were anything but politically correct.

Some longtime residents see Levittown “as the way it was” — like an episode of “Leave It to Beaver” in which everyone is white — instead of how it is and should be, said Bob Koenig, vice president of the Levittown Historical Society.

“A lot of people are nervous with the changes,” said Koenig, who is white. “We are diverse and we are changing.”

While the majority of 5,000 parishioners at St. Bernard’s Roman Catholic Church are second- or third-generation Levittowners and white, the number of Hispanic congregants is growing, the Rev. Ralph Sommer said. The church started celebrating Spanish-language masses two years ago.

“We’re beginning to see more of a diverse community being developed because the housing is being sold to different folks,” Sommer said.

Julissa Pesante, who is Puerto Rican, said learning the history of the hamlet made it “feel good to be able to sign” a contract for a home here 18 months ago.

“It was a big deal,” said Pesante, 41 and a stay-at-home mom. “I always wonder how people feel to see that it is getting diverse, that you have Hispanics.”

Pesante said she has not experienced any kind of racism in Levittown, unlike when she lived in Glen Cove, where she felt she was treated differently as a minority. Her Levittown neighbors welcomed her to the area by bringing cake to her house.

That’s a different reception than some minority residents got when moving to Levittown decades ago.

When the first black family moved to Francis Richard Visconti’s block in the 1970s, a white police officer who lived on the block told the neighbors, “Stay put.”

“He said, ‘Don’t move, because then they’ll start moving in, and that’s how Levittown would become all black,'” Visconti, who is 82 and white, said.

Visconti, a former milkman and custodian, said he was not afraid of that.

“We welcomed them,” Visconti said outside the Island Trees library. “They felt out of place because it was all the white people there, and they moved out after a year and white people moved in.”

Trina Reed, who became the first African American director of the Levittown Public Library five years ago, said she was welcomed to the community.

“Coming in now, I think it’s a different environment,” said Reed, of Freeport.

Blessing Osuamkpe, a black medical student, said there was only one other African American family on her block.

“I really don’t care as long as it’s safe and it’s a good school district,” said Osuamkpe, 39, who recently moved to Pennsylvania for work. “That’s what matters to me.”

Another sign of increasing diversity: Levittown is home to the first Indian American state senator, Kevin Thomas.

“It’s a big deal to be able to say, ‘I’m from Levittown and I’m an elected official and I’m a minority,'” Thomas said, adding representing Levittown as an Indian American is a “huge responsibility” because he wants to be a role model.

The South Asian community in Levittown is growing, residents said, pointing to its proximity to Hicksville, which has a large South Asian population.

Levittowners have similar backgrounds, no matter their ethnicities, residents said. Most are blue collar or middle class: firefighters, teachers, police officers.

“Everybody gets up and goes to work for a living,” said James Van der Beek, who is white and inherited his home from his grandparents.

Levittown continues to be an emblem of the American dream, residents said.

“I’ve moved from another country. I’ve worked hard in the community,” said Baryana, who saw a documentary about Levittown before coming from England. “I bought the house and am raising my kids in the school district, and all I need now is a golden retriever and I’ll have the perfect American family.”

An acknowledgment: Newsday missed a critical chance to lead

State-required continuing education classes in real estate law and practices are supposed to cover fair housing regulations and how agents and brokers might deliberately or unintentionally discriminate.

Instead, in five of six classes attended by Newsday reporters, instructors provided information that was sometimes or often inaccurate, incomplete, confusing or lacking in quantity and quality, according to eight fair housing experts who reviewed transcripts and notes of the sessions.

Some instructors made comments about ethnic and religious groups that risked reinforcing discriminatory attitudes, the experts said. One instructor likened fair-housing laws to speed limits faced by a cab driver rushing a customer to the airport, telling students: “You get to choose whether you break the law.”

Other instructors filled class time with irrelevant material, such as reviews of television shows and descriptions of funeral rituals.

One described Rockville Centre as “lily white,” referred to West Islip as “white Islip” and used derogatory racial and religious terms.

Only one of the six classes included the required three hours of fair-housing law training.

The experts examined the transcripts of four classes in which instructors set no rules against recording or quotation. They also reviewed notes on one class where the instructor barred recording but placed no restrictions on quoting. The instructor in the sixth class said she did not want to be quoted.

The instructors included the president of the Long Island Board of Realtors and three former presidents, including one who is now an attorney for the board.

New York State law requires real estate agents to attend 22.5 hours of continuing education every two years to renew their licenses. The material must include the three hours of instruction in upholding anti-discrimination laws. The state permits up to 10 minutes of break time during each hour of instruction.

Many agents opt to take in-person classes to keep their licenses up to date. LIBOR reported 14,034 registrations for its own classes and 9,703 registrations for online classes in 2017, its most recent available tax filings show. To see how Long Island agents were trained, Newsday reporters registered online for in-person fair-housing classes offered by LIBOR.

“The trainers veered pretty far away from actually covering the important topics that a Realtor or real estate agent would need to understand in order to comply with their obligations,” said Thomas Silverstein, associate counsel with the Fair Housing & Community Development Project at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law in Washington, D.C., who reviewed transcripts and notes from three classes.

What agents must know

Agents and brokers bear the responsibility for applying fair housing standards as they guide customers to housing choices. Industry representatives have contended that proper training is the best way to ensure agents uphold fair housing laws, arguing against more aggressive enforcement through fines, license suspensions or revocations.

“If you don’t educate real estate professionals about not only the history of fair housing and housing discrimination in America but about current ways that discrimination is being manifest, then you’re losing out on the opportunity to educate these professionals about how they can actively support fair housing efforts and strengthen all communities,” said Lisa Rice, president of the National Fair Housing Alliance in Washington, D.C., who teaches fair housing classes at real estate conferences.

The Department of State publishes a fair housing curriculum. Among the topics to be covered: anti-discrimination laws; the practice of “steering” minorities and whites to different areas; the promotion of racial or ethnic fears to spark “blockbusting,” or panic selling; and the so-called protected classes, such as race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex, disability and family status.

On LIBOR’s website, an online fair housing course produced by a Colorado-based company covers all those topics and more. Students must spend at least 2 hours and 30 minutes taking the online class.

The course states that the Civil Rights Act of 1866 protects all Americans from housing discrimination, regardless of race or color and with no exceptions. It lists the seven protected classes under the Fair Housing Act of 1968, and it describes exceptions under that law.

The study material also ranges from explaining hard-to-detect forms of illegal bias, such as setting higher standards for minorities than whites, to outlining under what circumstances a senior housing development can legally exclude families with children.

Warning against “well-intentioned discrimination” – such as making assumptions about what clients want based on their national origin – the course offers anecdotes about situations agents might face to illustrate how to avoid fair housing violations. In one anecdote, for example, a landlord urges an agent to “screen a little harder” as a way to discriminate against tenants by race and sex.

The Long Island classes

By contrast, one of the six in-person classes Newsday attended included only 20 minutes on fair housing. Another included 35 minutes. Three others ranged from about 50 minutes to about two hours on the topic.

In three classes, instructors asked class members to identify themselves; the reporters did so and stated their Newsday affiliation. In one of those classes, instructor Linda Damico said she did not want to be quoted, and Newsday is abiding by that condition.

The experts consulted by Newsday said that Nicholas Gigante, who has served as president of LIBOR, gave the most informative instruction. He was the only instructor who spent the state-mandated three hours on fair housing and discrimination.

Leading a class of about 20 students at the Best Western Mill River Manor in Rockville Centre, Gigante detailed fair housing and civil rights milestones. He separated the class into groups and challenged them to come up with answers to questions about protected classes, the year the Fair Housing Act was passed (1968) and whether sex offenders are covered by antidiscrimination laws (they are not).

In between, Gigante provided advice.

“A lot of buyers will call you up: ‘I want to live with my own kind.’ You ever heard that one? I’ve heard that quite a few times,” he said. “In our business if we only show them those properties or make available those properties, that would be steering.”

He added: “I know the stories that you’ll probably tell me: that you’ve had landlords, buyers and sellers who actually want you to discriminate. And your job is to say, ‘I’m sorry I can’t do that because what you’re asking me to do would violate fair housing laws, federal, state and local.'”

In an interview with Newsday in October, Gigante said fair housing can be a “tough topic,” so instructors need to give detailed information in an engaging way. He said agents “come in thinking they know everything, and then I prepare them and I teach them that ‘maybe you don’t know everything.'”

‘Shockingly thin on content’

Dianne Scalza, an associate broker with three decades of experience, is president of LIBOR, chair of the New York State Association of Realtors’ Education Management Committee and former chair of NYSAR’s Professional Standards Committee.

LIBOR’s website described her course, titled “Ready, Set, Buy! Representing a Buyer in a Real Estate Transaction,” as covering topics such as “fiduciary responsibilities to your buyer/client” and compensation. The course description promised “Mandated 3 Hours Fair Housing.”

Newsday observed two sessions. In one, 20 minutes elapsed from the moment Scalza began speaking about fair housing to her announcement that she had concluded the instruction.

During that time, she said landlords and agents may not ask buyers or renters how many children they have or what religion they practice and stated that discrimination against gay people is illegal. She said an agent cannot fulfill a client’s request for a home “in a Jewish neighborhood.”

Despite her warnings that students should not ask about protected characteristics such as race and religion, she made a blunt inquiry.

“Now, anybody here Jewish?”

Pressing further, she asked one student, “you’re not Orthodox, are you?”

Continuing that she had “a lot of friends who are Jewish,” Scalza said some did not adhere to kosher standards.

Scalza, who said she is of Irish descent and called bias “disgusting in today’s world,” also related this anecdote:

“I can remember somebody saying to me once, ‘You taking those Mafia people out?’ ‘What makes you think they’re Mafia?’ ‘Did you see their license plate? Garbage 1 and Garbage 2?’ They were paying cash! I didn’t ask them where their cash was coming from.”

She called Rockville Centre “lily white” and referred to West Islip as “white Islip.”

She also implored the class to treat everyone fairly.

About 16 minutes after she announced the start of fair-housing instruction, Scalza spoke to an African American class member, saying to her:

“We may not look alike, but deep down inside, you’re still my sister. If we could just treat people with that kind of kindness, it would be a wonderful thing. OK, so fair housing. OK, we covered that.”

A student then asked what to do if a landlord does not want tenants with children. Scalza correctly replied that the landlord “can’t deny that particular family an apartment” if the number of people in the apartment would not violate the law.

If the landlord insisted on refusing children, Scalza advised, “You cannot take the listing. It’s that simple.”

Aside from that 20-minute segment, Scalza made no reference to fair housing or discrimination in her all-day course, other than a comment offering insight into how school district preferences can become proxies for race in house hunting, saying of one client:

“She didn’t want Bay Shore because they didn’t like the school district. I have to tell you, Bay Shore is actually a good school district. What people are really saying is that there’s too many minorities there. You need minorities. You can’t grow up without minorities. You have to work with other people of all different sizes, shapes, colors, creeds, whatever.”

Scalza recalled taking that same client to a house that was “done soup to nuts. Now if you’re Italian I’m not saying this to insult you, but it was a very Italian house. Lots of molding. I’m surprised it didn’t have plastic seat cushions.”

In a second session observed by Newsday, Scalza asked a few class members to identify themselves. The Newsday reporter identified himself.

In that class, Scalza touched on fair housing issues in a roughly 90-minute stretch interspersed with unrelated matters. She informed students about six of the seven federally protected classes: race, color, religion, national origin, sex and familial status. She played a video that mentioned the seventh federally protected class, people with disabilities. She also talked about sexual orientation, which is protected under state and local laws.

However, she did not give her students a list of the seven other characteristics protected under state and local fair housing laws, including age, military and veteran status, marital status and source of income. She did not discuss any specific laws or United States Supreme Court cases.

Scalza described standing up to a home seller who tried to prevent a sale to a mixed-race couple.

“If she’d refused to sell, I would have been required to release the listing and report it to HUD,” Scalza said, referring to the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development.

She told students she has sold homes to people who are Muslim, black, Christian and Jewish, “anybody you can think of, I’ve probably sold.”

She played a video about fair housing. However, she stopped the video after about 15 minutes, saying: “You have all your fair housing regulations in your offices. There’s another 30 minutes or so. You got what it’s about.”

Warning students not to use offensive words, Scalza recalled that she once joked to a Jewish friend that a house in the Hamptons had burned down through “Jewish lightning.”

The phrase is derived from an anti-Semitic stereotype that a Jewish landlord or property owner committed arson to collect insurance proceeds. Her friend, Scalza recalled, “was very offended by that. And, you know, it breaks my heart to hurt. I would never do that. I would never do it intentionally.”

The term “is much less common now than it may have been decades ago, but you still see it show up now and then,” said Aryeh Tuchman, associate director of the Center on Extremism at the Anti-Defamation League.

Using the term reinforces anti-Semitic stereotypes, he said.

In addition, Scalza repeated an Italian-language slur for African Americans, recalling that she had been unfamiliar with the word before a home seller used it.

Newsday asked five experts on fair housing training to review Scalza’s two course presentations, based on information provided by Newsday. Two of the experts have headed fair housing organizations that train real estate agents, and three are attorneys who specialize in fair housing and conduct fair housing training.

The five experts said unanimously that the course presentations lacked basic information agents need to help them abide by fair housing laws and that some of Scalza’s statements regarding racial and religious bias could reinforce stereotypes rather than dispel them.

The two classes taught by Scalza were “shockingly thin in content,” said Silverstein, of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. “There was no clear organizational structure for what limited content there was regarding fair housing.”

Silverstein added, “Although it may have been the intent of the trainer to use examples that touched upon racial, ethnic or religious stereotypes to undermine those stereotypes, the transcript leaves substantial question as to whether she actually achieved that purpose rather than having the effect of reinforcing those stereotypes.”

Invited to speak with Newsday, Scalza said she is deeply committed to providing equal opportunities to all home buyers, and she said she has stood up to home sellers who tried to discriminate. She said she believed she had provided more than 20 minutes of fair housing instruction.

“I feel so strongly about fair housing and the right to live where you want to live that I’m glad you sent me the letter,” she said, referring to a letter from Newsday describing its findings about her classes. “Because maybe the way I’m doing it, although my passion is there, maybe it might be misinterpreted and I certainly wouldn’t want that. So I thank you for that.”

She said the stories she told about expressions of prejudice were intended to educate students about ways people might inadvertently offend others or discriminate. “I just tell my students, when you put that Realtor hat on you have to leave your prejudice at the door,” she said. “I can’t tell people not to be prejudiced. That’s a moral thing. But what I can do is, I can give them examples of everyday things that happen that you may not realize that you say, that you do, and how is that affecting those people? That’s really what I’m trying to get across.”

Scalza said: “We have met with our education director who has said, ‘we really have to, if this is truly happening,’ and she said, ‘then, we have to go back and revisit what we’re doing,’ and I understand that. Can I do it better? I’m teaching a long time. I’m sure I can. Do I want to? Without a doubt.”

‘Confusing’ instruction

A former LIBOR president, Donald Scanlon, spent about two hours on fair-housing topics at a class held in LIBOR’s West Babylon training facility in October 2018.

He devoted the first hour of the advertised three hours primarily to business topics, including LIBOR’s recent election of officers, real estate’s impact on the economy, property taxes, foreclosures, short sales, flood insurance, certificates of occupancy, LIBOR’s political action committee, his own recent home sale and a proposed professional services tax.

He spent three minutes describing a LIBOR gathering where he said 30 to 40 people lined up to ask questions after a talk about fair housing.

He also devoted six minutes to blockbusting, the practice of inducing panic sales by warning homeowners that people of a different race or ethnicity were moving in.

He told students that the state created “cease and desist” lists of homeowners who could not be contacted by agents.

Those lists have been have been instituted in certain sections of Queens, “and we’re fearful that it could spread into Nassau County,” he said.

Contacting homeowners, he added, “is our lifeblood.” He said a former elected official who supported the lists was “really not a friend of ours anymore.”

Before giving students a 10-minute break, he told them, “I’ve just spent almost an hour of our time, so I’ve got to start moving quickly into fair housing here, OK, which is not going to be hard.”

After the short break, Scanlon spent one hour and 50 minutes discussing fair housing issues. Two experts on fair housing training who reviewed a transcript of Scanlon’s three-hour class called his instruction incomplete, confusing and at times inaccurate.

Describing an agent’s obligation, Scanlon said, “You and I can provide every person with the same opportunity to either purchase, lease or occupy residential real property.” He added, “If we provide them with that opportunity, that’s an opportunity for us to make some money.”

“I’m trying to share with you here how not to get caught and the way not to get caught is not to violate the law, and the way not to violate the law is to know what the law is,” Scanlon advised.

“Then if you do get caught it’s your choice. I’m telling you, the speed limit out here is 55 miles an hour. If you choose to do 65 miles an hour, that’s your choice.”

“That’s all I’m trying to accomplish today,” he added. “If you know what the law is, if you know how you can get caught and you can decide how far are you going to push, you can decide.”

He compared real estate agents with a cab driver who is asked to get a passenger to the airport quickly and must decide whether to speed:

“You get to choose whether you break the law,” he said.

He warned that house hunters who believe they have faced bias can sue.

“Why are they doing this? Money’s the answer. What was the question again? Money is the answer,” he advised.

Scanlon told the class he had three rules to impart about fair housing.

The first focused on how to proceed if charged with violating the law.

“It’s always cheaper to settle,” he said. “Even if you did nothing wrong, it’s cheaper to settle.”

Scanlon’s second rule: “Don’t draw attention to yourself. Fly under the radar.”

As an example, he recommended that agents take care with the wording of advertisements.

Scanlon compared real estate agents who draw attention to themselves with motorists driving red cars: “Even if you’re doing nothing wrong, you have increased your chances of being pulled over, haven’t you, because you’re driving a red car.”

Scanlon’s third rule called for removing any references to “who” – that is, to people rather than homes – “out of any marketing, advertising and vocabulary.”

“Because the moment that I start talking about” people, he explained, “I am talking about someone who is ultimately in a protected category.”

Stressing that anti-discrimination laws cover more than race or color, Scanlon listed the seven classes of people covered by federal fair housing law and said that state and local laws had been extended to cover additional groups of people.

He outlined the history of fair housing laws, from the Civil Rights Act of 1866 through the modern era and explained the restrictions that once prevented blacks from buying homes in Levittown.

He noted that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968, and President Lyndon Johnson signed the Fair Housing Act into law soon after. “He had 50 percent of the country said do it and 50 percent said don’t do it. So here’s a lose-lose situation,” Scanlon said of Johnson.

“This law, in order to get it through Congress, had to allow for some exceptions saying it’s OK to discriminate under these circumstances,” Scanlon said. But over the decades, new federal, state and local laws have granted rights to more groups, he noted, giving numerous examples such as women, people with disabilities and others.

“So, just remember if they breathe, they’re protected,” he said.

Pointing out that discriminatory treatment may not be “blatantly obvious,” Scanlon said agents should pay attention even to how they return phone calls.

“Not returning a phone call is considered refusing to show a property to somebody,” he said.

Focusing the class on steering, Scanlon warned that home buyers often want to know “who their neighbors are going to be.” He added: “And we can’t help them with that.”

Kevin Cremin, director of litigation for disability and aging rights for Mobilization for Justice Inc. and a lecturer at Columbia Law School, said Scanlon’s first two rules – it’s always cheaper to settle, and don’t draw attention to yourself – bring a “moral or legal ambiguity” into the discussion, as if “it doesn’t matter what you’re doing [if you] don’t draw attention to yourself.”

William Tisdale, president and chief executive of the Metropolitan Milwaukee Fair Housing Council, called Scanlon’s instruction “confusing” and at times inaccurate, particularly in the discussion about blockbusting.

Invited by Newsday to discuss his class presentation, Scanlon said in an interview that he covered topics such as flood insurance and taxes as he opened the class to get the attention of agents, who often regard fair housing instruction as a “pill” they must take every two years.

He asserted that he nonetheless gave enough instruction time because the state allows three 10-minute breaks and he gave only one 10-minute break.

“When you say to a real estate agent, ‘you have to take three hours of fair housing,’ they’re going to go, ‘ucchh,'” he said. “And so you have to bring it down to reality for them. You really do. Because a lot of agents don’t know that they’re doing something wrong.”

In fact, he said, he believes that blockbusting – when agents tell homeowners that new residents of a different ethnic background are moving into an area and urge them to sell their homes before they decline in value – is going on in Nassau County communities such as Elmont, Valley Stream, Franklin Square, Hicksville, Uniondale and Hempstead.

He acknowledged that his description of violating the speed limit may have given a wrong impression, adding that his fiancée had suggested so after reviewing Newsday’s description of the class.

Scanlon recalled: “My fiancée said, ‘Well, Don, you know, they might even consider, you know, that you’re saying that it’s OK to do 65 miles an hour as long as you don’t get caught.’ No, it’s not OK. That’s not what I meant. But if some people interpreted that, then I’m going to have to, perhaps, readjust the way I cover fair housing, or readjust that particular topic.”

He said that he has moved fair housing instruction to the start of his classes to have students at full attention and is devoting a full three hours.

Discussing enforcement of fair housing laws, he said both that the statutes serve a purpose and that testing can go too far.

“And, you know, look, I understand the purpose of the laws. I certainly do. I understand the purpose of the testing. You know, I think sometimes it can be a little too aggressive.”

Scanlon said agents who are tested and violate the law should be given a warning if it’s their first offense. “Then it would show that, ‘Hey, look, we’re looking to work with you. We’re not adversarial…. Look, we’re going to give you a warning this time. If it happens again, you’re going to get nailed, big,'” he said.

‘Short shrift’ to fair housing

An attorney and former real estate broker, Cathleen Nolan is a former LIBOR president and answers a LIBOR legal help line for agents and brokers. She taught an all-day class in November that primarily focused on commercial real estate transactions involving investment properties. The course documents said Nolan would cover three hours of fair housing instruction.

She spoke about the topic for a period of less than 45 minutes that included:

• Four minutes devoted to stories about her mother’s misadventures in cars.
• Four minutes given to her grandmother’s military service during World War I, and television shows, such as Amazon’s “The Man in the High Castle,” Showtime’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” and the Fox series “The Americans.”
• Seven minutes focused on the so-called comfort animals that qualified renters may house in apartments.

Nolan spent less than a minute talking about steering in the remaining half hour of the fair housing instruction.

Facing about 20 students, she recounted fair housing and other civil rights laws from 1866 through modern times, emphasizing that the 1866 Civil Rights Act prohibits all bias based on race or color, with no exceptions. She also touched on the three Civil War-era amendments to the U.S. Constitution that sought to grant equality to black Americans.

She listed the protected classes under federal, state and local laws, and spoke about discrimination based on race, religion, gender, sexual orientation and disability, among other classifications.

Discussing steering, Nolan said: “Steering is when you decide where somebody has to live based on how he looks, the church he attends, all kinds of different things. All protected classes.”

She cited as an example a landlord wanting to rent to gay couples, recalling that when she worked as a broker “all the landlords seemed to want the same tenants, a gay male couple.”

Briefly, Nolan searched unsuccessfully for information she said she had received from the New York City Human Rights Commission.

“Just go under nyc.gov human rights and you’ll come up with all this stuff,” she told the class. “You can’t do anything if you’re a landlord or broker. The only ones with any rights apparently are the tenants.” She also asserted: “Nobody’s got pets anymore. They have comfort animals. You think they’re stupid? They go online and you can print something out and it’s from a doctor, 30 bucks or something, and the doctor says you need a comfort animal.”

Nolan said landlords may not charge tenants extra security fees or rent if they live with such animals and she counseled against asking someone whether they have a service animal.

In her discussion of laws governing the rights of protected classes – which in Suffolk County includes a ban on discrimination against domestic violence victims – she told the class:

“The real problem is the victims of domestic violence. That’s pretty terrible because if, let’s say somebody’s been shooting at someone for a while and now that person wants to move into your two-family house and you have kids, you don’t want somebody coming along shooting at your tenant and maybe hitting your kids, right?

“But they are protected. It’s a protected class and we’ve got to be careful. All right? Now does that mean you have to take them if they’re victims of domestic violence or if they’re in the military or if there’s, you know, if they’re, if they’re gay? No, you just can’t refuse to take them for that reason.”

She urged agents to “stay away” from rentals, and she recommended that agents who list rental apartments hold an open house.

“When you have a room full of people it’s hard for any one of them to say, ‘Oh, you’re discriminating against me,'” she said.

Cremin, of Mobilization for Justice, called Nolan’s discussion of domestic violence “disturbing,” saying that Nolan seemed “against the idea that people, victims of domestic violence, are covered” by fair housing laws.

Tisdale, of the Metropolitan Milwaukee Fair Housing Council, said, “That’s almost, ‘how not to get caught doing something bad’ as opposed to, what to do to make sure everyone has the same information.”

Nolan said she was surprised to hear she spent less than 45 minutes on fair housing when she covered the topic during the afternoon section of her all-day class. She said she has realized she was giving “short shrift” to fair housing, and has moved that instruction to the morning, when students are paying closer attention. She said she now gives the mandated three hours.

“I find it that they’re more alert in the morning. It’s worked out much better,” she said.

On the topic of protections for victims of domestic violence, she said her goal was to help agents understand the perspective of landlords who might fear for their family members’ safety. Landlords are “worried,” she said, but agents “have to understand that these people need housing, and they’re supposed to be protected as well.”

Tisdale said he believes the state should monitor fair housing instruction and “make their own conclusions about whether it meets the requirement.”

Newsday asked the Department of State about its monitoring of continuing education classes from 2016 through 2018. The agency said it monitored four classes in January and February this year, and all were in compliance.

Gigante, who gave three hours of instruction, said in more than 30 years of teaching, “I don’t think the Department of State has ever sat in on any one of my courses, or anybody else’s for that matter, not that I’ve heard of.”

The department licenses agents and is responsible for supervising continuing education of agents and brokers.

– With Mark Harrington

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While searching for homes with prices ranging from $400,000 in the Bay Shore and West Islip area to $7 million on the North Shore Gold Coast, Asian house-hunters met evidence suggesting discrimination less often than black and Hispanic peers in Newsday’s paired testing of real estate agents.

The Asian would-be home buyers – one Chinese American, one Korean American, one South Asian American – participated in 16 tests that measured the service agents gave to them against how the agents helped comparable white buyers.

In all but three, agents provided comparable service to Asian and white house hunters. The three exceptions included evidence that one agent denied equal service to an Asian tester compared with his white counterpart and that two agents provided greater information about communities to white testers – even as the agents disparaged those areas.

None of the tests matching Asian and white buyers showed evidence that agents had steered house hunters to different communities.

At three out of 16 tests, the individual Asians experienced evidence suggesting discrimination 19 percent of the time – a frequency far less then met by black (49 percent) or Hispanic (39 percent) testers.

That rate reflected apparent personal discrimination against Asian testers. Two additional tests suggested possible violations of fair housing standards that restrict agents from volunteering the racial, ethnic or religious makeup of communities to customers. In those two tests, agents pointed out a growing Asian presence in an area to potential white buyers.

“It would probably always be questionable to raise those kinds of matters if the home seeker didn’t ask about them,” said Robert Schwemm, a professor at the University of Kentucky College of Law and authority on the fair housing act, who served as Newsday consultant. “There is clear law that says steering can occur based on statements about racial makeups that are unsolicited by the home seeker.”

Asians made up 6 percent of Long Island’s population in 2017, according to the latest U.S. census estimate.

The majority live in Nassau County, where they are more dispersed than black residents. Half of the Asian population lives in 28 communities, while half of black residents live in just 11.

In Suffolk County, Asians made up 4 percent of the population in 2017 and are most highly concentrated in Stony Brook – thanks mainly to Stony Brook University, where the census counts 45 percent of the population as Asian.

Among all Asians across Long Island, Asian Indians made up 37 percent of the population, followed by Chinese, Koreans and Filipinos.

Asian testers received an average of 18 listings from agents in Newsday’s investigation, compared with 22 for their paired white testers. Collectively, the agents concentrated the listings provided to Asian and white testers in neighborhoods with similar proportions of white residents.

Asians made up 10 percent or more of the population in 59 Long Island communities, or one in every five.

All but eight of those were in Nassau County, from South Floral Park village, where Asians made up 10 percent of the population, to Garden City Park, where Asians made up 44 percent of the community. Hicksville was home to the largest number of Asians, just shy of 10,000.

The number of Asians in Nassau County has grown. Between 1990 and 2017, their proportion of the population has risen from 3 percent to 9 percent, or 123,000 people.

They have become a presence, for example, on the Island’s upscale Great Neck peninsula, home to 41,000 people on almost 10 square miles of land that extends into Long Island Sound near the border between Nassau County and Queens. Multimillion-dollar house prices are common.

Largely composed of people with Chinese and Korean backgrounds, many of them first-generation immigrants, the peninsula’s Asian representation climbed from 7 percent of the population to 18 percent in 2017.

With more than a quarter of the group below the age of 18, the children make up more than one-third of the school-age population. Their addresses channel the students to one of two high schools: Great Neck North, where, according to state statistics, Asians composed 15 percent of the student body in the last school year, and Great Neck South, where the proportion topped half.

At the same time, a peninsula that has long had a strong Jewish representation has drawn a growing number of Orthodox Jews among immigrant families with Iranian, Middle Eastern and Russian heritages.

The two tests that touched on Asian community characteristics occurred in home searches on the Great Neck peninsula, also known as Long Island’s Gold Coast.

Test 10

We got a lot of Chinese, Oriental coming in Great Neck…

Akhtar Somekh

Coldwell Banker

Great Neck

White and Hispanic testers separately consulted Coldwell Banker agent Akhtar Somekh about purchasing $2 million houses in the villages and hamlets that cover the peninsula. Somekh praised the schools but described their racial composition only to white buyer Kimberly Larkin-Battista and not to Hispanic customer Nana Ponceleon.

Speaking of areas served by Great Neck North and Great Neck South High Schools, Somekh told Larkin-Battista:

“Kensington and Great Neck Estates has a choice between North and South. Before it was only South. Recently we got a lot of Chinese, Oriental coming in Great Neck. In the beginning, they start going to South because they have their friends and family, everybody South. And it became overwhelmed.”

Somekh added: “Usually, the great thing about Great Neck is they keep their amount of students smaller than 20. They tried to do it but South school, when it became very crowded, so they gave Kensington and Great Neck a choice of North or South.”

Based on information provided by Newsday, fair housing consultant Fred Freiberg, executive director of the Fair Housing Justice Center, concluded:

“The agent should not have described the racial makeup of a specific high school as being overwhelmed with ‘Orientals, Chinese’ when meeting with the white tester. This negative statement, which was not made to the Hispanic tester, appears to indicate a preference or limitation based on race or possible steering by discouraging the white tester from considering the area served by this school.”

Newsday’s second consultant, Schwemm, found:

“There was a difference in treatment between the white and Hispanic tester in the form of a blatant statement by the agent about the school’s demographics. The statement suggests a possible fair housing violation, with the town/school as potential plaintiff.”

Test 11

We have a lot of Asian people in Great Neck…

Rosalind Resnick

Coldwell Banker

Great Neck

Coldwell Banker agent Rosalind Resnick described both Asians and Orthodox Jews as living in the Great Neck area when speaking with white tester Brittany Silver but not with black tester Martine Hackett as each sought $5 million homes.

Resnick described the area to a white tester as “very mixed, more than it ever was.”

“We have a lot of Orthodox people in Great Neck,” she said. “We have a lot of Asian people in Great Neck. So it is – you know, it’s like that kind of a mixed community, which is …”

“Wonderful,” said white tester Silver.

“… Fine, which is good,” Resnick said, adding, “Nothing bad about any of it, is what I guess what I’m trying to say. They’re all beautiful neighborhoods.”

Shortly, she asked Silver, “Are you religious at all?” Told no, Resnick said, “Well, then that was really my way of asking – because some people are, they were Orthodox, and they want to live near a temple.”

Wrote Schwemm: “What you’re dealing with is an agent who talks about racial and demographic makeups to the white tester and doesn’t mention any of that to the black tester. And that’s inappropriate.

“It would probably always be questionable to raise those kinds of matters if the home seeker didn’t ask about them. There is clear law that says steering can occur based on statements about racial makeups that are unsolicited by the home seeker.

“It’s clearly something she thinks is bonding her to this customer, and it’s unfortunate that she thinks what bonds her to the white customer is demographic information and that she doesn’t think the minority customer is worth bonding with over demographic information.” Freiberg found: “It was inappropriate for the agent to make statements about the racial or religious makeup of a community.

“Such statements are specifically prohibited by the Fair Housing Act. Agents should not make statements that indicate a limitation or preference based on any protected characteristics, including race, national origin and religion.”

Somekh and Resnick showed no evidence of steering in the house suggestions they offered white and minority buyers. Informed by letter of Newsday’s findings, the two agents did not respond to an invitation to view video recordings of their meetings with testers or to follow-up emails and phone calls requesting interviews.

Newsday presented its findings by letter to Charlie Young, president and chief executive officer of Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage. The letter conveyed the actions of Resnick and Somekh and additional Coldwell Banker agents.

The company’s national director of public relations, Roni Boyles, wrote in an emailed statement:

“Incidents reported by Newsday that are alleged to have occurred more than two years ago are completely contrary to our long term commitment and dedication to supporting and maintaining all aspects of fair and equitable housing.

“Upholding the Fair Housing Act remains one of our highest priorities, and we expect the same level of commitment of the more than 750 independent real estate salespersons who chose to affiliate with Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage on Long Island. We take this matter seriously and have addressed the alleged incidents with the salespersons.”

Coldwell Banker declined to discuss the company’s responses to specific cases.

Mimi Hu, a Great Neck Library Board trustee, said she is aware of racial tension in the Great Neck school district. Hu’s son attends the Saddle Rock Elementary School and said she has heard fellow parents make generalizations about Asian students.

Learning that a real estate agent described Asians or “Orientals” as having “overwhelmed” the school district, Hu responded: “I don’t see anyone who would take that lightly.”

The relative equality of service provided to Asian testers when compared with black and Hispanic buyers made evidence suggesting individual discrimination no less stinging.

Following are three case histories that show evidence of the disparate treatment hidden in house hunting by Asians. They are accompanied by the findings of fair housing consultants Fred Freiberg, executive director of the Fair Housing Justice Center, and Robert Schwemm, professor at the University of Kentucky College of Law.

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.

It was the public schools, a symbol of Great Neck’s desirability, and the proximity to Manhattan that drew Karen Ashkenase and her family to the wealthy peninsula on the North Shore of Nassau County in 1979.

Two of her children were enrolled in the local elementary school in Fresh Meadows, Queens, but Ashkenase said she and her husband wanted better for the youngsters.

“The top reason we moved was education,” said Ashkenase, 72. So the family moved to Kensington, one of nine incorporated villages on the Great Neck peninsula.

The Ashkenases, who are Conservative Jews, still live in the same house, while two sons, now grown, have moved off Long Island. A daughter lives in Great Neck.

Nearly half a century later, the Great Neck peninsula’s same attributes brought Sean Shi and his family from Austin, Texas, to the area after his wife accepted a tenure-track position at Farmingdale State College.

Shi, 40, a software engineer in Manhattan who emigrated from China more than a decade ago, and his wife moved into their house in the village of Great Neck Estates in April 2018.

Parents of two girls, a 4-year-old and a 4-month-old, the Shis are part of a growing number of Asians, predominantly Chinese and Koreans, who have settled on the peninsula in the past decade, replacing mostly white and Jewish residents.

The Ashkenases and the Shis represent the changes taking place in Great Neck over the past five decades as people from different backgrounds, looking for the same high quality of life, come to live.

First-generation immigrants from China, Korea, Iran and Russia – each with their own cultural history – live side by side with second-, third- and fourth-generation immigrants from around the world who have assimilated into American culture.

Between 2000 and 2017, Great Neck’s Asian population more than doubled, from 2,657 to 7,347, and they rose from being 7 percent of the population to 18 percent, according to U.S. Census estimates. In 2017, 27.8 percent of Asians were under the age of 18. Meanwhile, the white population decreased from 32,234 in 2000 to 29,904, or from 81 percent to 72 percent. In 2017, only 12 percent of non-Hispanic whites were 18 or younger.

During the same period, the Hispanic population dropped from 6 percent to 3 percent and the black population declined from 4 percent to 3 percent.

The Great Neck peninsula, with more than 41,000 residents, has also seen its population of Orthodox Jews, Iranian Jews ¬- who refer to themselves as Persians – and other Middle Eastern Jews grow, according to local residents interviewed for this story. Bukharian Jews, many of whom immigrated to the United States and settled in Queens after the Soviet Union collapsed, have also moved to the peninsula in recent years, according to residents.

There are at least 20 synagogues, two kosher supermarkets, a kosher butcher shop and more than a dozen kosher food establishments on the peninsula. Great Neck has three mikvahs, indoor pools in which Orthodox Jewish women immerse themselves for ritual purification.

An eruv, a symbolic religious boundary that makes it possible for Orthodox Jewish residents to carry certain items outside their homes and engage in activities such as pushing a stroller on the Sabbath, covers most of the peninsula, except for the village of Lake Success.

In Newsday’s paired testing of real estate agents on Long Island, the population shift in Great Neck was referenced by some agents as they spoke with customers.

“Any community that you live in is going to undergo changes. Things evolve,” said North Hempstead Town Supervisor Judi Bosworth, who moved to the peninsula from Forest Hills in 1980. “I think that Great Neck has become a more diverse community. I think that adds to the strength of the community that there are so many different cultures that are learning from each other.”

The Great Neck peninsula, which is 9.6 square miles, juts into Long Island Sound on the northwestern edge of Nassau, just across from the Queens border.

Great Neck starts south of the Long Island Expressway in the village of Lake Success and stretches all the way to the affluent village of Kings Point, thought to be the inspiration for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s town of West Egg in “The Great Gatsby.”

The peninsula consists of several unincorporated areas in the Town of North Hempstead and nine incorporated villages, each with its own mayor and village trustees. In addition to single-family homes, there are co-ops, condominiums, rental apartments, several senior residential developments and two hotels.

Prices range from $225,000 for a one-bedroom co-op in Great Neck Plaza to $35 million for a waterfront mansion in the village of Kings Point, according to the Multiple Listing Service of Long Island Inc. The median home value is $940,000, according to MLSLI.

A buyer looking for a four-bedroom house will generally pay $1 million or $1.5 million in certain villages such as Kensington, said Hong Guo, also known as Dana, a real estate broker with Keller Williams Realty in Great Neck.

Great Neck has been confronted with changes over the years as different waves of newcomers move to the area, transforming the community each time.

After World War II, Ashkenazi Jews left the city and relocated to Great Neck. In the 1980s, the peninsula was a refuge for Iranian Jews who fled Iran after the country’s monarch was overthrown. As the Persian community grew, they built the Iranian Jewish Center, the North Shore Sephardic Temple and the Mashadi Jewish Center of Great Neck.

Village of Great Neck officials in July approved the site plan of a proposed three-story, 75,000-square-foot Mashadi Jewish community center in a residential neighborhood.

“One of the reasons I moved to Great Neck was because of the growing Persian community in Great Neck,” said Jacqueline Harounian, a lawyer who moved to Kings Point from Old Westbury more than three decades ago. “When I moved to the community, it was much, much smaller. Now it’s much, much larger.”

The latest wave of newcomers, Asians, arrived in greater numbers in the 2000s.

“If you live in Flushing, Bayside or College Point and you’re looking to move to Long Island, the first choice is Great Neck or Jericho,” said Youngsoo Choi, 47, a lawyer who moved from Flushing to Spinney Hill, in Manhasset, a decade ago with his wife and their two school-age children.

Great Neck has one school district, with 6,438 students, that serves the entire peninsula as well as North New Hyde Park and part of Manhasset Hills. The majority of Spinney Hill students attend the district.

Asians made up 12.8 percent of the student population in the Great Neck schools in the 1999-2000 school year, but their ranks had grown to 26 percent a decade later, according to state data. In the 2017-18 school year, 36.6 percent of the district’s students were Asian.

While Asian students made up 15.1 percent of the population in Great Neck North High School in 2017-18, they were the majority, at 53.5 percent, in Great Neck South High School.

In the last decade or so, as Asians move to Great Neck, some said differences between the newcomers and the more established population have led to tensions.

In the 1980s and ’90s, Iranians in Great Neck, who spoke in their native Farsi, stood out among the area’s Ashkenazi Jewish residents.

“Yes, when the Persians moved in, they opened restaurants; they spoke a different language; they looked a little different; their values were a little different. And, I am sure that made a lot of people very uncomfortable,” said Harounian, whose parents emigrated from Iran. “And, yes, you see the same thing happening with the Asian community.”

In Newsday’s real estate investigation, the following 52 tests, which involved 56 agents, complied with fair housing standards.

In another 34 cases, Newsday’s fair housing experts found evidence suggesting fair housing violations including steering and denial of equal service. View those case histories including the experts’ opinions and agents’ responses, if any.

Uniondale’s supporters acknowledge many view their community as a troubled place, but they say those with that perception need to look a little closer.

Sergio Argueta, a longtime community activist and a Uniondale school district social worker, said there are parts of Uniondale where well-kept homes with manicured lawns on quiet streets have been passed down over the generations, while other areas face economic challenges.

He says there exists an invisible line within the community between the north and south sides.

“Uniondale [is] perfectly situated in terms of it being lower, middle and upper classes,” he said.

Longtime Uniondale resident Mary-Ellen Kreye laughed when told of the negative things some people have to say about her community – high crime, poverty, a gang problem.

“They just don’t know a good thing when they see it,” said Kreye, 83, who serves as vice president of the Uniondale Community Council. Kreye has lived in Uniondale since 1966.

“We have a fabulous community where people work together for the betterment of the community, we participate in civic organizations and coordinate and cooperate, we attend town and legislative meetings, our young people do very well all over the world,” she said.

“It’s very interesting, things people say. They see what they want to see.”

Newsday’s paired tester investigation of real estate brokers and agents on Long Island found evidence of steering and disparate treatment toward minority buyers in individual tests. It also uncovered a larger pattern that showed agents avoid sending buyers to predominantly minority communities like Uniondale.

“Uniondale is basically black and now Hispanic,” said Ernie Catanese, a Uniondale resident since 1954. “Some people don’t appreciate that. They want a white neighborhood.”

Uniondale is a sprawling community in southern Nassau County with neighborhoods featuring a variety of home styles: capes, ranches, high ranches and colonials, along with high-density communities for the aged and people with lower incomes. College students attending nearby Hofstra University in Hempstead have plenty of options for rentals.

The community boasts numerous active civic associations, the 65-acre county-owned Purcell Preserve and a huge library.

Uniondale is home to NYCB Live’s Nassau Coliseum and the region’s largest hotel, the Long Island Marriott. That area is now poised for another transformation. In December, the Nassau County Legislature took the first step in pushing forward a plan to transform 72 vacant acres surrounding the coliseum into a housing, office and biotech research development known as the Hub.

Manhattan-based cancer care system Memorial Sloan Kettering in April officially opened its $180 million, 114,000-square-foot cancer facility there.

But the community’s challenges are real. Amid an increase in crime more than a decade ago, Argueta said, the U.S. Department of Justice in 2007 designated Uniondale as a Weed and Seed community. The program attempts to weed out violent crime, gang activity and drugs, then restore the community through prevention, intervention, treatment and social and economic revitalization.

“Unfortunately, we do have some gun violence and gang violence,” Argueta said. “It’s part of the unique challenges that many of our young people are facing. It’s the same young people that live in communities where there are a lack of resources, employment opportunities and positive engagement.”

He said some of the economic adversity faced by Hempstead and Roosevelt to the south also impacts Uniondale and that it brings with it residual effects such as low high school graduation rates. Uniondale High School’s graduation rate in 2018 was 73 percent, while the state average was 80 percent.

But Uniondale has advantages over some other communities, he said.

“It’s predominantly an African American and Latino community,” Argueta said. “But because of all of the businesses, there’s still a high quality of life within the region that doesn’t currently exist in a lot of the other communities that are predominantly of color.”

Kreye, who is white, has fought for years to keep Uniondale diverse, joining with other concerned residents to lobby for the community. She said that when she and her family moved from Hempstead to Uniondale, they found exactly what they were seeking.

“We wanted a diverse community that was integrated like the country is supposed to be, and we felt very lucky to buy in Uniondale,” she said. “We’ve never regretted it.”

Uniondale started off like most other Long Island communities: farmland. But by 1988 there were only two farms left, including the last 3.5 acres of the Goehner Family Farm, which 100 years before had been 17 acres. Now, the only remnant is what used to be the Goehner farm stand, which has been relocated and preserved as a museum.

Uniondale has a notable history dating to the Revolutionary War, when it served as an enlistment center, plus a more recent rich military history that helped shape the community.

Mitchel Field, an Army Air Corps base during World War II, was established in 1917 within the Hempstead Plains, the first known prairie in America. After the war, many of those who lived on the base moved to Uniondale, Kreye said. Because the base was also a source for civilian jobs, it helped the community expand.

Nearby military manufacturers such as Grumman, Fairchild and Republic were a quick commute and made Uniondale attractive.

“It’s a convenient area to live in and it was open,” Kreye said. “The covenants in Levittown, which I still can’t believe, that prevented people from selling their homes to people of color, made Uniondale a welcome option.”

When Catanese and his wife, Marie, moved to Uniondale from Brooklyn in 1954, he wanted an easy commute to his job at Grumman in Syosset. The couple also sought an integrated community with good schools.

They picked Uniondale as a direct rebuke of Levittown’s racist policies.

“We just didn’t want to live like that,” said Ernie Catanese, who is white. “It’s not right.”

While Uniondale was integrated overall, whites lived on the north side of town and black people lived south of Jerusalem Avenue.

Eventually, white flight took off.

“When we moved on our block of 54 homes, there were no black families,” Catanese said.

Now, he says, he and his wife are the last white family. “And that’s fine,” Catanese said. “They’re better neighbors; their lawns look better than ours.”

According to the census in 1960, the resident population was 95 percent white and 5 percent black. By 1990 the numbers were 45 percent white and 46 percent black.

In 2010 the census counted 24,759 residents, with 10 percent white, 47 percent black, 2 percent Asian and 39 percent Hispanic.

In 2017 the total number of residents had grown to 31,597, with 21 percent white, 37 percent black, 3 percent Asian and 35 percent Hispanic, according to the census’ American Community Survey. That survey expanded the Uniondale boundaries to include parts of the community known as East Garden City, which will not be a separate census tract in the 2020 census.

Kreye acknowledges Uniondale was far from perfect. Black children from south of Jerusalem Avenue had to be bused to the north side of town to integrate schools.

She said many of the civic organizations in Uniondale were created to make sure the community got its fair share of government funds for beautification, public works projects and street cleaning as compared to surrounding areas.

After the Korean War, war-related work dried up and people began to leave. Kreye said real estate agents tried to pressure residents into selling their homes, saying the area was becoming unsafe.

She said the community developed a “do-not-solicit” list to keep real estate agents from seeking listings from residents not interested in selling. “I do think that it helped,” Kreye said.

Catanese said he’s aware of his community’s reputation, recounting a story about the family of a suitor of their daughter.

“She said, ‘Where do you live?’ And we said ‘Uniondale,’ and she said ‘ugh,'” Catanese said. “It was very, very upsetting.”

James M. Sharpe III, a former Uniondale school board president who has lived in bordering Hempstead Village for about three decades, said he thinks Uniondale overall has a good reputation.

“There’s a transient population. You worry about overcrowding in houses,” he said.

Kreye, Catanese and Sharpe say the latest demographic change, the growing Hispanic population, just adds to the fabric of a diverse community.

What concerns them all are the things that concern many communities: fear of overdevelopment, traffic, absentee landlords, overcrowded schools.

“The people in this community wants what every other community wants: good schools, good neighbors, safety,” Sharpe said. “It doesn’t matter what the people look like.”

But when told real estate agents avoided showing testers homes in his community as well as other minority neighborhoods, he said he was not surprised.

“People have a predisposition of certain areas of Nassau based on what they hear, what’s in the paper, on radio and TV,” he said. “People’s perceptions become their reality.”

He added that he has noticed that when homes are put on the market in his neighborhood and surrounding communities, they are most often represented by independent brokers who are minorities.

“Not showing homes to house hunters does a disservice to everyone involved,” he said. “There’s nothing going on here that’s not going on in any other neighborhood on Long Island, and I mean that in a good way.”

Argueta said Uniondale is a good community.

“We have some incredible things happening in the community that are positive. Ninety percent of our community is the way that it needs to be,” he said. “Unfortunately, you do have some of the same challenges and issues you find in high poverty areas where there’s a lack of resources and opportunities.”

Thirty-nine times, black men and women engaged with real estate agents as paired undercover testers in Newsday’s investigation. In 19 of those times, the testing suggested they experienced disparate treatment compared with matched white testers. Additionally, one agent warned white and Asian testers to avoid predominantly black communities.

Kelvin Tune, 54, a federal employee, met with nine courteous, professional agents. He had no idea that seven of those meetings produced evidence of unequal service, with one agent in effect shutting him out of considering houses in the bedrock Long Island community of Plainview.

“I wasn’t welcomed to Plainview for her,” said Tune on learning the results of that test.

Johnnie Mae Alston, 65, a retired state worker, had no idea that an agent refused to provide her service on the same terms offered to a white client.

“I would have never known,” Alston said on learning how her experiences as a tester in Newsday’s investigation compared with the experiences of her white counterparts.

Speaking of the real estate agents she met, Alston added: “They make you feel like they are treating you like everybody else. That’s because you don’t see the other side. But once you see the other side, you realize that you aren’t treated that well.”

All these testers – both minority and white – discovered for the first time how their experiences compared when Newsday brought them together for joint interviews.

Testing found evidence that:Black testers experienced unequal treatment
49% of the time

• Newsday’s black testers experienced disparate treatment at higher rates than did Hispanic (39 percent) and Asian testers (19 percent).
• In 11 cases, agents directed black testers to different neighborhoods than white testers in comparisons that showed evidence of steering.
• In five instances, agents imposed conditions on black testers that amounted to the denial of equal service compared with conditions requested of white testers.
• In three cases, agents either spoke about steering to the white tester but not the black tester or volunteered information about the ethnic makeup of communities only to white testers.
• Altogether, agents provided white testers an average of 50 percent more listings than they gave to black counterparts – 39 compared with 26, including instances when agents provided no listings to one tester.

There was no such gap in paired testing for other minorities. Agents gave both Hispanic and white testers an average of 42 listings. Asians received 18 compared with 22 given to white testers.

Limiting choices can help guide buyers toward and away from communities.

“Probably the most powerful tool for steering is through information withholding,” said Jacob Faber, an assistant professor of sociology at New York University who studies segregation.

“So that job as information conveyors is just really important.”

Before the changes driven by the civil rights movement, real estate agents often refused outright to serve black buyers. Today, experts say discrimination more likely takes the form of subtly directing buyers of different backgrounds toward different communities or requiring minorities to overcome higher financial barriers than whites.

Following are four case histories that show evidence of the disparate treatment hidden in house hunting while black on Long Island a half century after passage of the federal Fair Housing Law. They are accompanied by the findings of fair housing consultants Fred Freiberg, executive director of the Fair Housing Justice Center, and Robert Schwemm, professor at the University of Kentucky College of Law.

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.

In 34 cases, Newsday’s fair housing experts found evidence suggesting fair housing violations including steering and denial of equal service. Below are the case histories including the experts’ opinions and agents’ responses, if any.

The opinions are based on Newsday data and do not represent legal conclusions.

In 52 cases, agents complied with fair housing standards. See the list of those agents here.

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

Clustered in northern Suffolk County, more than an hour’s commute by train to Manhattan, Huntington and its adjoining communities have long epitomized Long Island’s suburban lifestyle. There’s a vibrant downtown. There are stately homes on wide leafy streets. There are former beach cottages close to Long Island Sound.

And there is change: The white population has dropped in many census tracts, and the Hispanic population has risen – a phenomenon reflected in house choices by real estate agents in Newsday’s investigation of residential sales practices.

The area emerged as the location most favored by agents for Hispanic house hunters on Long Island. In undercover testing that paired white and Hispanic buyers, agents recommended the Huntington surroundings far more often to the Hispanic testers – even though none asked specifically to live in that area.

In five tests, white and Hispanic house hunters sought $450,000 to $500,000 houses within 20 or 30 minutes of Greenlawn or Northport, two communities within driving distances from downtown Huntington, or a $600,000 house within 30 minutes of Syosset, an area also encompassing Huntington.

Collectively, the agents gave the testers 453 listings, recommending 65 percent of them to the Hispanic house hunters. The listings covered a swath of territory that extended from Plainview and Oyster Bay on the west to Hauppauge and Kings Park on the east.

Among those listings, the agents suggested homes in the core Huntington communities of Huntington, Huntington Station and South Huntington 173 times. Here the concentration of houses recommended to Hispanic buyers hit 84 percent – with no agent providing a majority of listings to a white tester.

The gap in the number of home recommendations made to Hispanic and white buyers in three of the tests was large enough that Newsday’s two fair housing consultants detected evidence suggesting that agents had steered Hispanic buyers into the Huntington area compared with matched white buyers.

These three agents recommended houses in the Huntington area 78 times to Hispanic house hunters and three times to their white counterparts – an imbalance of 96 percent for the Hispanic testers and 4 percent to the white testers.

In contrast, where agents chose Huntington as a place to live in six similar black-white tests, they recommended it to the black buyer 39 percent of the time.

An additional agent, Raj Sanghvi of Century 21, saw Huntington as a no-go zone when white and Asian testers separately sought his help finding $500,000 homes within 30 minutes of Northport.

Based on its ethnic makeup, Sanghvi advised white tester Gabriel Kennedy against considering the community.

“But you don’t want to go there. It’s a mixed neighborhood,” Sanghvi told Kennedy after speaking favorably about the Huntington school district.

When Kennedy asked what Sanghvi meant by “mixed neighborhood,” the agent said he was speaking “residents-wise.”

“You have commercial, you have residential, you have white, you have black, you have Latino, you have Indians, you have Chinese, you have Koreans; everything,” he explained, adding:

“It’s a mini, mini United Nations.”

Sanghvi offered no similar advice to an Asian tester matched with Kennedy. He recommended Huntington to neither man.

Sanghvi did not respond to a letter or email and telephone calls requesting comment.

“If I was a Huntington home owner or public official, the data from your investigation would give me serious pause and I would want to know more about how agents are marketing my community and whether they are affording all populations equal access to home ownership opportunities,” said Fred Freiberg, executive director of the Fair Housing Justice Center, who served as a paid Newsday consultant in designing the investigation and training testers. He was not paid to evaluate test results.

Robert Schwemm served as the second Newsday fair housing consultant and was not paid. Newsday counted tests as suggesting evidence of fair housing violations only when both Schwemm and Freiberg independently stated such an opinion based on information provided by Newsday.

Referring only to the tests that suggested evidence of steering, Schwemm concluded:

“Taken as a group, the three Hispanic-white tests with listings in the Huntington area show a meaningful, even stark, pattern of Hispanic steering to Huntington-area towns (and white and perhaps others) being steered away.”

Huntington, Huntington Station and South Huntington seamlessly connect but possess distinct characteristics.

Downtown Huntington is alive with restaurants, bars and a concert venue, The Paramount, that in 2018 was ranked the fifth best club concert venue in the world by a trade magazine.

The community has an independent movie theater and bookstore. A historical marker memorializes a tavern where George Washington stopped to thank Revolutionary-era patriots. The area is often referred to as a village, although it is not legally designated as such.

The population breaks down 86 percent white, 9 percent Hispanic, 1 percent black and 3 percent Asian.

Route 25A, known as Main Street, is replete with hometown touches such as a toy store and artisanal ice cream and chocolate shops. The road has served as a dividing line in Huntington between north and south, wealth and working class.

To live north of this east-west thoroughfare means to enjoy proximity to Long Island Sound, where a picturesque harbor is filled with boats during the summer and hosts a holiday boat parade in December.

Waterfront residential communities are mixed with neighborhoods filled with stately homes. The area boasts private yachting clubs and the Huntington Country Club.

Just east from downtown, neighborhoods run the gamut from small former beach cottages to neighborhoods with large properties on wide, leafy streets. The members-only Huntington Crescent Club is nestled among the streets. Private beaches related to homeowner associations add an air of exclusivity for those who make their homes north of Route 25A.

Huntington Station is to the south. There is a Long Island Rail Road stop, as well as the birthplace of poet Walt Whitman. A shopping mall bears his name and features such high-end shops as Saks Fifth Avenue.

The community has long been the center of the area’s working class and minorities and has a growing Hispanic presence.

In 1980 the white population was 88 percent. By 2017 the number had dropped to 48 percent, while the Hispanic proportion of residents rose from 5 percent to 38 percent.

Longtime residents trace a decline in Huntington Station to 1966, when a never-completed, so-called urban renewal program demolished a grocery store, bank, movie theater and other indicators of a robust downtown. Eventually the area saw construction of some low-income and affordable housing but few commercial services.

In 1998, officials approved a site where day laborers could gather for hire, an idea many residents opposed. It was eventually closed. Because of rising crime, Suffolk County police posted surveillance cameras on some Huntington Station streets in 2008. Still, partly propelled by gang activity, crime rose.

From 2008 to June 2010, the community recorded 311 violent crimes, a number proportionally higher than in the surrounding neighborhoods. From 2011 through 2012, overall crime climbed 11.2 percent, while police arrested dozens of alleged gang members.

Against that backdrop, parents who lived north of Route 25A objected to having their children attend the Jack Abrams School, located in Huntington Station close to two public housing complexes.

After a shooting near the school parking lot in the summer of 2010, the school board voted to close the school for instruction but maintained after-school activities and a summer camp for children of low-income families. Eventually, the board gave parents the option of registering children in a magnet school there from fourth through sixth grade.

Still, over a 12-month period beginning in 2013 there were four murders in Huntington Station, including that of Maggie Rosales, 18, who was killed by her neighbor.

In September 2017, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said he would deploy state troopers to 10 of the “highest risk” schools in Suffolk County to stop gangs from recruiting. Huntington High School was on the list, upsetting many in the community.

South and west of Huntington Station is South Huntington, a community that shares its ZIP code with Huntington Station but identifies differently with its own school and library districts. Its demographics are different as well: 81 percent white, 10 percent Hispanic, 2 percent black, 7 percent Asian.

South Huntington has a mix of home styles and residential communities as well as the heavily commercial Jericho Turnpike running through from east to west. There is often confusion on where South Huntington begins and where Huntington Station ends.

Willie Perez is treasurer at Huntington Station’s Iglesia Luz de Salvacion, the oldest Spanish language church in Huntington. The congregation has expanded to need a second location.

“The Hispanic community is growing beyond Huntington Station,” he said.

Julio Hernandez, a real estate agent with an office in the heart of Huntington Station, said he has seen the beginning of the town’s transformation on his own Huntington street. When he moved to his block of 14 houses in 2001, his was the first Hispanic family, he said. Now there are five, including his next-door neighbor, to whom he helped sell the house.

“We don’t want to go where we’re not welcome,” he said. “Here you have a good, thriving Hispanic community with a sense of community and the chance to be close to relatives.”

Hispanics’ movement into more expensive parts of town confirms their growing economic power, he said. “We look for nice neighborhoods, good schools and to be good neighbors,” he said. “We’re like everyone else.”

The agents in the five tests that matched Hispanic and white testers recommended houses in 18 Huntington census tracts, covering Huntington, Huntington Station, South Huntington and Halesite.

They placed their selections for both customers in areas that averaged 72 percent white, choosing listings that would spread the Hispanic population beyond Huntington Station. At the same time, when agents selected Huntington Station they offered listings there almost exclusively to Hispanic buyers.

Following are three case histories that show evidence of the disparate treatment hidden in house hunting in in the area around Huntington. They are accompanied by the findings of fair housing consultants Freiberg and Schwemm.

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.

Consider the home choices offered by Signature Premier Properties agent Ann Pizaro when white and Hispanic testers sought $600,000 homes within 30 minutes of Syosset, where Pizaro was based.

The agent suggested 18 listings to white tester Kimberly Larkin-Battista, all of them in nearby Plainview and Syosset. For Hispanic tester Nana Ponceleon, Pizaro chose seven listings in those communities plus 58 listings that were seven miles away in the Huntington census tracts.

Of the homes she chose for Ponceleon in Huntington, 14 were north of Route 25A, an area that traditionally is overwhelmingly white but is changing. Her home selections were in census tracts where the white population has decreased 8 percentage points to 85 percent from 2000 to 2017, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Watch videos of the test

In another paired test, Ashley Creary, using the name Eve Lopez, asked Century 21 agent Meghan Tello in June 2016 for help looking for a house of up to $500,000 within 30 minutes of her husband’s job in Greenlawn.

Creary said she was a child counselor at a school in Queens but that the commute wouldn’t bother her. Tello gave Creary 29 listings, 12 of which were in Huntington.

Three of those homes were north of Route 25A.

Less than a month later, white tester Lizzy Lee visited Tello, also seeking a $500,000 house within 30 minutes of Greenlawn, where she said her mother was in a nursing home near the Huntington Station border. Tello gave Lee 34 listings; one was in Huntington, and two were in South Huntington.

Even though the white tester mentioned a nursing home that’s on the far west side of Greenlawn, Tello placed most of her listings further to the east in Greenlawn (66 percent white), Northport (93 percent white) and Commack (88 percent white).

The Hispanic tester mentioned that her husband worked for a company in the center of Greenlawn, yet she received a dozen listings in Huntington to the west. Outside Huntington, the pattern of listings provided to the white and Hispanic testers was similar.

Watch videos of the test

In a third case, Douglas Elliman Realtor Michele Friedman sent a Hispanic tester nine listings in Huntington, including three north of Route 25A, but sent no Huntington listings to a white tester with matching search terms: a home for $475,000 within 20 minutes of Northport.

White tester Steven Makropoulos visited Friedman in April 2017. He said his mother-in-law lived in the Dawn Hill Manor residential care facility in Northport, approximately five miles east of Huntington.

He advised Friedman that his wife worked in Downtown Brooklyn and would likely take the train to work. He said he was a bathroom installer headquartered in New York City but that he was looking to join a company on Long Island.

Friedman recommended Northport, East Northport and Centerport, all east of Huntington. She also asked whether Makropoulos would consider Kings Park, about 10 miles east of Huntington. He said he would be open to it.

Friedman gave Makropoulos 40 listings, starting in Centerport on Huntington’s eastern border and heading farther east as far as Kings Park.

She never mentioned Huntington as a place to live Makropoulos. None of her suggested listings was in Huntington

Hispanic tester Jesus Rivera, using the name Jose Montes, met Friedman less than three weeks later looking for a $475,000 home within 20 minutes of his wife’s job at the Northport VA Medical Center, located about seven miles east of Huntington.

Rivera said he worked in Manhattan but wasn’t concerned about his own commute. Referring to his wife, he told Friedman: “I want to make her commute easier. Like for my job, it’s much more flexible. I can come in like certain days of the week to work at the lab.”

Friedman gave Rivera 28 listings, nine of which were in Huntington and the rest to the east, but none as far east as Kings Park. She mentioned the name of Huntington 11 times in their conversation.

Watch videos of the test

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

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Federal, state and local laws bar real estate agents from steering home buyers – that is, guiding purchasers to communities based on race or ethnicity – yet national studies show the practice has grown increasingly common over the past three decades.

Why would real estate agents do that?

Civil rights measures enacted starting in the 1960s “made explicit discrimination in the housing arena and in other arenas of American life illegal,” said Jacob Faber, an assistant professor of sociology at New York University who studies segregation.

“But the effect of that was to push a lot of these practices underground, from the in-your-face signs outside communities saying ‘whites only’ to subtler forms of exclusion.”

As part of its examination of home-sale practices on Long Island, Newsday conducted paired testing of real estate agents, in which white and minority testers posed as comparably qualified homebuyers to find out whether agents would treat them differently. In nearly a quarter of the tests, agents directed whites and minorities into differing communities through house listings that experts said showed evidence of steering.

Across the country, some real estate agents engage in illegal steering, either due to bias or for reasons ranging from a misguided urge to “help” buyers and sellers to a desire to maximize sales and boost commission income, scholars who study housing bias say.

“You’re almost never going to get someone, in person or in an email or over the phone, saying, ‘we don’t rent or don’t sell to black or Latino people,'” Faber said. Rather, the ways real estate agents discriminate against minorities include “talking about housing values to certain people but not to other people, or the ways they talk about schools and what’s a good school,” he said.

Faber said, “We as a society have created this whole vocabulary that talks about race without talking about race.”

In a 2017 research paper, “Investigating the Relationship Between Real Estate Agents, Segregation, and House Prices: Steering and Upselling in New York State,” Faber and coauthor Max Besbris wrote that real estate agents have strong incentives to steer customers by race and that doing so perpetuates racial differences in the accumulation of wealth.

The researchers interviewed 45 New York State real estate agents for the study, withholding the agents’ names. Some agents acknowledged steering customers, saying that’s what buyers and sellers want.

Faber said when his white co-author would interview real estate agents, “he would say something purposely on the nose, like, ‘how does race enter the conversation with clients?'”

The agents “would say, ‘we don’t do that, that’s illegal.’ Then he would say, ‘c’mon,’ and they would basically spill the beans at that point,” Faber said.

The study quotes one agent who said in certain Brooklyn neighborhoods, homeowners “don’t want to sell” to black buyers, and “it’s not really worth it to push.”

An agent in Buffalo pointed to “self-segregation” in the city and said, “I’m not imposing my opinion about neighborhoods, but if someone tells me what they want, I think I can help them make a selection about where to look.”

The study quotes an agent who said, “race definitely plays a part in how we show homes.” The agent said his boss asks if clients are “good people,” and coworkers “clued me in about what that means.”

In a class on fair-housing law offered by the Long Island Board of Realtors in October, instructor and former board president Donald Scanlon said buyers often drive agents to make tough choices.

In the 1900s, he said, steering “meant bringing people of color to one side of town or to a mixed side of town and bringing people who are white to the white side of town.”

Now, he said, the prohibited practice means “helping people make choices on where to live based on who they are or who lives in the area.”

“Here is our dilemma: Do buyers want to know who their neighbors are going to be? Absolutely,” he said, adding: “Not just their immediate neighbors but who lives in the area. That’s an important factor in them making their decision whether to buy or not. And we can’t help them with that. But yet we’re asked all the time.”

Later, he told the agents: “This is a major thing that people want to know, and this is why we are so easy to get. We are so easy to be entrapped” into a steering violation.

Asked to explain what he meant by “entrapped,” Scanlon said in an interview that buyers often ask agents to engage in conduct that he views as steering.

“The agents today are faced with that dilemma,” Scanlon said. “Do they do what the buyers ask them to do and potentially violate the law, or are they very rigid? And then [buyers] will say, ‘Well, you know, so and so would show me. So why aren’t you showing me? What do I need you for?’ This is what we’re facing.”

He added, “That’s how easy it is for agents to get entrapped.”

Even when white or minority homebuyers don’t say they’re seeking a community with a particular racial mix, some agents may believe they are catering to the buyers’ unspoken preferences, fair-housing researchers say.

Or agents might assume that minority buyers prefer to live in communities where their neighbors come from similar backgrounds – in spite of research showing that most minority home seekers want the best house they can buy for their money, in the best school district they can afford.

In a survey of African Americans living on Long Island, most said they wanted to live in a community with low crime, well-maintained homes, high-quality schools and good services, and nearly all said they would prefer to live in a community that is racially mixed, the Syosset-based group ERASE Racism reported in 2012.

Housing discrimination also can arise when an agent makes assumptions about a particular homebuyer based on race, whether consciously or not.

Real estate agents “routinely assume that black and Hispanic buyers and sellers are low income, they don’t know a lot about the buying and selling process and so on,” said Elizabeth Korver-Glenn, an assistant professor at the University of New Mexico who studies racial inequality in for-sale and rental housing markets.

Korver-Glenn said she interviewed dozens of agents in Houston, Texas, some of whom made negative comments about black and Hispanic customers.

“The stereotypes of agents themselves are pervasive,” she said.

In some cases, agents might seek to accommodate what they believe is the bias of local homeowners, since agents rely heavily on referrals to build their networks, Korver-Glenn said.

“There are these incentives that agents have to at least accommodate discrimination, if not directly engage in it,” Korver-Glenn said. In some cases, she said, when a home seller expresses racial bias to an agent, the agent will “coach them on how to avoid being racist in public.”

Agents believe that “if they cut ties with that person, that person is just going to go find somebody from the competition.” Then, she said, “the agent that cut ties with them has lost not only their business but has lost all the business that client could have brought them.

“So essentially, by accommodating that racism … they’re showing that they can be trusted and they’re banking on that trust to be able to continue building their business.”

In addition, some agents fear that if they bring minority buyers to predominantly white communities, certain white neighbors might get angry with the agents for allowing the area to become more racially diverse, said John Yinger, a professor of economics and public administration at Syracuse University who studies discrimination.

“If you’re a real estate broker and you want to preserve your reputation with whites, you don’t want to be seen as somebody who introduces black people to a white neighborhood,” Yinger said.

In a 2015 research paper he co-authored, Yinger analyzed massive federal studies of agents’ behavior toward whites and minorities with equivalent qualifications. Every decade, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development conducts national studies utilizing paired testing.

Yinger found the incidence of racial steering – including agents’ recommending and showing fewer homes in whiter areas to black and Hispanic buyers – increased in federal studies from 1989 to 2000 and kept rising through the most recent study in 2012, even as other forms of housing discrimination declined.

Discrimination by real estate agents was higher in areas with greater proportions of white residents and more owner-occupied homes, Yinger found in his analysis of federal data and reviews of previously published papers.

Black home seekers were significantly more likely than Asian or Hispanic customers to experience steering and other forms of bias, and men and younger buyers faced more bias than women and older buyers, Yinger’s 2015 study found.

“A real estate broker hangs up a sign somewhere and hopes people come to visit,” Yinger said. “And if he is perceived to be somebody who does not have the community’s interests at heart, people are not going to visit.”

The impact on minority homebuyers is not merely that they are being steered away from the whitest areas.

In federal paired-testing studies, minority buyers were more likely to be shown houses near sites on the federal Superfund pollution list, said Peter Christensen, a professor of economics at the University of Illinois and an author of a 2018 National Bureau of Economic Research study analyzing HUD’s most recent paired tests.

Testing shows that real estate agents also are more likely to show minority buyers homes with lower-performing schools, higher crime rates and fewer economic opportunities, Christensen said.

When real estate agents steer minority and white buyers to different areas, they help exacerbate racial inequalities in children’s lifelong educational attainment, earnings, health and likelihood of encountering violence, Christensen said.

Due in part to steering by real estate agents, Christensen said, minority home buyers are still “being systematically excluded from high opportunity neighborhoods.”

Real estate agents who engage in discriminatory practices might not realize they are doing so.

“Most people are aware now that it is inappropriate to say, ‘you can’t live in X neighborhood because you belong to Y racial group,’ but they might limit the choices that people have” by offering certain listings to white buyers but not to minorities, said Ian Wilder, executive director of Long Island Housing Services, a fair-housing group.

Those limits could be “based on what they might even perceive as in somebody’s best interest, that they would be more comfortable living in one community rather than the other,” instead of simply heeding the buyers’ request for, say, a $350,000 three-bedroom home in the Town of Babylon, Wilder said.

Even if bias against bringing a buyer to a particular neighborhood is not deliberate, Wilder said, it’s a choice that the real estate agent “shouldn’t be making.”

After all, he said, “location is one of the biggest determinants of quality of life.”