Category: Long Island

The investigative team explains

Long Islanders’ Stories

Veteran denied a Levittown home

Long Island’s most diverse school

She was forced out of her Rockville Centre home

No house hunter asked specifically to live in three Long Island communities where white residents dominate the population – but seven real estate agents specifically suggested them almost exclusively to white potential buyers during Newsday’s investigation.

Merrick, Levittown and Rockville Centre in Nassau County emerged in the testing as places that these agents overwhelmingly chose for the white customers but not for their matching, paired minority home seekers. The makeup of the communities ranges from 75 percent white to 88 percent white.

The agents’ choices matched the demographics of the towns: The seven gave their white customers 13 times more listings in the communities than they provided to matching minority buyers. Two suggested homes there only to their white customers.

In all seven tests, Newsday’s two 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 – independently detected evidence of steering.

Real estate agents engage in steering, which is outlawed under the Fair Housing Act, by encouraging members of racial or ethnic groups to consider particular neighborhoods and discouraging others based on race, ethnicity or religion.

While meeting with the seven agents, Newsday testers – one white, the other black, Hispanic or Asian – posed as first-time buyers who were considering a general location rather than a precise neighborhood.

For example, they asked for help finding $600,000 houses within an hour’s commute to Manhattan, $450,000 houses within 30 minutes of Garden City or $500,000 properties within a half-hour of Bethpage.

Following protocols used in paired testing by government-sponsored fair housing enforcement investigations, the testers were matched by qualities such as gender, age and education and presented comparable personal profiles and home-search criteria.

The territories covered by the requests gave the agents authority to recommend houses in communities whose demographics ranged widely. Those varied from 97 percent black and Hispanic Roosevelt to 23 percent Asian Hicksville to 88 percent white Merrick.

When white and minority buyers are matched and make comparable requests for help finding houses, agents should, in theory, give them roughly similar listings to consider in comparable places. Wide disparities could show evidence of racial or ethnic steering.

All things being equal, a map of the listings an agent suggested to paired testers would distribute the listings evenly across an area.

Agents did, in fact, recommend houses to white, black, Hispanic and Asian testers at similar levels in some communities.

Consider, for example, Bellmore, Wantagh, Seaford, Massapequa and Massapequa Park, five communities that stretch six miles along the South Shore. Their populations are 85 percent to 90 percent white. All told, 22 agents located 616 listings in those communities, distributing the listings between white and minority buyers in roughly similar numbers.

As one example, 12 agents suggested 114 Wantagh listings, giving 57 percent to white customers and 43 percent to matching minority buyers. As another, 14 agents suggested 273 Massapequa listings, giving 42 percent to white customers and 58 percent to matching minority buyers.

Coldwell Banker Residential agent Robert Stiles suggested comparable numbers of homes in the South Shore communities to white and minority testers when the testers, one white, the other Asian, sought his help finding $450,000 homes within a half-hour of Hempstead. Stiles did not respond to multiple requests for an interview.

Based in Bellmore, Stiles recommended two listings in Wantagh to each customer, while also pointing out three Bellmore listings to the white customer and two to the Asian house hunter.

In seven tests:Agents placed 94% of the listings for Merrick, Levittown and Rockville Centre with white house hunters

In contrast, seven agents provided listings that favored white over minority house hunters in Merrick, Levittown and Rockville Centre.

Separated by as few as five miles and as many as 12, Merrick, Rockville Centre and Levittown sit at the points of a triangle in the middle of Long Island’s South Shore.

The three have been solid places to invest in housing: Home values appreciated at least 3.4 percent per year since 1990, a rate faster than experienced in two-thirds of Long Island’s communities, according to a Newsday analysis of the Federal Housing Finance Agency price index.

Although similar in demographics, they have distinct characters and histories.

Rockville Centre offers a close-in commute to New York City on the Long Island Rail Road’s Babylon branch and is home to the imposing edifice of St. Agnes Cathedral, the seat of Long Island’s Roman Catholic diocese. Single-family houses, ranging from Capes to rambling Tudors, line leafy streets. The school district touts that 91 percent of the 2018 high school graduates earned a Regents diploma with advanced designation.

Almost one in five of the district’s students is black or Hispanic. While the minority children are dispersed throughout the schools, white and minority families live largely in separate areas. Most black residents are clustered in attached housing in a corner of the village close to the train tracks, a legacy of bitterly fought, so-called urban renewal that bulldozed a historic black settlement a half century ago.

Merrick is a prosperous community that boasts highly rated schools, access to the South Shore bayfront and a drive of less than 10 minutes to Jones Beach. Its median household income is almost $140,000 – roughly one-third higher than the Nassau County median. A significant Jewish population supports four synagogues, and there is a thriving Catholic parish.

While Merrick is largely homogenous, with a population that is 88 percent white, its western boundary, the Meadowbrook Parkway, sits like a barrier to two overwhelmingly minority communities, Roosevelt and Freeport.

To the northeast, the concrete slabs on which William Levitt built 17,000 tract houses on farmland in the late 1940s that became Levittown formed a crucial foundation for the construction of suburban Long Island.

His legacy today is a place in which many homes have been expanded, families stay through generations and the community takes pride in the strength of its schools, the bustle of its library and recreation facilities that include eight pools.

Levitt’s legacy also includes Levittown’s identity as an overwhelmingly white community due to covenants barring blacks that Levitt wrote into his initial deeds. While diversity has increased, with growing Hispanic and Asian representations, Levittown’s share of African Americans still hovers at roughly 1 percent.

In the seven tests cited as showing evidence of steering into and away from Merrick, Levittown and Rockville Centre, agents recommended 156 listings in the three communities – placing 93 percent of the listings with white house hunters.

An additional 13 agents also selected listings in Merrick, Levittown and Rockville Centre. Although these agents directed 71 percent of these listings to white buyers, Newsday’s consultants said differences in the placement of listings given to white and minority testers were not large enough to show patterns of steering.

Cumulatively, the 20 agents provided 82 percent of their Merrick, Levittown and Rockville Centre listings to white home buyers – a figure roughly in line with the white makeup of the three towns.

Two paired tests conducted over a three-month period in 2017 illustrate the imbalances that came into play in Levittown and Merrick as agents recommended homes for white and Hispanic buyers in both communities.

In one of the tests, white and Hispanic buyers asked Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage agent Maria Vermeulen for help finding $475,000 houses within 30 minutes of Hempstead.

Vermeulen, who was based in Massapequa Park, recommended 28 homes in Levittown and seven homes in Merrick to the white buyer. She offered no homes in either community to the Hispanic buyer.

Instead, she pointed the Hispanic buyer east to Wantagh, Seaford and Massapequa, which are among the predominantly white communities where agents provided roughly equal listings to white and minority testers. She also suggested homes there to the white buyer.

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

“The selection of home listings by the agent raises concern about possible steering. Although the agent selected many home listings for both testers in predominantly white areas, only the white tester received listings in the predominantly white areas of Levittown and Merrick.”

Consultant Robert Schwemm found that the 7-0 gap in the listings that Vermeulen provided in Merrick to the white and Hispanic testers “is large enough to make out a case of pro-white steering to Merrick.” Similarly, he judged that the 28-0 difference in Levittown “is large enough to make out a case of pro-white steering to Levittown.”

There, he added: “The conduct seems to violate the Fair Housing Act vis-a-vis Levittown, potentially producing claims by both the minority testers and the town.”

Newsday sent Vermeulen a letter detailing the findings of the tests, invited her by letter and email to view video recordings of her interactions with testers and requested an interview. She did not respond to the letter and email or to a later telephone message seeking comment.

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

In the second test that entailed Merrick and Levittown listings, white and Hispanic house hunters relied on Century 21 agent Gina Minutoli for assistance in seeking $500,000 homes within an hour of Manhattan.

The agent, based in East Meadow, gave the white buyer 22 choices in Levittown and 19 in Merrick while providing the Hispanic customers with no Levittown possibilities, plus three Merrick listings to consider.

Instead, Minutoli directed the Hispanic buyer to Bellmore, Wantagh, East Meadow and Westbury, while also providing the white buyer with choices in those areas.

Freiberg concluded that the selection of listings in both Levittown and Merrick “raises concerns about possible steering.”

Schwemm saw “pro-white steering” to Merrick and Levittown in both tests and said more generally, “These tests taken together show a clear pattern of pro-white steering to Merrick.”

Newsday detailed the findings to Minutoli by letter, invited her by letter and email to view video recordings of her interactions with testers and requested an interview. She, along with a fellow agent and branch manager reviewed Newsday’s video recording and listings maps, but none of them commented at the time.

More than a month later when Newsday reached out to her for a comment, Minutoli said: “I had gotten an email from someone. It’s extremely unfounded. It’s so untrue. I was told by everyone not to comment. It’s sad, that’s all I’m going to say. It’s so not me.”

Similar imbalances in listings offered in Levittown in one test (18 for a white buyer, three for a black buyer) and in two tests in Merrick (six for a white buyer, two for a black buyer; and 15 for a white buyer, two for a Hispanic buyer) prompted Freiberg and Schwemm to detect possible evidence of pro-white steering.

Both were offered multiple listings in mostly white Levittown

A single agent, who showed no evidence of providing disparate treatment or steering, accounted for two-thirds of the listings provided to minority house hunters in Levittown. Ethiel Melicio of Century 21 Catapano Homes gave 60 Levittown listings to his white customer, while also providing a substantial number – 23 – to his black client in searches for $500,000 homes within a half-hour of Bethpage.

Newsday presented its findings by letter to Michael Miedler, president and chief executive officer of Century 21 Real Estate LLC. The letter covered the actions of Minutoli, Melicio and additional Century 21 agents. Miedler and Melicio did not respond to requests for comment.

Collectively, six agents recommended homes to buyers in Rockville Centre. Two of the tests showed evidence of steering, the consultants said.

In one of those tests, black and white house hunters asked Coach Realtors agent Mary Weille to recommend homes priced at up to $600,000 in neighborhoods within an hour commute of Manhattan.

Weille stressed to both buyers that their budgets would not stretch far in her home base of Garden City because most homes were more expensive than $600,000. She suggested five house listings in sections of Rockville Centre that averaged 83 percent white to the white buyer.

Weille did not mention Rockville Centre to the black customer and offered no home possibilities there.

According to Zillow, more than two dozen Rockville Centre houses were listed as available within the price range on the date when the black customer met with Weille.

In the second test cited as showing evidence of steering in Rockville Centre, Coach Realtors agent Jayne McGratty Armstrong responded to white and black buyers seeking $600,000 houses within an hour of Manhattan. She offered 18 houses there to the white buyer and only one to the black customer. At the same time, she provided the white buyer with 14 choices in Merrick and none to the black customer.

Both McGratty and Weille work for Coach Realtors. Newsday detailed the test findings by letter, invited them by letter and email to view video recordings of their interactions with testers and requested interviews. Neither responded.

Three leaders of Coach Realtors – Georgianna Finn, the firm’s founder, Lawrence Finn, a company owner, and Whitney LaCosta, principal and broker of record – viewed Newsday’s video recordings and listings maps. They declined to comment.

– With Rachelle Blidner, Bart Jones, Deborah S. Morris and Carol Polsky

Watch videos of the tests

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

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Pedro Jimenez expected to find evidence of some discrimination as a Hispanic searching for a home on Long Island. He found more than he imagined as a member of the Island’s largest minority group.

Jimenez asked eight real estate agents for help buying houses as a paired tester in Newsday’s investigation of discrimination in real estate sales. Five of the eight tests produced evidence that agents had subjected Jimenez to unequal treatment when compared with his white counterparts.

“It is alarming. It is crazy,” he said. “It’s 2018, I cannot stress that enough – this is 50 years after the civil rights marches. I remember all sorts of people saying, well, we’re post racial, we voted a black president. No, we’re not. Obviously, we are not.”

Jimenez, 45, is a computer and internet professional who was born in the Dominican Republic.

As a boy of 5, he followed his mother to immigrate legally to the United States. He grew up in the Corona section of Queens, attended New York City public schools and helped his mother earn income by making belts in the family’s apartment.

Jimenez also remembers that the social surroundings taught him to distinguish between light-skinned and dark-skinned fellow Hispanics, those of darker tones being looked down upon.

The milieu also included attitudes toward women and gays that he long ago grew to consider backwards.

“I’ve been everything. I’ve been the misogynist. I’ve been the racist. I’ve been the homophobe. Over time I just came to learn almost in evolutionary steps there is no basis for those things,” Jimenez said. “You don’t know these people, how can you cast this light on people you don’t know? And not only that, but by having this view I am causing this suffering.”

That evolution, Jimenez believes, outpaced the attitudes of real estate agents he encountered as an undercover tester.

“What this says to the Latino population is that, clearly, you’re going to be steered, especially if you leave yourself at the mercy of the agent,” he said.

Latinos compose 18 percent of the Island’s population, according to 2017 census estimates, followed by blacks at 9 percent and Asians at nearly 7 percent. They are spread widely, with 90 percent of the population living in 120 of the Island’s 291 communities. The United States Census Bureau defines Hispanics and Latinos as people of Cuban, Mexican, Puerto Rican, South or Central American or other Spanish culture or origin regardless of race.

Jimenez was one of five Hispanic testers who went undercover in Newsday’s investigation.

They engaged with agents representing 12 of the Island’s largest brokering firms in offices located from Massapequa Park, Brentwood and East Hampton on the South Shore to Great Neck and Northport on the North Shore. Using aliases with Hispanic surnames, they said they were looking for houses with prices that ranged from $400,000 to $3 million.

All told, Newsday’s:five Hispanic testers met evidence of disparate treatment
39% of the time

Jimenez, Ashley Creary, Nana Ponceleon, Liza Colpa and Jesus Rivera went house hunting 31 times while paired with matching white testers. Twelve of the tests showed evidence that agents:

• Provided the group 12 percent fewer listings than the white buyers in those tests, with the gap larger in the overwhelmingly white communities of Rockville Centre, Oceanside, Roslyn, Levittown, Merrick and Kings Park. There, the agents gave white testers seven times more homes to consider than they provided to matching Hispanic testers.
• Focused Hispanic testers on houses in 18 census tracts in the Town of Huntington that took in the downtown area, then stretched north to Halesite and south to Huntington Station, South Huntington and West Hills. They picked listings in these areas for Hispanic testers at double the rate they did for white buyers. Eleven of the 18 tracts show growing Hispanic populations.
• In one case, imposed more stringent requirements on a Hispanic tester than a white buyer, amounting to a denial of equal service, according to evaluations by Newsday’s fair housing consultants.

Following are three case histories showing evidence that Hispanic house hunters experienced disparate treatment, along with the findings of Newsday’s fair housing consultants Fred Freiberg and Robert 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Listen to the Newsday and Levittown podcast: A paper’s crusade and a history of discrimination
in LI’s foundational suburb

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

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

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

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

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

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

An acknowledgment: Newsday missed a critical chance to lead

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Elmont also saw a dramatic racial swing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

They were wary through their first nights there.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Source: New York State Education Department, 2017-18

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

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

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

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

– With Ann Choi

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Test 106

I sold my nephew a house, him and his bride. I said … ‘Do you really want your future children going to Amityville school districts?’

Joy Tuxson

RE/MAX

East Meadow

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The boundary was key to some agents.

Test 76

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

Margaret Petrelli

Realty Connect USA agent

Levittown

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Longtime residents recall intense resistance to integration.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Watch videos of the tests

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

– With Rachelle Blidner

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

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

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

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

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

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

Otherwise, you may live on the West Side.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He said he would not buy a home there.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“We do not do any testing.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Despite the increased communication, the process remains complex.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ben Art did not respond to requests for comment.

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

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

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

The other six complaints are pending, officials said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

– With Mark Harrington

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Watch videos of the tests

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was close, but pancakes won.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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