Serving as gatekeepers to homes, schools and communities, some real estate agents made the key to the front door easier to reach for whites than for minorities.
Typically, these agents provided ready service to white customers they encountered in Newsday’s investigation, offering homes to consider and conducting house tours while taking on faith that the white house hunters had the financial capability to purchase.
In contrast, they denied similarly full service to minority customers, refusing to provide listings or tours unless the customers showed proof of financial capability.
In seven of Newsday’s 86 paired tests – 8 percent – the agents’ conduct produced evidence of unequal treatment amounting to the denial of equal service to minorities.
Black buyers experienced the evident denials most frequently – in five of the tests. One tester was Hispanic. One was Asian.
The five tests that produced evidence of the denial of equal service to black testers occurred among 39 black-white tests – a rate of almost 13 percent.
No agent in any test placed greater obstacles in front of a white buyer than a matched minority customer.
Posing as first-time home buyers, white and minority testers separately asked agents to start their searches by suggesting house listings and by providing tours of properties for sale. No agent flatly refused service to anyone.
Instead, seven agents imposed conditions on minority buyers that were seemingly reasonable until matched against service they provided to white buyers.
One condition involved securing preapproval or prequalification for a mortgage loan. Preapproval certifies that a lender has found a buyer creditworthy up to a certain amount based on a credit check and documentation submitted by the buyer. Prequalification indicates that a lender has preliminarily offered a similar judgment without yet conducting a full financial review.
Another condition entailed granting an agent the exclusive right to represent a buyer. Exclusive broker’s agreements stipulate that an agent will be a buyer’s sole representative and typically guarantee that the agent will be paid a commission, either from the proceeds of a sale or directly by a buyer.
The law permits agents to employ both stipulations equally with all customers. But it bars agents from imposing them only on members of one group and not another.
One example: Although a black customer told Laffey Real Estate agent Nancy Anderson, “My uncle is actually a loan officer so we crunched the numbers with him,” Anderson refused to provide house tours, emailing, “I need to have the preapproval before we see the listings.”
Black tester
Refused house tours without preapproval
White tester
Escorted on house tour without preapprovalIn contrast, she escorted a paired white buyer on house tours after he assured her, “I got a buddy of mine that works at Roslyn Savings & Loan.”
Anderson did not respond to a letter informing her of Newsday’s findings or to invitations by letter and email to view video recordings of her meetings with testers. When reached by telephone, she said, “I have no comment to you at this point.”
Mark Laffey, named on Laffey Real Estate’s website as principal owner, and Philip Laffey, described as overseeing Laffey Real Estate, did not respond to letters, emails and telephone calls requesting interviews or comment.
Experts say real estate agents may more efficiently manage their time if they require buyers to produce a mortgage preapproval or a prequalification letter before providing house listings or taking the customers out on a tour.
“If you are really worried about your time, you’d require everybody to be prequalified,” said Dorothy Brown, a law professor at Emory University School of Law who focuses on issues of race and legal policies.
“White people get turned down for mortgages too, so why wouldn’t you?”
Based on facts presented to them in Anderson’s case, Newsday’s two fair-housing consultants, Fred Frieberg, executive director of the Fair Housing Justice Center, and Robert Schwemm, professor at the University of Kentucky College of Law, saw evidence of unequal treatment.
Freiberg wrote: “The agent’s refusal to provide service to the African American tester is an example of disparate treatment based on race. The agent told the African American tester that a preapproval letter was a condition of being shown homes but did not impose this same condition on the white tester.”
Schwemm concluded: “Evidence of blatant discrimination (inferior treatment of the black tester) regarding not showing houses before receiving a preapproval letter.”
Newsday’s tests compared how agents interacted with people of different races or ethnicities in individual situations and therefore may not necessarily shed light on how any individual agent treats white and minority customers in general.
As one illustration, Realty Connect USA agent Reza Amiryavari provided service to black and white customers without preconditions in a test that Newsday disqualified because recording equipment failed. In a subsequent test, Amiryavari required a Hispanic buyer to meet conditions that indicated a denial of equal service when compared with the white buyer.
Reflecting on what she had learned from serving as a tester, Brittany Silver, who is white and an actress, said:
“A Caucasian person with money coming in to spend it really could never do anything wrong.” She added: “I don’t think that person will ever be questioned. I think that I am privileged because I’m white.”
Following is evidence of disparate treatment at work in four case histories, as affirmed independently by consultants Frieberg and Schwemm, who rendered similar judgments on all seven tests that produced evidence of the denial of equal service to minorities.
The opinions of Freiberg and Schwemm are based on data provided by Newsday. Their judgments are not legal conclusions.
The case histories each include the experts’ findings, and responses of agents and the companies they represent.
Agent places no obstacles to white buyer’s home search but spurns black buyer
One customer was white, the other was black.
The white tester was just past 50 years old. He was born and raised in Seattle, studied biology and worked in Hawaii, held a human resources post at the University of Alabama and then helped deliver consumer services for a Long Island nonprofit organization.
His name is Richard Helling. He used the alias David Owens in this test.
The black tester was also just past 50. He was born in upstate New York, came of age working summers in Virginia tobacco fields and built a career as a federal employee. His name is Kelvin Tune. His undercover alias was Andre Henry.
Over the course of two months from 2016 to 2017, Helling and Tune engaged separately with real estate agent Aminta Abarca in the Garden City office of Keller Williams Realty of Greater Nassau.
Each customer told Abarca he was married with a child. Each said he was a first-time home buyer who was moving out from the city and was in the market for a $550,000 home within a 45-minute commute of Manhattan. Each asked Abarca to recommend house listings and to arrange tours of selected homes.
Black Tester:
Kelvin Tune
Listings Given:
13
Census Tracts:
43% white on average
White Tester:
Richard Helling
Listings Given
19
Census Tracts:
61% white on average
Abarca told both testers they could research schools through a website that provides information on community “demographics.”
Abarca escorted Helling to inspect six properties in a seven-week period without setting any conditions on her service.
In contrast, she refused to show houses to Tune unless he signed an exclusive agreement empowering her to serve as his buyer’s agent.
Home sales agents typically represent sellers and seek the highest prices for them. A buyer’s agent searches for houses and negotiates instead for buyers rather than sellers. Abarca explained that her buyer’s contract would both obligate her to work for Tune and entitle her to a commission for her services.
Abarca’s differing treatment of the two men came to the fore most vividly on Jan. 19, 2017. That day, Tune visited Abarca’s office after choosing three houses to tour from listings she had sent.
She rebuffed him, saying: “So the way I work is when I take someone out I sign them up to be a client. So that is the only way that I’m going to be working with people is if they’re my clients, then I will take them out.”
Abarca added: “It’s not company policy. It’s my policy. In other words, this is my business, OK? This is how I make my money. Nobody gives me money.”
“So my word is not good enough?” Tune asked.
“This is how I do it,” Abarca responded.
It was how she did business with Tune – not with Helling.
A few hours after snubbing Tune, she left a voice mail inviting Helling to continue touring houses:
“Hi David, how are you? This is Aminta. Just calling to see if you started to do some house hunting now that the holidays are over.”
Still later that day, Abarca told Tune in a text message that he should inform his wife that “agent only take Clients (sic) that have a buyer contract with her. To show them homes.”
Tune responded: “Thanks. I will explain to her that this is your firm policy.”
“Yes. Thank you,” Abarca wrote back.
Additionally, Abarca provided listings that located Helling in neighborhoods that were 61 percent white, compared to 43 percent white for Tune. Among the differences: Abarca recommended heavily minority Baldwin and Elmont only to Tune.
Experts’ Opinions
Freiberg: The agent treated the testers differently by requiring the African American tester to sign an exclusive agreement before she would provide a home tour while she took the white tester out for a tour without requiring such an agreement.
Neither tester asked the agent for information about demographics and yet the agent urged the testers to investigate the demographic make-up of any community or school district they were considering. She also provided more listings to the African American tester in areas where there were larger African American student populations, an indication of possible steering.
Schwemm: Evidence of blatant discrimination (inferior treatment of the black tester) regarding not showing houses before an agency agreement was signed. Plus, blatant evidence of differential treatment and steering. There are lots of examples of the white tester getting listings in white areas that black tester did not get, and black tester getting listings in more minority areas that white tester did not get.
Agent and Company Responses
Abarca did not respond to a letter informing her of Newsday’s findings or to invitations by letter and email to view video recordings of her meetings with testers. She did not return a phone message seeking comment.
Keller Williams associate broker Gary Bauman viewed the video recordings and declined to comment.
Asked for comment about the actions of four Keller Williams agents, including Abarca, chief executive officer Gary Keller responded through the firm’s national spokesman, Daryl Frost, who said in an emailed statement:
“Keller Williams does not tolerate discrimination of any kind. All complaints of less than exemplary conduct are addressed and resolved in partnership with our leaders to ensure compliance with our policies, as well as with local, state and federal laws. In addition, we require all Keller Williams agents to take the National Association of Realtors Code of Ethics training, developed in accordance with the Fair Housing Act, before they earn their Realtor’s license and thereafter, every two years to maintain it. Every Keller Williams franchise also receives extensive industry training and resources that reinforce best practices in fair housing.”
Agent offers white buyer tours, won’t give black buyer listings without mortgage prequalification
Cindy Parry and Johnnie Mae Alston are peas-in-a-pod baby boomers who retired after successful careers. As young women, they each wanted good jobs and had dreams of traveling.
Parry went to law school and fulfilled her wanderlust by living in Paris before returning to New York for a post with the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Alston signed up with the state Office of People with Developmental Disabilities and climbed through 10 positions over 35 years while also visiting Europe and setting out to tour America’s 50 states. She has made it to 45.
Parry is white and Alston is black, but both are comfortable in two racial worlds.
With her early roots in the strict segregation of Goldsboro, North Carolina, Alston attended all-black schools until her family moved to Long Island’s Selden community when she was a young girl. There, she became the lone African American among all-white classmates.
Parry crossed the racial divide in the opposite direction. Until eighth grade, she attended classes that were all-black, except for her, in Wyandanch. Then, Parry’s family moved five miles to Lindenhurst, where the schools were all-white.
“That was truly culture shock,” she laughs.
Parry and Alston met as paired testers in Newsday’s investigation. By comparing their experiences, they learned that, concealed in the ordinary course of business, the service afforded to two accomplished women of similar bearing – except for race – can be starkly different.
One month apart in the summer of 2016, Parry and Alston met separately with real estate agent Anne Marie Queally Bechand in Signature Premier Properties’ Cold Spring Harbor office. They were searching for $500,000 homes within 30 minutes of Northport, where the population was more than 90 percent white.
Black Tester:
Johnnie Mae Alston
Listings Given:
0
White Tester:
Cindy Parry
Listings Given:
79
Parry encountered a gracious woman who took time to explain the house-hunting process, promised to provide listings and arranged dates to tour properties.
“She took me right away, didn’t make me wait even five minutes,” Parry recalls, adding: “She addressed every question I may have asked. She offered things for me to think about.”
In contrast, Alston remembers resistance, including Queally Bechand’s refusal to provide listings or a house tour unless she prequalified for a mortgage. Speaking of Queally Bechand, she says:
“Well this lady, when I walked into her office, she already had me pegged. She shut me down before I could get started.”
Transcripts of the meetings recorded on video show how Queally Bechand treated the two women.
Two minutes into Alston’s meeting, the following exchange took place:
QUEALLY BECHAND: I won’t take out anyone unless you have a prequalification letter so I need to know [crosstalk] prequalified for a mortgage.
ALSTON: Oh, so that means I can’t go out to see anything.
QUEALLY BECHAND: I won’t – I won’t do it. You can try another person, but I don’t have the time to do that, because I need to know that you’re serious, and that – I really need a prequalification letter. It also shows on that your price range.
ALSTON: Yeah. My price is at 500,000.
QUEALLY BECHAND: OK, but I need to have the bank say, yes, that’s your price range.
Later, after Alston stated that she has $100,000 to put down, they had this exchange:
QUEALLY BECHAND: Oh, isn’t that nice? Oh, that’s wonderful.
ALSTON: OK. So, I don’t come back until we get that.
QUEALLY BECHAND: Yeah.
Later, responding to Alston’s email query, Queally Bechand confirmed:
“I have to run my business like this unfortunately, otherwise I can will [sic] never know who is a serious buyer.”
In contrast, Queally Bechand opened Parry’s visit by gathering information about the types and locations of houses that might be of interest. The mortgage prequalification issue passed quickly in this exchange:
QUEALLY BECHAND: Have you talked to a banker yet?
PARRY: We’ve – we’ve done some preliminary talks, you know, about getting preapproval, but if you have someone that you recommend that we work together –
QUEALLY BECHAND: Yes.
PARRY: – I’d be very interested in talking to them.
QUEALLY BECHAND: That would be perfect.
Later Queally Bechand added: “I’ll give you a couple of references, and you will obtain a preapproval from the mortgage lender.”
She said Parry would be “a very, very good buyer,” committed to set up “a radius search” for available houses and asked: “What is your availability? When can you start looking at houses?”
Saying, “I’m available all summer so you’re going to get sick of me,” Queally Bechand promised, “I’ll make sure my car is sparkly clean” when they drove from one house to another.
She said Parry should expect to tour “at least five” homes.
The transcript of Queally Bechand’s conversation with Parry extended across 7,800 words – more than three times longer than her 2,400-word conversation with Alston.
She sent Parry 79 house listings, escorted her to see four houses and invited her to see more. She sent Alston no listings and offered no tour.
Summarizing her impressions at the time, Alston said of Queally Bechand:
“This woman had no intentions – she looked at me and she had already decided. ‘There ain’t no way I’m taking you out because you don’t even look like you got money.’ And the thing is, she didn’t even give me a chance to tell her what I had.”
After listening to Parry describe her experience with Queally Bechand and discovering that the agent had told Alston mortgage prequalification was necessary but had given Parry 79 listings without it, Alston responded:
“I was lied to, walked over, stomped. She did me in. She did me in. I’ll never forget this woman, as I said. I’ll never forget. Very fancy, very beautiful woman, but she did me in .”
Experts’ Opinions
Freiberg: The agent’s refusal to provide service to the African American tester is an example of disparate treatment based on race.
The agent told the African American tester she didn’t take customers on house tours without a mortgage prequalification letter and refused to provide any home listings, while the same agent agreed to provide home listings and arranged to show homes to the white tester.
Schwemm: This feels like steering 30 years ago when steering was more overt but agents could offer a pretense of providing equal service: “Of course, I’m giving you service, both black and white. But if you’re the black buyer, you’d be more comfortable in the black or integrated areas; and, if you are white, you certainly would be more comfortable in the different white areas.”
Agent and Company Responses
Queally Bechand did not respond to a letter informing her of Newsday’s findings or to invitations by letter and email to view video recordings of her meetings with testers. Queally Bechand did not return a call seeking her comment.
Kathleen Viard, listed as a co-owner of Signature Premier Properties, viewed Queally Bechand’s videos at Newsday with two branch managers, brokers Richard Halloran and Claire Leface. They declined to comment.
Agent gives white buyer listings and house tour, requires Hispanic buyer to sign contract
Pedro Jimenez is a computer and internet specialist who grew up among fellow Dominican immigrant families in Corona, Queens. He participated in eight undercover tests in Newsday’s investigation. In five of them, the tests suggested agents denied Jimenez equal service or provided house listings that showed evidence of steering.
Jimenez, 45, met Realty Connect USA agent Reza Amiryavari at the company’s Levittown office in April 2017, 10 months after matched white tester Richard Helling had consulted Amiryavari. They each sought $600,000 houses within an hour of Manhattan.
Amiryavari turned the conversation toward finances when meeting with Helling.
“We’re very comfortable with $600,000,” Helling responded in a money-related discussion that encompassed 250 words.
Hispanic Tester:
Pedro Jimenez
Listings Given:
14
Census Tracts:
67% white on average
White Tester:
Richard Helling
Listings Given
39
Census Tracts:
64% white on average
Amiryavari noted Helling’s need to secure mortgage preapproval but brushed by the requirement in looking forward to quickly touring houses.
When Helling said of mortgage preapproval, “So we should have that very soon,” Amiryavari responded, “Very good. So, you don’t need that – this right now, so – but you’re gonna – we’re gonna do this.”
Amiryavari offered Helling the possibility of signing a contract that would give Amiryavari the exclusive right to represent him as buyer’s agent. He indicated that he would help Helling whether he signed such an agreement or instead chose to work with Amiryavari as an agent who pitched him houses on behalf of sellers.
“You don’t have to do it,” he told Helling, referring to a buyer’s contract. After the meeting, Amiryavari provided Helling 39 house listings in communities stretching from Franklin Square on the west to Syosset on the east. He escorted Helling to tour homes in Carle Place and East Meadow.
While on the tour, he counseled Helling to look at 65 percent white Franklin Square over 85 percent minority Elmont even as he offered a definition of the prohibited practice of steering.
“And then there’s also Elmont. You don’t want to be – I don’t think you should be in Elmont. I think you should probably just be Franklin Square,” Amiryavari said, while they were in 69 percent white East Meadow.
He added: “I think you want to stay in Franklin Square, if you go there. Here, great. East Meadow, OK, no issues, as far as, you know, the feedback that I get from, you know, buyers, and I’ve looked stuff up. But, technically, as a real estate agent, we shouldn’t tell you, the buyers, which school district is better. Really, we’re not supposed to … School district-wise only. Because there’s something called steering, you know, like steering.”
“Like a car or something?” Helling asked.
“No, like a horse, you know, facing somebody toward whatever you want them. So, in our business, they say, if you do that, that’s not right. And it’s not right, some agents do it, but it’s not correct. Because the buyer should kind of – we gotta give you information, basically.”
Amiryavari is the agent who was tested more than once by Newsday after an equipment failure. In the disqualified test, he provided listings and a tour to a black customer without requiring mortgage preapproval or an exclusive agent’s agreement, the conditions he later imposed on Jimenez.
When Jimenez met with Amiryavari, he asked where Jimenez and his wife worked and about their family. He said he would ask “one question that is really important,” adding, “And it has to do with finance.”
The agent explored Jimenez’s family income and expenses, did a calculation intended to show Jimenez what he could afford and declined to accept Jimenez’s assertion that he could carry a $600,000 purchase with $120,000 down.
“Because the bank guy, you know, he’s gonna ask you for your docs,” the agent said. “Ask you for your bills and all of that, and they’re gonna kinda crunch the numbers. And they’re gonna come – come out with the right number.”
Amiryavari’s discussion of Jimenez’s financial capacity extended for 1,300 words, five times longer than his back-and-forth over Helling’s finances.
While Amiryavari had given Helling a choice of whether or not to designate Amiryavari as his exclusive buyer’s agent, Amiryavari informed Jimenez that signing such a document was a must for gaining his services.
He told Jimenez that the contract would enable Amiryavari to be “like your buddy” in searching out the best houses and prices and would put Jimenez on the hook for paying a 2 percent commission if the seller refused to pay the fee.
“Because we have to make sure the buyer is serious, and they really truly want to buy a home,” Amiryavari explained, adding that he prefers not to spend time showing a selected property to a less committed potential buyer.
When Jimenez indicated that he needed to know more about the quality of Amiryavari’s service before signing an exclusive contract, Amiryavari pressed a computer button that sent Jimenez 14 housing choices in Syosset.
“Let me just send it right now and then – this is only Syosset, OK?” Amiryavari said, to which Jimenez responded simply, “OK.”
In contrast, Amiryavari had offered Helling 39 house choices in communities that extended 15 miles from Franklin Square through New Hyde Park, Mineola, Carle Place and Hicksville to Syosset.
His snap action, focusing on Syosset only, provided Jimenez with listings in tracts that averaged 67 percent white, 4 percentage points higher than he offered to Helling.
As they wrapped up, Amiryavari promised to send Jimenez the name of a bank to start the process of getting mortgage preapproval. He told Jimenez they would sign the exclusive broker’s agreement at their next meeting.
The following day Amiryavari texted the name of a “mortgage contact” at Bank of America. Jimenez returned a text thanking Amiryavari for the information and asking:
“Reza, my wife asks what’s the best plan for going to see a home? Should we plan on Friday?”
Amiryavari responded: “What I suggest is to contact the mortgage officer first and get pre-Preapproved [sic]. Once Preapproved we can start looking at homes. Thank you.”
“So that has to come first?” Jimenez asked.
“Yes,” Amiryavari answered.
On learning how his experience with Amiryavari compared with Helling’s, Jimenez said:
“I’m surprised to find that I was definitely scrutinized more over my financial capability, and, yeah, that the listings that were provided to me were not only less, but also concentrated in a particular area as opposed to being more dispersed and more varied.”
Helling’s judgment: “He showed me more listings. He showed me listings in a much, much broader set of areas, set of neighborhoods than he showed Pedro. And then just the willingness to just take me at my word, and move forward, take me on tours, and he was throwing up all the barriers about what Pedro had to do before he would even begin to start working with him.”
Experts’ Opinions
Freiberg: While the agent took the white tester out to view homes without requiring any prequalification or an exclusive listing contract, the same agent declined to take the Hispanic tester out to view homes unless he was first prequalified by a lender and agreed to sign an exclusive listing agreement. In addition to this differential treatment, the agent made statements to the white tester that suggests steering, by the agent’s own admission.
Schwemm: Strong evidence of steering here, plus discriminatory (inferior) treatment of the Hispanic tester.
Most of the Hispanic-only listings are in one area to the north and most of the white-only listings in two other areas to the west and in the center. But this is not a “classic” case of steering because the target area for the Hispanic listings is not more diverse.
The agent provided inferior treatment to the Hispanic tester with respect to the discussion of financial issues and refusal to show houses without having received mortgage preapproval.
Agent and Company Responses
Informed by letter about Newsday’s findings, Amiryavari made, but canceled, an appointment to view video recordings of meetings with testers. He did not respond to a follow-up email or phone message seeking comment.
Realty Connect broker owners Michael Ardolino, Bart Cafarella, Fern Karhu and chairman Kevin McClarnon did not respond to letters describing Newsday’s findings regarding Amiryavari and additional Realty Connect agents.
Agent drops preapproval policy for white buyer, holds firm with black buyer
Niguel Williams-Easter is an actor from West Hempstead in his mid-20s. He has appeared in commercials and short films. He’s black.
Steven Makropoulos is also an actor in his mid-20s. From Massapequa, he has traveled the country in theater productions and at theme parks. He’s white.
They each sought the services of Plainview-based Charles Rutenberg Realty agent Edwin Torres in searching for $400,000 houses in the Brentwood area.
Black Tester:
Niguel Williams-Easter
Listings Given:
0
White Tester:
Steven Makropoulos
Listings Given
20
Torres told both men that he required customers to get mortgage preapproval from a bank before he provided listings or house tours.
He explained that he had invested time helping some house hunters only to discover they could not afford to buy, and that sellers and their agents often balked at showing houses to people who were not fully prepared to make a deal.
“So, it’s very important for you to get that preapproval and to make sure that the taxes are indicated on that preapproval,” he told Williams-Easter. “Once you do that, you can email it to me and let me know.”
“The first thing that you do when you’re going to apply for a home or want to look at homes is you get prequalified,” Torres told Makropoulos.
Still, both men asked Torres to send house listings.
He said yes to Makropoulos in this exchange:
MAKROPOULOS: Is it possible to for you to start sending me some listings?
TORRES: I can send you I can send you listings in those areas.
MAKROPOULOS: In those areas?
TORRES: I would say like based on your income, a ballpark figure, I would say anywhere between two and 350 I’ll send you. That’s the bracket that I’m gonna put it in.
MAKROPOULOS: OK.
TORRES: And when you receive it, you’ll be able to view them.
MAKROPOULOS: Yeah.
TORRES: But, like I said, I need that [preapproval], OK?
MAKROPOULOS: Gotcha.
Torres said no to Williams-Easter in this exchange:
WILLIAMS-EASTER: OK. So, you need that [preapproval].
TORRES: Definitely.
WILLIAMS-EASTER: Absolutely.
TORRES: Absolutely.
WILLIAMS-EASTER: Can you look at listings or anything?
TORRES: I don’t really know what to show you.
As requested, Torres selected homes for Makropoulos to consider. He located them in Deer Park, Brentwood, Bay Shore and West Islip. He also took Makropoulos to see one of the 20 houses while still pressing him to secure preapproval.
The agent responded differently when Williams-Easter followed up by texting a request for listings that could lead to house tours.
Torres texted: “I don’t know if there was a misunderstanding when we met. But I’m awaiting your preapproval first and at that time I will start sending properties to you based on your approval.”
Experts’ Opinions
Freiberg: The agent’s refusal to provide service to the African American tester is an example of disparate treatment based on race. The agent refused to select home listings or show homes to the African American tester until he obtained a preapproval letter from a lender, while the same agent waived this preapproval requirement for the white tester providing him with home listings and a home tour.
Schwemm: The evidence shows blatant discrimination. There was inferior treatment of the black tester regarding the preapproval requirement. And there was a continuation of blatant discrimination with many listings provided to white tester vs. none to black tester.
Agent and Company Responses
After viewing video recordings of his interactions with testers, Torres said he provided listings and a tour to one tester and not the other because the white tester seemed more “pushy” and eager to engage in searching for a house to buy.
“One seemed a little bit more eager than the other. That’s the bottom line,” Torres said, adding:
“Sometimes you may make a decision that may be interpreted incorrectly. That’s the only thing I can tell you. You learn and then you implement. Is there a chance that you can say something that is misinterpreted? I think so. And that’s basically what I see here.”
Torres also said that he has adopted a firmer policy: “So now if you don’t have a preapproval, I’m not going to show you a house.”
Joseph Moshe, founder of Charles Rutenberg Realty, viewed Newsday’s recordings of three Charles Rutenberg agents, including Torres. Subsequently, he offered no comments.
Sources: Demographic data in maps from Census Bureau 2016 American Community Survey five-year estimates.
How we did it
The young white man was an actor, the young black man a drug store worker. They were going undercover with constructed identities – new families, new ages, new addresses, new incomes, new jobs. The white man was cloaked as a building contractor, the black man as a piano tuner.
Married without children to a working wife with a household income of $125,000, their essential personas were interchangeable – except for the black-and-white distinguishing factor of race.
One month apart in the spring of 2016, each strapped a tiny camera to his chest with a miniature lens that peeked through a button hole of his shirt. Then, with the camera running, each separately met with one of Long Island’s 27,000 licensed residential real estate brokers and agents.
Posing as first-time house hunters in the spring of 2016, white actor Steven Makropoulos and black drug store worker Ryan Sett led a 25-member platoon of white, black, Hispanic and Asian New Yorkers into Newsday’s investigation of residential brokering.
Ordinary folks stocked the platoon: a 20-year-old college student, a 69-year-old lawyer, teachers, a computer tech, actors and more. All were recruited by Newsday to work as paired testers in the hope of measuring how often, if at all, agents provided unequal service to white and minority house hunters.
Collectively, they went undercover with agents for 16 months and recorded 240 hours of video in 109 tests conducted from April 2016 to August 2017. A professional court reporter created typed transcripts of the meetings between testers and agents. Newsday journalists reviewed the transcripts for accuracy and used them to verify that testers had, in fact, presented matching profiles to agents.
This is the story behind the three-year investigation.
How paired testing works
Fair-housing violations are determined by the courts. Enforcement authorities generally file charges after subjecting an agent to several paired tests to establish a pattern, but they do bring cases based on a single test when an agent has openly expressed bias.
Newsday tested each agent only once. Falling short of proving legal wrongdoing, the results provide a single comparison of customer contacts and offer no insight into an agent’s general professional conduct.
Collectively, however, the individual test results, bolstered by statistical findings, form a body of evidence suggesting the extent of discriminatory practices by agents in Long Island home sales.
Additionally, read side by side, some matched transcripts uniquely revealed the hidden disparities experienced by minority house hunters without their ever knowing they had been disadvantaged.
Paired testing has been central to investigating housing discrimination for almost half a century. Enforcement agencies, including the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and the U.S. Justice Department, rely on undercover testers to determine whether real estate agents deny equal opportunities to home hunters based on race or ethnicity.
In fact, enforcement of the Fair Housing Act, as well as of state and local anti-discrimination statutes, is often powered by paired testing.
Two testers of the same gender and age bracket – but of different races or ethnicities – are given matching personas. The profiles typically include the same family status, education level, type of job, level of income and credit score. After being matched in a pair, the testers separately tell a real estate agent that they are searching for houses with identical qualities, prices and locations.
The personal characteristics and search terms are drawn to be as identical as possible, bringing race or ethnicity to the fore if an agent treats, say, a white and a black tester differently.
Explore the testsCourts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, have recognized testing as a tool for uncovering disparate treatment since the 1970s, the decade after passage of the Fair Housing Act. They have stated that testing can produce evidence of discrimination that is otherwise unavailable, while imposing limited burdens on agents who are tested. They have also granted testers standing to file discrimination suits based on the results of their undercover work.
In the early era of testing after passage of the landmark Fair Housing Act in 1968, discrimination was far more blatant. Today, practices such as the outright refusal to sell houses to African Americans have given way to the hidden disparities of denying equal service to minority house hunters and “steering” minorities and whites to different neighborhoods.
“Without testing, it would be very difficult to uncover what is going on in today’s housing market,” said Carla Wortheim , executive vice president of the Metropolitan Milwaukee Fair Housing Council. “Housing discrimination today is done with a smile and a handshake instead of that door being slammed in the face.”
Who does paired testing
The Department of Housing and Urban Development provides funding to fair housing advocacy organizations across the country with the goal of stemming discrimination in home sales or rentals.
Enforcement often targets major landlords or real estate brokerages. Typically, the investigating organization subjects a landlord or brokerage to several tests to gather the evidence necessary for a court action alleging fair housing violations.
HUD also uses paired testing roughly every 10 years to study housing discrimination nationwide. The department has increased the volume of the testing it does for research, not enforcement, purposes, from 3,264 paired tests in 1977 to 8,047 paired tests in 2012. HUD’s testing covers both rental and sales discrimination.
The department’s 2012 research fielded 135 sales tests across the New York-Northern New Jersey region, an area with a population in excess of 20 million people. The region covers Long Island, New York City, the city’s northern suburbs and close-in counties across the Hudson River.
Although Nassau and Suffolk are among the nation’s most segregated counties, that 2012 research bypassed them entirely, according to the Urban Institute, a social policy think tank that aggregates paired-testing surveys for HUD.
How testers were trained
Newsday’s prospective homebuyers – the testers – were a diverse group: white, black, Asian and Hispanic.
Tester portraits by Arnold Miller, William Perlman and Chris Ware
The Fair Housing Justice Center in Long Island City, an organization that has the nation’s most extensive paired-testing experience, trained the testers to interact properly with the agents. Executive director Fred Freiberg served as a paid Newsday consultant for that work and his organization was compensated for helping to design the testing. He was not paid to evaluate test results.
Newsday paid testers $16 an hour and reimbursed travel costs.
Freiberg provided multiple daylong training sessions for testers. Additionally, a member of his staff helped develop testing protocols for Newsday’s investigation and assisted in analyzing test results.
Newsday provided the testers with aliases and written profiles of the characters they were to portray as they “shopped” for homes on the Island, focusing only on purchases rather than rentals. For Hispanic testers, the aliases used common Hispanic surnames. The United States Census Bureau defines Hispanics and Latinos as people of Cuban, Mexican, Puerto Rican, South or Central American or other Spanish culture or origin regardless of race.
The profiles included, among other details, occupation, spouse’s occupation, whether or not they had children, the children’s ages and year of schooling. The identities also included supposed income, credit scores, how much money testers had in the bank, how much money they were prepared to spend on a house and how much money they had to put down.
To be convincing to real estate agents, testers also memorized a phone number, fictional address and credit card accounts.
Some researched which subway line they would take from a supposed city apartment to get to a supposed job, or how long it had taken them to drive from a home in the city to a job on Long Island.
Newsday reporters drilled the testers: How much were they able to spend on a home? What would their down payment be (usually 20 percent of the purchase price)? What was their occupation and their spouse’s? What school did their children attend? Why were they looking for a house search in a particular area?
Reporters also outfitted each tester with a video recorder concealed in clothing or a handbag. The recorder was turned on for the duration of meetings. If an agent escorted a tester on a house tour, the tour was similarly recorded.
Testers get outfitted with special hidden cameras for their tests.
Following the same protocol, Newsday assigned a second tester to arrange a meeting with the same agent. If the first tester was white, the second tester would be black, Hispanic or Asian, and vice versa. The median time between tests was 57 days.
Newsday later verified that agents had houses to sell when meeting with testers, based on analyses provided by Zillow, the online home search site.
Zillow draws an inventory of available homes daily from the Multiple Listing Service of Long Island, the computerized system used by agents to track the market and select possible houses for buyers. MLSLI said that it does not maintain its own database of past daily inventories, as Zillow does, and so could not provide the same type of tallies.
While Zillow’s figures do not exclude properties that had been taken off the market because, for instance, owners had signed sales contracts, its inventory of homes was similar for white and nonwhite testers.
On average, according to Zillow, 304 homes were available on dates that white testers spoke with agents and 296 when black, Hispanic and Asian testers met with them. In more than 90% of the matching paired tests, Zillow showed more than 100 houses on the market when each of the two testers met with an agent.
Further bolstering the reliability of Zillow’s statistics, MLSLI and Zillow both count the inventory of homes available for sale on a monthly basis. Their numbers were highly correlated.
Zillow’s inventory figures rose and fell with the numbers published by MLSLI during Newsday’s testing period, with Zillow showing on average 6 percent more available homes in Nassau than MLSLI and 26 percent more in Suffolk as inventories expanded and contracted month by month.
Testers asked agents to find houses in general areas rather than request particular communities or properties. For example, one criteria called for locating houses within an hour’s commute from Manhattan; another sought houses within 30 minutes of Garden City.
The testers also used maximum purchase prices that Newsday had determined fit the designated market.
The object was to give agents the discretion to select among communities with widely varying populations, some overwhelmingly white or minority, and others with more mixed demographics. Typically, agents searched the Multiple Listing Service of Long Island electronic database of houses for sale to locate listings for each tester in an undercover matched pair.
“You need groups of people that are trained that say exactly the same thing,” said Myron Orfield, director of the Institute on Metropolitan Opportunity at the University of Minnesota Law School, of paired testers. “They usually say, ‘I have no preference for neighborhoods, I don’t know anything about an area.'”
Why tests were recorded
Strictly following rules set by New York law, Newsday recorded all tester interactions with agents.
The state’s Penal Law permits one person who is participating in a conversation to record other people who participate in the conversation without their knowledge. As summarized by the Digital Media Law Project, “if you operate in New York, you may record a conversation or phone call if you are a party to the conversation.”
Thirty-seven other states and the District of Columbia similarly permit individuals to record in-person conversations with others without seeking their consent, according to the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.
When conducting once-a-decade research into the extent of discrimination, HUD does not equip its testers with taping equipment and instead relies on their reports of agents’ actions. Enforcement authorities similarly rely on tester reports and testimony while conducting investigations in states that bar undercover taping. In states that permit such taping, including New York, investigators often record conversations between testers and agents.
Newsday’s video and audio recordings captured crucial conversations and conduct that are normally beyond view and could not be documented any other way.
Each is a snapshot of an agent one-on-one with a tester. Some snapshots found instances when agents served both testers equally. Other snapshots recorded evidence indicating apparent disparate treatment of minority testers. As individual moments – not repeat looks of the kind generally used to enforce the law – the recordings show only what happened there and then, not an agent’s broader conduct.
How test areas were chosen
To capture broad swaths of Long Island, Newsday divided most of Nassau and much of Suffolk into 10 zones that included housing markets with affordable homes as well as million-dollar mansions and places where large groups of minorities live closely to white populations.
Four zones studied how agents served house hunters in areas where white and minority communities abut one another. Those were drawn around Greenlawn and Northport, Bay Shore and West Islip, Hempstead and Garden City and Brentwood and Commack.
Three zones surrounded communities with highly rated schools and reasonably affordable houses: Syosset, Bethpage and Port Jefferson.
Two keyed on higher-priced areas in an attempt to assess how a customer’s willingness to spend millions of dollars for a house influenced whether agents differentiated between white and minority buyers: Nassau County’s Gold Coast and the Hamptons in Suffolk County.
The largest zone encompassed Western Nassau, which garnered listings that stretched from the Queens border to the east beyond Wantagh Parkway.
Collectively, the testing gathered house listings in communities that extended from the New York City line, across the full width of Nassau County, and then 30 miles into Suffolk County, reaching the communities of Miller Place, Coram, Medford and Patchogue, plus the Hamptons, still farther east.
Newsday conducted no tests in the remainder of Suffolk County, a territory that stretches roughly 45 miles from Yaphank through Orient Point on the North Fork. The population density there is comparatively lighter than in locations within commuting distance to New York City, and white residents compose a greater share of the population than on the Island generally: 84 percent to 66 percent.
The size of the territory and its dominant concentrations of white residents limited the possibility that agents could direct white and minority buyers to areas with significantly different demographics.
Cumulatively, Newsday’s test zones encompassed 83 percent of Long Island’s population, including 80 percent of the white population and 88 percent of the minority population.
How agents were chosen
Long Island has more than 27,000 actively licensed real estate salespeople and brokers, making the Island home base for one out of every five agents in New York State. Salespeople and brokers are both familiarly known as agents, but brokers have greater authority, including the power to supervise salespeople and execute certain transactions.
Their workplaces range from mom-and-pop shops to offices affiliated with well-known chains. Newsday’s investigation focused on 12 brands that represented more than half of the Island’s home sellers in 2017 and ranked at the top in the numbers of salespeople they deployed.
The dozen logged $15 billion worth of transactions on Long Island in 2017, with Douglas Elliman Real Estate first on the list at $4.2 billion, according to The Real Deal trade publication.
In addition to Douglas Elliman, the investigation tested agents affiliated with:
- Century 21 Real Estate LLC
- Charles Rutenberg Realty Inc.
- Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage on Long Island
- Coach Realtors
- Daniel Gale Sotheby’s International Realty
- Laffey Fine Homes
- Keller Williams Realty
- The Corcoran Group
- Signature Premiere Properties
- Realty Connect USA
- RE/MAX LLC
Newsday tested each brand at least three times at offices located in 27 communities. Tests of agents associated with two of the firms — The Corcoran Group and Daniel Gale Sotheby’s — produced no evidence of disparate treatment.
How data was evaluated
Newsday studied the information gathered by the tests through twin lenses.
One lens studied each agent’s interaction with paired testers for evidence that an individual agent had offered disparate treatment based on race or ethnicity, including through the listings the agent provided.
The other lens analyzed the agents’ 5,763 listings for evidence that, as a group, the agents had directed white and minority buyers to different neighborhoods, also based on race or ethnicity.
To accomplish the parallel goals, Newsday enlisted two nationally recognized authorities in fair housing standards and an expert in statistical analysis.
- Fred Freiberg, who co-founded the Fair Housing Justice Center in 2004. Previously, he had led a national testing program for the Civil Rights Division of the United States Department of Justice, as well as two national paired testing programs for the Urban Institute. He was paid for his help organizing the testing and training the testers. He was not compensated for evaluating test results.
- Robert Schwemm, the Everett H. Metcalf Jr. professor of law at the University of Kentucky College of Law. Schwemm is the author of “Housing Discrimination: Law and Litigation,” widely accepted as the definitive treatise of the subject. Schwemm assisted on an unpaid basis.
- Isabel Elaine Allen, a fellow of the American Statistical Association, professor emeritus of statistics at Babson College in Massachusetts and professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California San Francisco. Newsday paid Allen.
Generally, fair-housing standards require real estate agents to provide equal service and information to all customers, to give all customers equal access to housing and to avoid directing customers toward or away from neighborhoods based on race or ethnicity, a phenomenon commonly called “steering.”
The placement of listings and the transcripts of the interactions between testers and agents served as guides for identifying evidence of disparate treatment between white and minority house hunters.
The transcripts revealed, for example, what an agent told both testers about communities or schools, as well as whether an agent escorted both testers to tour houses on comparable terms.
Plotting the 5,763 listings in census tracts signaled whether individual agents directed white and minority buyers to neighborhoods with differing racial or ethnic compositions. The mapping also helped measure whether the agents had done so collectively.
After reviewing video recordings and transcripts, Newsday set aside 23 tests. A common reason was that one paired tester had veered slightly off script, often by wrongly describing the area where the tester was looking for a house. For example, in one instance a white tester specified houses within 30 minutes of Bethpage while an Asian tester requested homes within 20 minutes from Bethpage.
Because of the 10-minute difference in search terms, Newsday ruled out comparing the agent’s responses to the two testers. Similar variations required disqualifying tests as lacking the apples-to-apples quality necessary to make valid comparisons. The disqualifications, which also included recording failures, reduced an initial roster of 109 tests to 86 matched pairs.
Data from more than 80 paired tests – a big enough number to give the results weight – can reveal “significant problems” in a residential real estate market, said Erin Kemple, executive director of the Connecticut Fair Housing Center, which conducted 300 tests with HUD grants earlier this decade.
“We can’t say that every time someone looks for housing they’re going to be discriminated against,” Kemple said. “What it does is give a picture of how people are treated at a particular time. I think that, yes, that’s significant.”
Each foray into testing is different and always includes some tests showing inconclusive results, or tests that don’t get counted because of tester error.
“They’re human,” Kemple said of testers.
Thirty of Newsday’s 86 matching cases showed no evidence that agents had treated testers disparately. Newsday asked Freiberg and Schwemm to review the remaining 56.
They did so independently and were not informed of each other’s findings until publication of the investigation. They made their judgments based on Newsday test summaries, transcript excerpts and listings maps, including neighborhood demographic data. The opinions they offered do not represent legal findings.
Newsday counted a test as showing evidence of disparate treatment only when Freiberg and Schwemm both rendered such a conclusion. Read their opinions on each test here.
Separately, Newsday analyzed the listings to compare, for example, how many listings agents gave to white, black, Hispanic and Asian testers – and to determine whether the agents had cumulatively directed white and minority buyers to areas with different racial or ethnic populations.
One important caveat: Determining disparate treatment by real estate agents is not an exact science. Reviewing a map of listings to assess whether an agent “steered” a white buyer and a black buyer to impermissibly different areas can entail subjective judgments.
Clear cut: An agent makes an explicit statement of racial attitude and directs a black customer to a largely black neighborhood and a white customer to a largely white community.
Less clear cut: An agent speaks appropriately and focuses both a white and a Hispanic buyer on adjoining communities, one town with a comparatively high Hispanic population, the other town with a comparatively low Hispanic population.
The agent provides the Hispanic buyer with listings in both places but concentrates the listings in the town with the higher Hispanic population. Conversely, the agent gives the white buyer listings in both places but concentrates the listings in the town with the higher white population.
“Can I convince a white judge and jury that race is a factor in how this person was treated, yes or no,” said Pamela A. Kisch, executive director of the Fair Housing Center of Southeastern Michigan. “Yes, that’s a judgment call based on my experience…We have got to be pretty sure this evidence is very good.”
Kelvin’s story
The mounting test results revealed this to Kelvin Tune: A black man who ventures into house hunting on Long Island risks suffering hidden discrimination by real estate agents.
He saw that the risks can be high.
“Do I feel like I’m sitting on the back of the bus? Yes,” Tune said after discovering evidence that six agents had subjected him to disparate treatment when compared with matched white house hunters.
An African American who came of age working summers in a Virginia tobacco field, Tune, 54, served as a tester in Newsday’s investigation of possible discriminatory practices in Long Island’s residential real estate brokering industry.
Over the course of nine months ending in July 2017, Tune met with nine agents in offices that stretched from Franklin Square on the west to East Setauket on the east, from Great Neck on the North Shore to Massapequa on the South Shore.
He adopted the identities of a tax consultant or financial adviser whose wife was employed in jobs that included child psychologist, nurse and financial portfolio manager. Often, Tune used his real name. Other times, he went by the aliases Andre Henry or Kelvin Liggon.
He expressed interest in houses ranging from $400,000 in one test to $5 million in another. Four times he posed as a would-be commuter hoping to ride the Long Island Rail Road no more than 45 minutes or an hour. In other instances, he told agents he wanted to live within a half hour of Bethpage, Brentwood or Port Jefferson to be near a workplace or his elderly mother.
Overwhelmingly, Tune felt that the agents had provided proper service until, in joint interviews with white house-hunting partners, Tune learned that seven of his nine tests had produced evidence of disparate treatment:
- an agent had urged his white counterpart to consider listings in Plainview but had told him nothing was available;
- an agent had warned his partner about gang violence in Brentwood but had given him 27 house listings there;
- an agent had escorted his counterpart on house tours but refused to take him without an exclusive broker’s agreement;
- an agent had directed his white counterpart to houses in overwhelmingly white communities after disparaging predominantly minority areas;
- an agent had broken a commitment to show him houses while showing homes to his white partner;
- an agent had told his white counterpart that she avoided the word “steer” but also advised, “I have to say it without saying it, you know?” She said nothing similar to him.
- an agent warned his white counterpart against living close to Queens communities with immigrant populations, citing a “safety factor,” without providing similar information to Tune.
All told, five of Tune’s agents directed his white counterparts to neighborhoods with higher proportions of white residents. The gap averaged 21 percentage points, with the smallest differential 7 percentage points and the highest 55 percentage points.
“Is it discrimination? Yes,” Tune said. “But it is the way of the world.”
Five of the seven agents declined comment.
A lawyer for Douglas Elliman agent Judi Ross wrote that, in telling Tune’s counterpart that she never looks for houses in the predominantly minority communities of Freeport, Baldwin and Amityville, she “never referenced the racial makeup of the district or alluded to race” and “was merely speaking to her understanding of the school’s rating, which has nothing to do with race.”
The same lawyer, representing Douglas Elliman agent Donna Rogers, wrote that, in telling Tune nothing was available in his price range in Plainview, Rogers may have misinterpreted his “willingness to do a renovation” and was influenced by his mentions of traffic.
Tune learned early about life for black Americans.
He spent summers in Virginia with his grandmother, stringing tobacco on the farm where she worked. Starting from age 11, he’d hop onto a pickup truck for the drive to fields where foremen treated black and white workers differently. The black workers then went home to houses, like that of his grandmother, lacking basics like a tub and a toilet.
The labor taught Tune to appreciate the life he led in Albany, New York, where his Virginia-born parents had migrated and where he was born and raised.
Yes, he lived in segregated neighborhoods and attended segregated schools.
Yes, he held an after-school job in a diaper laundry where the black workers did the dirtiest work of counting soiled diapers as they arrived.
But anger and hatred had no place in his household. Speaking of his parents and grandparents, Tune said they shared little about life in the Jim Crow era.
“They tried to make me respect the person,” he remembered, adding that “growing up they tried not to make me an ugly person. They tried to make me into a respectful person. And I get that.”
So perhaps it’s not surprising how hard Tune works to get “the big picture,” to try to peer into the motivations of the real estate agents who, evidence suggests, may have discriminated against him in two-thirds of the tests in which he participated.
Perhaps they assumed he could better afford a house somewhere else.
Perhaps they were just looking to protect their business in the whiter neighborhoods by keeping him out.
Perhaps they assumed he would prefer to live among, as he said, his own nationality, that it was just a fact that people prefer to live among their own kind.
Tune lives in Rocky Point, a largely white community where he had the opportunity to buy an affordable condo near his workplace. He uses the condo as a place to lay his head, he said, and doesn’t socialize there or even feel comfortable enough, as a black man, to attend the community’s annual St. Patrick’s Day Parade.
So maybe that’s what real estate agents are thinking too, he suggests.
“We all are human beings, they all have hearts,” he said. “But also, bottom line, they need to make a dollar.”
Eventually, as the results mounted, Tune concluded that perhaps the agents weren’t giving him “the big picture” that he had attempted to discover about them.
“I’m asking them for guidance, and they never gave me the options, they never gave me the big picture,” he said. “Don’t give me 60 degrees of the circle, give me 360 degrees of the circle.”
What he most resented was the loss of opportunity to decide where he would want to live. “They should not be making that choice for you,” he said.
Tune said he accepts that racial discrimination might change in form but never disappear.
“Not hurt, not at all,” he said, adding: “You just got to take it. You can’t let it get to you.”
Levittown
Vickie Perlongo remembers the first time her daughter saw a black person.
Perlongo, who is white and lives in Levittown, took her then-preschool-age daughter shopping in the mid-1980s to a Radio Shack where a black man was working.
“Why is his skin a different color?” the daughter asked.
“She’d never seen a black person before because she grew up here, and I was surprised,” said Perlongo, 66, a retired nurse who has lived in Levittown for more than 40 years. “I said, ‘Never say that out loud.'”
The incident speaks to how few minorities lived in Levittown, a suburb famous for being both the first of its kind and for policies that kept minorities out.
In Newsday’s paired testing of Long Island real estate agents, Levittown emerged as one of three communities, with Merrick and Rockville Centre, that some agents overwhelmingly chose for white customers but not for their matching minority home seekers.
While Levittown is still predominantly white, it is becoming more diverse, data show.
“You don’t see it on the streets,” said Janet Gonzal, a Hispanic stay-at-home grandmother who was one of 31 Levittown residents or workers interviewed about the makeup of the community. “You see it at school pickup.”
The 2010 U.S. Census had Levittown’s population as 88 percent white. By 2017, census estimates put Levittown’s population at 75 percent white, 14.6 percent Hispanic, 7 percent Asian and 1 percent black.
The school population has become even more diverse: as of 2018-19, roughly 69 percent of students in the Levittown and Island Trees districts are white, with 19 percent Latino, 10 percent Asian and 1 percent black.
All this is a noticeable shift from 20 years ago, when the community’s population was 97 percent white, according to census data.
Of those interviewed – two-thirds white, the rest divided among other races and ethnic groups – the majority welcomed the change, saying diversity strengthens communities.
Jon Probstein, president of the Levittown Chamber of Commerce, praised Levittown’s growing diversity.
“My children are exposed to something I was not exposed to and I think it makes them better people,” said Probstein, a white lawyer and actor.
Yet on some blocks, the neighbors still look the same as they did decades ago, residents said.
Beatrice Marin, 70, has lived in the same house her whole life, almost as long as Levittown has existed. Only one family of color — a black family — has ever lived on her block, and they left after a year.
“The houses have been renovated, but as far as the people, they haven’t changed that much,” said Marin, who is white and works in information technology at Nassau Community College.
The current demographics of Levittown reflect its history, residents said. The developers of Levittown prohibited people of color from moving in through contract clauses, a common practice at the time. Restrictive racial covenants were recommended by the Federal Housing Administration to create homogenous communities. The U.S. Supreme Court struck them down in 1948, but William Levitt kept them.
Levittown’s restrictive racial covenant read: “The tenant agrees not to permit the premises to be used or occupied by any person other than members of the Caucasian race. But the employment and maintenance of other than Caucasian domestic servants shall be permitted.”
Levitt developed more than 17,400 partially prefabricated Cape Cods and ranch-style houses in planned communities with parks, pools and schools.
Levitt explained his racial exclusionary policy in the 1950s. “But I have come to know that if we sell one house to a Negro family, then 90 or 95 percent of our white customers will not buy into the community. This is their attitude, not ours. As a company, our position is simply this: We can solve a housing problem, or we can try to solve a racial problem, but we cannot combine the two.”
All of the people who moved into Levittown in its first years were white. And many of them passed on those homes to their children and relatives, maintaining the demographics, residents said.
“There aren’t that many people moving out to give people the opportunity to move in,” said Pat Patane, a white resident of 30 years who is co-president of the Levittown Community Council. “People, once they move [here], they love the whole environment and they don’t want to leave.”
Residents say they came to Levittown for their own piece of the American dream, where they could afford a house in a good school district. The census put the median home value at $367,700 in 2017. Neighbors say they know each other, throw block parties and deliver baked goods to new residents. People gather at eight public pools in the summer.
Most residents spoke warmly of the place they call home and described it as a family-oriented, friendly and welcoming place.
Satwinder Baryana, who moved to Levittown three years ago, said there are five families on his block who live in houses they got from relatives.
“It’s good for me because everybody knows everybody. It brings me into the community,” said Baryana, 35, a sales executive of Indian descent.
But it can also be hard to break into groups who have known each other for decades, some residents said.
Gonzal said she still feels new to Levittown even after five years. The first time Gonzal’s granddaughter came to the Levittown library, “all the other little girls ran away,” which Gonzal attributed to the girl’s skin color.
“It’s that type of town — you either fit into a clique or you’re independent,” Gonzal, 57, said. “For newcomers, it can be intimidating.”
All but one of the 20 white people interviewed said they either had no issue with increasing diversity or welcomed it. Four even expressed feeling like they had missed out on valuable life experience and growth without it.
But in candid conversations about race and demographics, some older white residents used descriptors that were anything but politically correct.
Some longtime residents see Levittown “as the way it was” — like an episode of “Leave It to Beaver” in which everyone is white — instead of how it is and should be, said Bob Koenig, vice president of the Levittown Historical Society.
“A lot of people are nervous with the changes,” said Koenig, who is white. “We are diverse and we are changing.”
While the majority of 5,000 parishioners at St. Bernard’s Roman Catholic Church are second- or third-generation Levittowners and white, the number of Hispanic congregants is growing, the Rev. Ralph Sommer said. The church started celebrating Spanish-language masses two years ago.
“We’re beginning to see more of a diverse community being developed because the housing is being sold to different folks,” Sommer said.
Julissa Pesante, who is Puerto Rican, said learning the history of the hamlet made it “feel good to be able to sign” a contract for a home here 18 months ago.
“It was a big deal,” said Pesante, 41 and a stay-at-home mom. “I always wonder how people feel to see that it is getting diverse, that you have Hispanics.”
Pesante said she has not experienced any kind of racism in Levittown, unlike when she lived in Glen Cove, where she felt she was treated differently as a minority. Her Levittown neighbors welcomed her to the area by bringing cake to her house.
That’s a different reception than some minority residents got when moving to Levittown decades ago.
When the first black family moved to Francis Richard Visconti’s block in the 1970s, a white police officer who lived on the block told the neighbors, “Stay put.”
“He said, ‘Don’t move, because then they’ll start moving in, and that’s how Levittown would become all black,'” Visconti, who is 82 and white, said.
Visconti, a former milkman and custodian, said he was not afraid of that.
“We welcomed them,” Visconti said outside the Island Trees library. “They felt out of place because it was all the white people there, and they moved out after a year and white people moved in.”
Trina Reed, who became the first African American director of the Levittown Public Library five years ago, said she was welcomed to the community.
“Coming in now, I think it’s a different environment,” said Reed, of Freeport.
Blessing Osuamkpe, a black medical student, said there was only one other African American family on her block.
“I really don’t care as long as it’s safe and it’s a good school district,” said Osuamkpe, 39, who recently moved to Pennsylvania for work. “That’s what matters to me.”
Another sign of increasing diversity: Levittown is home to the first Indian American state senator, Kevin Thomas.
“It’s a big deal to be able to say, ‘I’m from Levittown and I’m an elected official and I’m a minority,'” Thomas said, adding representing Levittown as an Indian American is a “huge responsibility” because he wants to be a role model.
The South Asian community in Levittown is growing, residents said, pointing to its proximity to Hicksville, which has a large South Asian population.
Levittowners have similar backgrounds, no matter their ethnicities, residents said. Most are blue collar or middle class: firefighters, teachers, police officers.
“Everybody gets up and goes to work for a living,” said James Van der Beek, who is white and inherited his home from his grandparents.
Levittown continues to be an emblem of the American dream, residents said.
“I’ve moved from another country. I’ve worked hard in the community,” said Baryana, who saw a documentary about Levittown before coming from England. “I bought the house and am raising my kids in the school district, and all I need now is a golden retriever and I’ll have the perfect American family.”
An acknowledgment: Newsday missed a critical chance to leadAgents Training
State-required continuing education classes in real estate law and practices are supposed to cover fair housing regulations and how agents and brokers might deliberately or unintentionally discriminate.
Instead, in five of six classes attended by Newsday reporters, instructors provided information that was sometimes or often inaccurate, incomplete, confusing or lacking in quantity and quality, according to eight fair housing experts who reviewed transcripts and notes of the sessions.
Some instructors made comments about ethnic and religious groups that risked reinforcing discriminatory attitudes, the experts said. One instructor likened fair-housing laws to speed limits faced by a cab driver rushing a customer to the airport, telling students: “You get to choose whether you break the law.”
Other instructors filled class time with irrelevant material, such as reviews of television shows and descriptions of funeral rituals.
One described Rockville Centre as “lily white,” referred to West Islip as “white Islip” and used derogatory racial and religious terms.
Only one of the six classes included the required three hours of fair-housing law training.
The experts examined the transcripts of four classes in which instructors set no rules against recording or quotation. They also reviewed notes on one class where the instructor barred recording but placed no restrictions on quoting. The instructor in the sixth class said she did not want to be quoted.
The instructors included the president of the Long Island Board of Realtors and three former presidents, including one who is now an attorney for the board.
New York State law requires real estate agents to attend 22.5 hours of continuing education every two years to renew their licenses. The material must include the three hours of instruction in upholding anti-discrimination laws. The state permits up to 10 minutes of break time during each hour of instruction.
Many agents opt to take in-person classes to keep their licenses up to date. LIBOR reported 14,034 registrations for its own classes and 9,703 registrations for online classes in 2017, its most recent available tax filings show. To see how Long Island agents were trained, Newsday reporters registered online for in-person fair-housing classes offered by LIBOR.
“The trainers veered pretty far away from actually covering the important topics that a Realtor or real estate agent would need to understand in order to comply with their obligations,” said Thomas Silverstein, associate counsel with the Fair Housing & Community Development Project at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law in Washington, D.C., who reviewed transcripts and notes from three classes.
What agents must know
Agents and brokers bear the responsibility for applying fair housing standards as they guide customers to housing choices. Industry representatives have contended that proper training is the best way to ensure agents uphold fair housing laws, arguing against more aggressive enforcement through fines, license suspensions or revocations.
“If you don’t educate real estate professionals about not only the history of fair housing and housing discrimination in America but about current ways that discrimination is being manifest, then you’re losing out on the opportunity to educate these professionals about how they can actively support fair housing efforts and strengthen all communities,” said Lisa Rice, president of the National Fair Housing Alliance in Washington, D.C., who teaches fair housing classes at real estate conferences.
The Department of State publishes a fair housing curriculum. Among the topics to be covered: anti-discrimination laws; the practice of “steering” minorities and whites to different areas; the promotion of racial or ethnic fears to spark “blockbusting,” or panic selling; and the so-called protected classes, such as race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex, disability and family status.
On LIBOR’s website, an online fair housing course produced by a Colorado-based company covers all those topics and more. Students must spend at least 2 hours and 30 minutes taking the online class.
The course states that the Civil Rights Act of 1866 protects all Americans from housing discrimination, regardless of race or color and with no exceptions. It lists the seven protected classes under the Fair Housing Act of 1968, and it describes exceptions under that law.
The study material also ranges from explaining hard-to-detect forms of illegal bias, such as setting higher standards for minorities than whites, to outlining under what circumstances a senior housing development can legally exclude families with children.
Warning against “well-intentioned discrimination” – such as making assumptions about what clients want based on their national origin – the course offers anecdotes about situations agents might face to illustrate how to avoid fair housing violations. In one anecdote, for example, a landlord urges an agent to “screen a little harder” as a way to discriminate against tenants by race and sex.
The Long Island classes
By contrast, one of the six in-person classes Newsday attended included only 20 minutes on fair housing. Another included 35 minutes. Three others ranged from about 50 minutes to about two hours on the topic.
In three classes, instructors asked class members to identify themselves; the reporters did so and stated their Newsday affiliation. In one of those classes, instructor Linda Damico said she did not want to be quoted, and Newsday is abiding by that condition.
The experts consulted by Newsday said that Nicholas Gigante, who has served as president of LIBOR, gave the most informative instruction. He was the only instructor who spent the state-mandated three hours on fair housing and discrimination.
Leading a class of about 20 students at the Best Western Mill River Manor in Rockville Centre, Gigante detailed fair housing and civil rights milestones. He separated the class into groups and challenged them to come up with answers to questions about protected classes, the year the Fair Housing Act was passed (1968) and whether sex offenders are covered by antidiscrimination laws (they are not).
In between, Gigante provided advice.
“A lot of buyers will call you up: ‘I want to live with my own kind.’ You ever heard that one? I’ve heard that quite a few times,” he said. “In our business if we only show them those properties or make available those properties, that would be steering.”
He added: “I know the stories that you’ll probably tell me: that you’ve had landlords, buyers and sellers who actually want you to discriminate. And your job is to say, ‘I’m sorry I can’t do that because what you’re asking me to do would violate fair housing laws, federal, state and local.'”
In an interview with Newsday in October, Gigante said fair housing can be a “tough topic,” so instructors need to give detailed information in an engaging way. He said agents “come in thinking they know everything, and then I prepare them and I teach them that ‘maybe you don’t know everything.'”
‘Shockingly thin on content’
Dianne Scalza, an associate broker with three decades of experience, is president of LIBOR, chair of the New York State Association of Realtors’ Education Management Committee and former chair of NYSAR’s Professional Standards Committee.
LIBOR’s website described her course, titled “Ready, Set, Buy! Representing a Buyer in a Real Estate Transaction,” as covering topics such as “fiduciary responsibilities to your buyer/client” and compensation. The course description promised “Mandated 3 Hours Fair Housing.”
Newsday observed two sessions. In one, 20 minutes elapsed from the moment Scalza began speaking about fair housing to her announcement that she had concluded the instruction.
During that time, she said landlords and agents may not ask buyers or renters how many children they have or what religion they practice and stated that discrimination against gay people is illegal. She said an agent cannot fulfill a client’s request for a home “in a Jewish neighborhood.”
Despite her warnings that students should not ask about protected characteristics such as race and religion, she made a blunt inquiry.
“Now, anybody here Jewish?”
Pressing further, she asked one student, “you’re not Orthodox, are you?”
Continuing that she had “a lot of friends who are Jewish,” Scalza said some did not adhere to kosher standards.
Scalza, who said she is of Irish descent and called bias “disgusting in today’s world,” also related this anecdote:
“I can remember somebody saying to me once, ‘You taking those Mafia people out?’ ‘What makes you think they’re Mafia?’ ‘Did you see their license plate? Garbage 1 and Garbage 2?’ They were paying cash! I didn’t ask them where their cash was coming from.”
She called Rockville Centre “lily white” and referred to West Islip as “white Islip.”
She also implored the class to treat everyone fairly.
About 16 minutes after she announced the start of fair-housing instruction, Scalza spoke to an African American class member, saying to her:
“We may not look alike, but deep down inside, you’re still my sister. If we could just treat people with that kind of kindness, it would be a wonderful thing. OK, so fair housing. OK, we covered that.”
A student then asked what to do if a landlord does not want tenants with children. Scalza correctly replied that the landlord “can’t deny that particular family an apartment” if the number of people in the apartment would not violate the law.
If the landlord insisted on refusing children, Scalza advised, “You cannot take the listing. It’s that simple.”
Aside from that 20-minute segment, Scalza made no reference to fair housing or discrimination in her all-day course, other than a comment offering insight into how school district preferences can become proxies for race in house hunting, saying of one client:
“She didn’t want Bay Shore because they didn’t like the school district. I have to tell you, Bay Shore is actually a good school district. What people are really saying is that there’s too many minorities there. You need minorities. You can’t grow up without minorities. You have to work with other people of all different sizes, shapes, colors, creeds, whatever.”
Scalza recalled taking that same client to a house that was “done soup to nuts. Now if you’re Italian I’m not saying this to insult you, but it was a very Italian house. Lots of molding. I’m surprised it didn’t have plastic seat cushions.”
In a second session observed by Newsday, Scalza asked a few class members to identify themselves. The Newsday reporter identified himself.
In that class, Scalza touched on fair housing issues in a roughly 90-minute stretch interspersed with unrelated matters. She informed students about six of the seven federally protected classes: race, color, religion, national origin, sex and familial status. She played a video that mentioned the seventh federally protected class, people with disabilities. She also talked about sexual orientation, which is protected under state and local laws.
However, she did not give her students a list of the seven other characteristics protected under state and local fair housing laws, including age, military and veteran status, marital status and source of income. She did not discuss any specific laws or United States Supreme Court cases.
Scalza described standing up to a home seller who tried to prevent a sale to a mixed-race couple.
“If she’d refused to sell, I would have been required to release the listing and report it to HUD,” Scalza said, referring to the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development.
She told students she has sold homes to people who are Muslim, black, Christian and Jewish, “anybody you can think of, I’ve probably sold.”
She played a video about fair housing. However, she stopped the video after about 15 minutes, saying: “You have all your fair housing regulations in your offices. There’s another 30 minutes or so. You got what it’s about.”
Warning students not to use offensive words, Scalza recalled that she once joked to a Jewish friend that a house in the Hamptons had burned down through “Jewish lightning.”
The phrase is derived from an anti-Semitic stereotype that a Jewish landlord or property owner committed arson to collect insurance proceeds. Her friend, Scalza recalled, “was very offended by that. And, you know, it breaks my heart to hurt. I would never do that. I would never do it intentionally.”
The term “is much less common now than it may have been decades ago, but you still see it show up now and then,” said Aryeh Tuchman, associate director of the Center on Extremism at the Anti-Defamation League.
Using the term reinforces anti-Semitic stereotypes, he said.
In addition, Scalza repeated an Italian-language slur for African Americans, recalling that she had been unfamiliar with the word before a home seller used it.
Newsday asked five experts on fair housing training to review Scalza’s two course presentations, based on information provided by Newsday. Two of the experts have headed fair housing organizations that train real estate agents, and three are attorneys who specialize in fair housing and conduct fair housing training.
The five experts said unanimously that the course presentations lacked basic information agents need to help them abide by fair housing laws and that some of Scalza’s statements regarding racial and religious bias could reinforce stereotypes rather than dispel them.
The two classes taught by Scalza were “shockingly thin in content,” said Silverstein, of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. “There was no clear organizational structure for what limited content there was regarding fair housing.”
Silverstein added, “Although it may have been the intent of the trainer to use examples that touched upon racial, ethnic or religious stereotypes to undermine those stereotypes, the transcript leaves substantial question as to whether she actually achieved that purpose rather than having the effect of reinforcing those stereotypes.”
Invited to speak with Newsday, Scalza said she is deeply committed to providing equal opportunities to all home buyers, and she said she has stood up to home sellers who tried to discriminate. She said she believed she had provided more than 20 minutes of fair housing instruction.
“I feel so strongly about fair housing and the right to live where you want to live that I’m glad you sent me the letter,” she said, referring to a letter from Newsday describing its findings about her classes. “Because maybe the way I’m doing it, although my passion is there, maybe it might be misinterpreted and I certainly wouldn’t want that. So I thank you for that.”
She said the stories she told about expressions of prejudice were intended to educate students about ways people might inadvertently offend others or discriminate. “I just tell my students, when you put that Realtor hat on you have to leave your prejudice at the door,” she said. “I can’t tell people not to be prejudiced. That’s a moral thing. But what I can do is, I can give them examples of everyday things that happen that you may not realize that you say, that you do, and how is that affecting those people? That’s really what I’m trying to get across.”
Scalza said: “We have met with our education director who has said, ‘we really have to, if this is truly happening,’ and she said, ‘then, we have to go back and revisit what we’re doing,’ and I understand that. Can I do it better? I’m teaching a long time. I’m sure I can. Do I want to? Without a doubt.”
‘Confusing’ instruction
A former LIBOR president, Donald Scanlon, spent about two hours on fair-housing topics at a class held in LIBOR’s West Babylon training facility in October 2018.
He devoted the first hour of the advertised three hours primarily to business topics, including LIBOR’s recent election of officers, real estate’s impact on the economy, property taxes, foreclosures, short sales, flood insurance, certificates of occupancy, LIBOR’s political action committee, his own recent home sale and a proposed professional services tax.
He spent three minutes describing a LIBOR gathering where he said 30 to 40 people lined up to ask questions after a talk about fair housing.
He also devoted six minutes to blockbusting, the practice of inducing panic sales by warning homeowners that people of a different race or ethnicity were moving in.
He told students that the state created “cease and desist” lists of homeowners who could not be contacted by agents.
Those lists have been have been instituted in certain sections of Queens, “and we’re fearful that it could spread into Nassau County,” he said.
Contacting homeowners, he added, “is our lifeblood.” He said a former elected official who supported the lists was “really not a friend of ours anymore.”
Before giving students a 10-minute break, he told them, “I’ve just spent almost an hour of our time, so I’ve got to start moving quickly into fair housing here, OK, which is not going to be hard.”
After the short break, Scanlon spent one hour and 50 minutes discussing fair housing issues. Two experts on fair housing training who reviewed a transcript of Scanlon’s three-hour class called his instruction incomplete, confusing and at times inaccurate.
Describing an agent’s obligation, Scanlon said, “You and I can provide every person with the same opportunity to either purchase, lease or occupy residential real property.” He added, “If we provide them with that opportunity, that’s an opportunity for us to make some money.”
“I’m trying to share with you here how not to get caught and the way not to get caught is not to violate the law, and the way not to violate the law is to know what the law is,” Scanlon advised.
“Then if you do get caught it’s your choice. I’m telling you, the speed limit out here is 55 miles an hour. If you choose to do 65 miles an hour, that’s your choice.”
“That’s all I’m trying to accomplish today,” he added. “If you know what the law is, if you know how you can get caught and you can decide how far are you going to push, you can decide.”
He compared real estate agents with a cab driver who is asked to get a passenger to the airport quickly and must decide whether to speed:
“You get to choose whether you break the law,” he said.
He warned that house hunters who believe they have faced bias can sue.
“Why are they doing this? Money’s the answer. What was the question again? Money is the answer,” he advised.
Scanlon told the class he had three rules to impart about fair housing.
The first focused on how to proceed if charged with violating the law.
“It’s always cheaper to settle,” he said. “Even if you did nothing wrong, it’s cheaper to settle.”
Scanlon’s second rule: “Don’t draw attention to yourself. Fly under the radar.”
As an example, he recommended that agents take care with the wording of advertisements.
Scanlon compared real estate agents who draw attention to themselves with motorists driving red cars: “Even if you’re doing nothing wrong, you have increased your chances of being pulled over, haven’t you, because you’re driving a red car.”
Scanlon’s third rule called for removing any references to “who” – that is, to people rather than homes – “out of any marketing, advertising and vocabulary.”
“Because the moment that I start talking about” people, he explained, “I am talking about someone who is ultimately in a protected category.”
Stressing that anti-discrimination laws cover more than race or color, Scanlon listed the seven classes of people covered by federal fair housing law and said that state and local laws had been extended to cover additional groups of people.
He outlined the history of fair housing laws, from the Civil Rights Act of 1866 through the modern era and explained the restrictions that once prevented blacks from buying homes in Levittown.
He noted that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968, and President Lyndon Johnson signed the Fair Housing Act into law soon after. “He had 50 percent of the country said do it and 50 percent said don’t do it. So here’s a lose-lose situation,” Scanlon said of Johnson.
“This law, in order to get it through Congress, had to allow for some exceptions saying it’s OK to discriminate under these circumstances,” Scanlon said. But over the decades, new federal, state and local laws have granted rights to more groups, he noted, giving numerous examples such as women, people with disabilities and others.
“So, just remember if they breathe, they’re protected,” he said.
Pointing out that discriminatory treatment may not be “blatantly obvious,” Scanlon said agents should pay attention even to how they return phone calls.
“Not returning a phone call is considered refusing to show a property to somebody,” he said.
Focusing the class on steering, Scanlon warned that home buyers often want to know “who their neighbors are going to be.” He added: “And we can’t help them with that.”
Kevin Cremin, director of litigation for disability and aging rights for Mobilization for Justice Inc. and a lecturer at Columbia Law School, said Scanlon’s first two rules – it’s always cheaper to settle, and don’t draw attention to yourself – bring a “moral or legal ambiguity” into the discussion, as if “it doesn’t matter what you’re doing [if you] don’t draw attention to yourself.”
William Tisdale, president and chief executive of the Metropolitan Milwaukee Fair Housing Council, called Scanlon’s instruction “confusing” and at times inaccurate, particularly in the discussion about blockbusting.
Invited by Newsday to discuss his class presentation, Scanlon said in an interview that he covered topics such as flood insurance and taxes as he opened the class to get the attention of agents, who often regard fair housing instruction as a “pill” they must take every two years.
He asserted that he nonetheless gave enough instruction time because the state allows three 10-minute breaks and he gave only one 10-minute break.
“When you say to a real estate agent, ‘you have to take three hours of fair housing,’ they’re going to go, ‘ucchh,'” he said. “And so you have to bring it down to reality for them. You really do. Because a lot of agents don’t know that they’re doing something wrong.”
In fact, he said, he believes that blockbusting – when agents tell homeowners that new residents of a different ethnic background are moving into an area and urge them to sell their homes before they decline in value – is going on in Nassau County communities such as Elmont, Valley Stream, Franklin Square, Hicksville, Uniondale and Hempstead.
He acknowledged that his description of violating the speed limit may have given a wrong impression, adding that his fiancée had suggested so after reviewing Newsday’s description of the class.
Scanlon recalled: “My fiancée said, ‘Well, Don, you know, they might even consider, you know, that you’re saying that it’s OK to do 65 miles an hour as long as you don’t get caught.’ No, it’s not OK. That’s not what I meant. But if some people interpreted that, then I’m going to have to, perhaps, readjust the way I cover fair housing, or readjust that particular topic.”
He said that he has moved fair housing instruction to the start of his classes to have students at full attention and is devoting a full three hours.
Discussing enforcement of fair housing laws, he said both that the statutes serve a purpose and that testing can go too far.
“And, you know, look, I understand the purpose of the laws. I certainly do. I understand the purpose of the testing. You know, I think sometimes it can be a little too aggressive.”
Scanlon said agents who are tested and violate the law should be given a warning if it’s their first offense. “Then it would show that, ‘Hey, look, we’re looking to work with you. We’re not adversarial…. Look, we’re going to give you a warning this time. If it happens again, you’re going to get nailed, big,'” he said.
‘Short shrift’ to fair housing
An attorney and former real estate broker, Cathleen Nolan is a former LIBOR president and answers a LIBOR legal help line for agents and brokers. She taught an all-day class in November that primarily focused on commercial real estate transactions involving investment properties. The course documents said Nolan would cover three hours of fair housing instruction.
She spoke about the topic for a period of less than 45 minutes that included:
- Four minutes devoted to stories about her mother’s misadventures in cars.
- Four minutes given to her grandmother’s military service during World War I, and television shows, such as Amazon’s “The Man in the High Castle,” Showtime’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” and the Fox series “The Americans.”
- Seven minutes focused on the so-called comfort animals that qualified renters may house in apartments.
Nolan spent less than a minute talking about steering in the remaining half hour of the fair housing instruction.
Facing about 20 students, she recounted fair housing and other civil rights laws from 1866 through modern times, emphasizing that the 1866 Civil Rights Act prohibits all bias based on race or color, with no exceptions. She also touched on the three Civil War-era amendments to the U.S. Constitution that sought to grant equality to black Americans.
She listed the protected classes under federal, state and local laws, and spoke about discrimination based on race, religion, gender, sexual orientation and disability, among other classifications.
Discussing steering, Nolan said: “Steering is when you decide where somebody has to live based on how he looks, the church he attends, all kinds of different things. All protected classes.”
She cited as an example a landlord wanting to rent to gay couples, recalling that when she worked as a broker “all the landlords seemed to want the same tenants, a gay male couple.”
Briefly, Nolan searched unsuccessfully for information she said she had received from the New York City Human Rights Commission.
“Just go under nyc.gov human rights and you’ll come up with all this stuff,” she told the class. “You can’t do anything if you’re a landlord or broker. The only ones with any rights apparently are the tenants.” She also asserted: “Nobody’s got pets anymore. They have comfort animals. You think they’re stupid? They go online and you can print something out and it’s from a doctor, 30 bucks or something, and the doctor says you need a comfort animal.”
Nolan said landlords may not charge tenants extra security fees or rent if they live with such animals and she counseled against asking someone whether they have a service animal.
In her discussion of laws governing the rights of protected classes – which in Suffolk County includes a ban on discrimination against domestic violence victims – she told the class:
“The real problem is the victims of domestic violence. That’s pretty terrible because if, let’s say somebody’s been shooting at someone for a while and now that person wants to move into your two-family house and you have kids, you don’t want somebody coming along shooting at your tenant and maybe hitting your kids, right?
“But they are protected. It’s a protected class and we’ve got to be careful. All right? Now does that mean you have to take them if they’re victims of domestic violence or if they’re in the military or if there’s, you know, if they’re, if they’re gay? No, you just can’t refuse to take them for that reason.”
She urged agents to “stay away” from rentals, and she recommended that agents who list rental apartments hold an open house.
“When you have a room full of people it’s hard for any one of them to say, ‘Oh, you’re discriminating against me,'” she said.
Cremin, of Mobilization for Justice, called Nolan’s discussion of domestic violence “disturbing,” saying that Nolan seemed “against the idea that people, victims of domestic violence, are covered” by fair housing laws.
Tisdale, of the Metropolitan Milwaukee Fair Housing Council, said, “That’s almost, ‘how not to get caught doing something bad’ as opposed to, what to do to make sure everyone has the same information.”
Nolan said she was surprised to hear she spent less than 45 minutes on fair housing when she covered the topic during the afternoon section of her all-day class. She said she has realized she was giving “short shrift” to fair housing, and has moved that instruction to the morning, when students are paying closer attention. She said she now gives the mandated three hours.
“I find it that they’re more alert in the morning. It’s worked out much better,” she said.
On the topic of protections for victims of domestic violence, she said her goal was to help agents understand the perspective of landlords who might fear for their family members’ safety. Landlords are “worried,” she said, but agents “have to understand that these people need housing, and they’re supposed to be protected as well.”
Tisdale said he believes the state should monitor fair housing instruction and “make their own conclusions about whether it meets the requirement.”
Newsday asked the Department of State about its monitoring of continuing education classes from 2016 through 2018. The agency said it monitored four classes in January and February this year, and all were in compliance.
Gigante, who gave three hours of instruction, said in more than 30 years of teaching, “I don’t think the Department of State has ever sat in on any one of my courses, or anybody else’s for that matter, not that I’ve heard of.”
The department licenses agents and is responsible for supervising continuing education of agents and brokers.
– With Mark Harrington
Asian homebuyers face hurdles but less than other minorities
While searching for homes with prices ranging from $400,000 in the Bay Shore and West Islip area to $7 million on the North Shore Gold Coast, Asian house-hunters met evidence suggesting discrimination less often than black and Hispanic peers in Newsday’s paired testing of real estate agents.
The Asian would-be home buyers – one Chinese American, one Korean American, one South Asian American – participated in 16 tests that measured the service agents gave to them against how the agents helped comparable white buyers.
In all but three, agents provided comparable service to Asian and white house hunters. The three exceptions included evidence that one agent denied equal service to an Asian tester compared with his white counterpart and that two agents provided greater information about communities to white testers – even as the agents disparaged those areas.
None of the tests matching Asian and white buyers showed evidence that agents had steered house hunters to different communities.
At three out of 16 tests, the individual Asians experienced evidence suggesting discrimination 19 percent of the time – a frequency far less then met by black (49 percent) or Hispanic (39 percent) testers.
That rate reflected apparent personal discrimination against Asian testers. Two additional tests suggested possible violations of fair housing standards that restrict agents from volunteering the racial, ethnic or religious makeup of communities to customers. In those two tests, agents pointed out a growing Asian presence in an area to potential white buyers.
“It would probably always be questionable to raise those kinds of matters if the home seeker didn’t ask about them,” said Robert Schwemm, a professor at the University of Kentucky College of Law and authority on the fair housing act, who served as Newsday consultant. “There is clear law that says steering can occur based on statements about racial makeups that are unsolicited by the home seeker.”
Asians made up 6 percent of Long Island’s population in 2017, according to the latest U.S. census estimate.
The majority live in Nassau County, where they are more dispersed than black residents. Half of the Asian population lives in 28 communities, while half of black residents live in just 11.
In Suffolk County, Asians made up 4 percent of the population in 2017 and are most highly concentrated in Stony Brook – thanks mainly to Stony Brook University, where the census counts 45 percent of the population as Asian.
Among all Asians across Long Island, Asian Indians made up 37 percent of the population, followed by Chinese, Koreans and Filipinos.
Asian testers received an average of 18 listings from agents in Newsday’s investigation, compared with 22 for their paired white testers. Collectively, the agents concentrated the listings provided to Asian and white testers in neighborhoods with similar proportions of white residents.
Asians made up 10 percent or more of the population in 59 Long Island communities, or one in every five.
All but eight of those were in Nassau County, from South Floral Park village, where Asians made up 10 percent of the population, to Garden City Park, where Asians made up 44 percent of the community. Hicksville was home to the largest number of Asians, just shy of 10,000.
The number of Asians in Nassau County has grown. Between 1990 and 2017, their proportion of the population has risen from 3 percent to 9 percent, or 123,000 people.
They have become a presence, for example, on the Island’s upscale Great Neck peninsula, home to 41,000 people on almost 10 square miles of land that extends into Long Island Sound near the border between Nassau County and Queens. Multimillion-dollar house prices are common.
Largely composed of people with Chinese and Korean backgrounds, many of them first-generation immigrants, the peninsula’s Asian representation climbed from 7 percent of the population to 18 percent in 2017.
With more than a quarter of the group below the age of 18, the children make up more than one-third of the school-age population. Their addresses channel the students to one of two high schools: Great Neck North, where, according to state statistics, Asians composed 15 percent of the student body in the last school year, and Great Neck South, where the proportion topped half.
At the same time, a peninsula that has long had a strong Jewish representation has drawn a growing number of Orthodox Jews among immigrant families with Iranian, Middle Eastern and Russian heritages.
The two tests that touched on Asian community characteristics occurred in home searches on the Great Neck peninsula, also known as Long Island’s Gold Coast.
Akhtar Somekh
Coldwell Banker
Great Neck
White and Hispanic testers separately consulted Coldwell Banker agent Akhtar Somekh about purchasing $2 million houses in the villages and hamlets that cover the peninsula. Somekh praised the schools but described their racial composition only to white buyer Kimberly Larkin-Battista and not to Hispanic customer Nana Ponceleon.
Speaking of areas served by Great Neck North and Great Neck South High Schools, Somekh told Larkin-Battista:
“Kensington and Great Neck Estates has a choice between North and South. Before it was only South. Recently we got a lot of Chinese, Oriental coming in Great Neck. In the beginning, they start going to South because they have their friends and family, everybody South. And it became overwhelmed.”
Somekh added: “Usually, the great thing about Great Neck is they keep their amount of students smaller than 20. They tried to do it but South school, when it became very crowded, so they gave Kensington and Great Neck a choice of North or South.”
Based on information provided by Newsday, fair housing consultant Fred Freiberg, executive director of the Fair Housing Justice Center, concluded:
“The agent should not have described the racial makeup of a specific high school as being overwhelmed with ‘Orientals, Chinese’ when meeting with the white tester. This negative statement, which was not made to the Hispanic tester, appears to indicate a preference or limitation based on race or possible steering by discouraging the white tester from considering the area served by this school.”
Newsday’s second consultant, Schwemm, found:
“There was a difference in treatment between the white and Hispanic tester in the form of a blatant statement by the agent about the school’s demographics. The statement suggests a possible fair housing violation, with the town/school as potential plaintiff.”
We have a lot of Asian people in Great Neck…
Rosalind Resnick
Coldwell Banker
Great Neck
Coldwell Banker agent Rosalind Resnick described both Asians and Orthodox Jews as living in the Great Neck area when speaking with white tester Brittany Silver but not with black tester Martine Hackett as each sought $5 million homes.
Resnick described the area to a white tester as “very mixed, more than it ever was.”
“We have a lot of Orthodox people in Great Neck,” she said. “We have a lot of Asian people in Great Neck. So it is – you know, it’s like that kind of a mixed community, which is …”
“Wonderful,” said white tester Silver.
“… Fine, which is good,” Resnick said, adding, “Nothing bad about any of it, is what I guess what I’m trying to say. They’re all beautiful neighborhoods.”
Shortly, she asked Silver, “Are you religious at all?” Told no, Resnick said, “Well, then that was really my way of asking – because some people are, they were Orthodox, and they want to live near a temple.”
Wrote Schwemm: “What you’re dealing with is an agent who talks about racial and demographic makeups to the white tester and doesn’t mention any of that to the black tester. And that’s inappropriate.
“It would probably always be questionable to raise those kinds of matters if the home seeker didn’t ask about them. There is clear law that says steering can occur based on statements about racial makeups that are unsolicited by the home seeker.
“It’s clearly something she thinks is bonding her to this customer, and it’s unfortunate that she thinks what bonds her to the white customer is demographic information and that she doesn’t think the minority customer is worth bonding with over demographic information.” Freiberg found: “It was inappropriate for the agent to make statements about the racial or religious makeup of a community.
“Such statements are specifically prohibited by the Fair Housing Act. Agents should not make statements that indicate a limitation or preference based on any protected characteristics, including race, national origin and religion.”
Somekh and Resnick showed no evidence of steering in the house suggestions they offered white and minority buyers. Informed by letter of Newsday’s findings, the two agents did not respond to an invitation to view video recordings of their meetings with testers or to follow-up emails and phone calls requesting interviews.
Newsday presented its findings by letter to Charlie Young, president and chief executive officer of Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage. The letter conveyed the actions of Resnick and Somekh and additional Coldwell Banker agents.
The company’s national director of public relations, Roni Boyles, wrote in an emailed statement:
“Incidents reported by Newsday that are alleged to have occurred more than two years ago are completely contrary to our long term commitment and dedication to supporting and maintaining all aspects of fair and equitable housing.
“Upholding the Fair Housing Act remains one of our highest priorities, and we expect the same level of commitment of the more than 750 independent real estate salespersons who chose to affiliate with Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage on Long Island. We take this matter seriously and have addressed the alleged incidents with the salespersons.”
Coldwell Banker declined to discuss the company’s responses to specific cases.
Mimi Hu, a Great Neck Library Board trustee, said she is aware of racial tension in the Great Neck school district. Hu’s son attends the Saddle Rock Elementary School and said she has heard fellow parents make generalizations about Asian students.
Learning that a real estate agent described Asians or “Orientals” as having “overwhelmed” the school district, Hu responded: “I don’t see anyone who would take that lightly.”
The relative equality of service provided to Asian testers when compared with black and Hispanic buyers made evidence suggesting individual discrimination no less stinging.
Following are three case histories that show evidence of the disparate treatment hidden in house hunting by Asians. They are accompanied by the findings of fair housing consultants Fred Freiberg, executive director of the Fair Housing Justice Center, and Robert Schwemm, professor at the University of Kentucky College of Law.
The opinions of Freiberg and Schwemm are based on data provided by Newsday. Their judgments are not legal conclusions.
The case histories each include the experts’ findings, and responses of agents and the companies they represent.
Agent gives white tester tour without mortgage preapproval, balks at Asian tester’s request for listings
In September 2016, tester Alex Chao sought the help of agent Francia Perez in searching for a home within 30 minutes of Bethpage. At the time, Perez worked for RE/MAX Central Properties in East Meadow. She is now a salesperson for Douglas Elliman Real Estate in Massapequa Park.
Chao told Perez that a retired friend who had worked with a mortgage lender had estimated that Chao could afford a $500,000 home. Chao said he had $120,000 for a down payment.
Richard Helling, a white customer, told Perez that a friend who currently worked with a mortgage lender projected that Helling and his wife could afford a $500,000 house as well. He said he had $130,000 to put down.
Asian Tester:
Alex Chao
Listings Given:
0
White Tester:
Richard Helling
Listings Given:
15
Perez introduced both men to a “preferred” mortgage lender who worked in her office.
Chao said he believed his wife had an appointment with a different lender the following week and expected to soon have mortgage preapproval.
“It’s always good to compare,” Perez told Chao, who said he was currently renting but was willing to pay the penalty for breaking his lease if they found the right house.
Helling said he hoped to have preapproval by the end of the next week and was renting on a month-to-month lease that was breakable.
“So, let’s not worry about the lender today,” Helling told Perez. The preferred lender told Perez, “I think he’s OK.”
Unprompted, Perez shortened the anticipated time frame for securing preapproval, saying, “Cause you’re confident that you have the preapproval in a day or two.” Helling said he was confident of his financial calculations.
Perez concluded, “I’m confident that you will get your preapproval, and I will find you a home.”
She provided Helling with listings and a house tour.
Chao told Perez that his wife had said, “I would like to see some listings” so they could “get an idea of what we can get for 500,000.”
Perez balked at suggesting homes, saying:
“When you get preapproved, you get preapproved for an amount and taxes. That’s very important before we do anything. Because if I’m just going to take you out just to look, it’s a waste of my time and your time, because we’re not knowing exactly where you stand as a monthly payment.”
Chao pressed by asking, “Would it be possible, just for our edification, for our education purposes, to just e-mail us some listings that you think would be good for us given all our criteria?” Perez responded that she would email listings that afternoon:
“Okay. So Bethpage, Plainview and Syosset will be areas that I will be e-mailing you. And then we’ll take it from there. And when you’re ready and you have your pre-approval, you’ll e-mail it to me. You say ‘Francia, I’m ready to go out and see.’ And we will make some plans.”
It was not until five weeks later, after Perez had inquired twice about preapproval in emails, that Perez emailed a batch of listings.
Experts’ Opinions
Freiberg: There was evidence of differential treatment in the provision of service. Even though neither tester was pre-approved for financing, the agent was reluctant to provide service to the Asian tester and delayed sending listings for five weeks, while the same agent accepted the word of the white tester that he was qualified to purchase a home and provided listings and a tour within four days.
Schwemm: There was evidence of discrimination and inferior treatment of the Asian tester regarding the preapproval requirement. Plus, this difference in treatment continued, with many listings being provided to the white tester vs. none to the Asian tester.
Agent and Company Responses
The vice president of communications for Perez’s then-parent company, RE/MAX LLC, provided a statement covering three tests of the firm’s agents, including Perez:
“We have spoken with the franchise owners whose agents were included in the inquiry and are confident that they have taken this matter seriously and are committed to following the law and promoting levels of honesty, inclusivity and professionalism in real estate.”
The spokeswoman, Kerry McGovern, declined to provide further information.
Representing both Perez and the Douglas Elliman company, where Perez is now an agent, an attorney with the Kasowitz Benson Torres LLP law firm watched the video recordings of the agent’s meetings with testers and reviewed listings maps.
Firm partner Jessica Rosenberg said Perez dealt more readily with the white tester because he said that he consulted a friend currently working for a mortgage company in Seattle about how much he could afford to spend, while the Asian tester had talked with a retired friend who had worked with a mortgage lender.
She wrote, “This point is critical – the white tester stated that he had had a conversation with a current mortgage lender.”
Rosenberg also asserted that Helling had “refused, despite Ms. Perez’s insistence, to meet with Ms. Perez’s preferred lender,” signaling that Helling was progressing with the process himself. In fact, the preferred lender participated in more than 15 percent of Perez’s meeting with Helling.
Agent directs both testers away from Huntington, calls it a ‘mixed neighborhood’
When white and Asian testers consulted Raj Sanghvi of Century 21 about finding $500,000 houses within a half hour of Northport, Sanghvi cautioned only the white tester about purchasing in Huntington.
“But you don’t want to go there. It’s a mixed neighborhood,” Sanghvi said, adding, “You have white, you have black, you have Latinos, you have Indians, you have Chinese, you have Koreans; everything.”
“It’s a mini, mini United Nations,” he continued.
Sanghvi suggested no Huntington houses to either tester.
Experts’ Opinions
Freiberg: Statements made by the agent to the white tester effectively steer buyers based on race. When referring to racially diverse Huntington, the agent told the white tester, “You don’t want to go there, it’s a mixed neighborhood.” The agent mentions that white, Black, Indian, Chinese live in Huntington and that it is a “mini United Nations.” The agent does not make this comment to the Asian tester. This is exactly the type of comment that agents should not make because it indicates a limitation or preference based on race.
Schwemm: There is evidence of steering, in the form of differential treatment. The agent commented on Huntington’s demographics only to the white tester, depriving the Asian tester of information that the agent apparently viewed as useful for someone choosing where to live.
Agent and Company Responses
Sanghvi and Michael Miedler, president and CEO of Century 21 Real Estate LLC, did not respond to requests for comment sent by letter, email and telephone.
Agent disparages minority communities when speaking with both testers
When white and Asian testers sought the help of Joy Tuxson of RE/MAX in finding $500,000 houses within 30 minutes of Bethpage, she offered only the white buyer her opinions on crime in an overwhelmingly minority community.
“I’m not going to send you anything in Wyandanch unless you don’t want to start your car to buy your crack, unless you just want to walk up the street,” Tuxson said.
The agent also spoke negatively to both testers about the predominantly minority Amityville school district. Speaking to the Asian tester, for example, she said that she had told a family member, “Do you really want your future children going to Amityville school districts?”
Experts’ Opinions
Freiberg: This is an example where 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.
Schwemm: The agent shared derogatory opinions about crime in the minority community of Wyandanch only with the white tester. Whether she was wrongly stereotyping or not, she provided greater information to the white tester than to the Asian.
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.”
Agent and Company Responses
Tuxson did not respond to requests for comment sent by letter, email and telephone. Kerry McGovern, RE/MAX vice president of communications, wrote in an email, “We have spoken with the franchise owners whose agents were included in the inquiry and are confident that they have taken this matter seriously and are committed to following the law and promoting levels of honesty, inclusivity and professionalism in real estate.”
Correction: Mimi Hu’s son attends Saddle Rock Elementary School. The school’s name was incorrect in a previous version of this story.
Great Neck
It was the public schools, a symbol of Great Neck’s desirability, and the proximity to Manhattan that drew Karen Ashkenase and her family to the wealthy peninsula on the North Shore of Nassau County in 1979.
Two of her children were enrolled in the local elementary school in Fresh Meadows, Queens, but Ashkenase said she and her husband wanted better for the youngsters.
“The top reason we moved was education,” said Ashkenase, 72. So the family moved to Kensington, one of nine incorporated villages on the Great Neck peninsula.
The Ashkenases, who are Conservative Jews, still live in the same house, while two sons, now grown, have moved off Long Island. A daughter lives in Great Neck.
Nearly half a century later, the Great Neck peninsula’s same attributes brought Sean Shi and his family from Austin, Texas, to the area after his wife accepted a tenure-track position at Farmingdale State College.
Shi, 40, a software engineer in Manhattan who emigrated from China more than a decade ago, and his wife moved into their house in the village of Great Neck Estates in April 2018.
Parents of two girls, a 4-year-old and a 4-month-old, the Shis are part of a growing number of Asians, predominantly Chinese and Koreans, who have settled on the peninsula in the past decade, replacing mostly white and Jewish residents.
The Ashkenases and the Shis represent the changes taking place in Great Neck over the past five decades as people from different backgrounds, looking for the same high quality of life, come to live.
First-generation immigrants from China, Korea, Iran and Russia – each with their own cultural history – live side by side with second-, third- and fourth-generation immigrants from around the world who have assimilated into American culture.
Between 2000 and 2017, Great Neck’s Asian population more than doubled, from 2,657 to 7,347, and they rose from being 7 percent of the population to 18 percent, according to U.S. Census estimates. In 2017, 27.8 percent of Asians were under the age of 18. Meanwhile, the white population decreased from 32,234 in 2000 to 29,904, or from 81 percent to 72 percent. In 2017, only 12 percent of non-Hispanic whites were 18 or younger.
During the same period, the Hispanic population dropped from 6 percent to 3 percent and the black population declined from 4 percent to 3 percent.
The Great Neck peninsula, with more than 41,000 residents, has also seen its population of Orthodox Jews, Iranian Jews ¬- who refer to themselves as Persians – and other Middle Eastern Jews grow, according to local residents interviewed for this story. Bukharian Jews, many of whom immigrated to the United States and settled in Queens after the Soviet Union collapsed, have also moved to the peninsula in recent years, according to residents.
There are at least 20 synagogues, two kosher supermarkets, a kosher butcher shop and more than a dozen kosher food establishments on the peninsula. Great Neck has three mikvahs, indoor pools in which Orthodox Jewish women immerse themselves for ritual purification.
An eruv, a symbolic religious boundary that makes it possible for Orthodox Jewish residents to carry certain items outside their homes and engage in activities such as pushing a stroller on the Sabbath, covers most of the peninsula, except for the village of Lake Success.
In Newsday’s paired testing of real estate agents on Long Island, the population shift in Great Neck was referenced by some agents as they spoke with customers.
“Any community that you live in is going to undergo changes. Things evolve,” said North Hempstead Town Supervisor Judi Bosworth, who moved to the peninsula from Forest Hills in 1980. “I think that Great Neck has become a more diverse community. I think that adds to the strength of the community that there are so many different cultures that are learning from each other.”
The Great Neck peninsula, which is 9.6 square miles, juts into Long Island Sound on the northwestern edge of Nassau, just across from the Queens border.
Great Neck starts south of the Long Island Expressway in the village of Lake Success and stretches all the way to the affluent village of Kings Point, thought to be the inspiration for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s town of West Egg in “The Great Gatsby.”
The peninsula consists of several unincorporated areas in the Town of North Hempstead and nine incorporated villages, each with its own mayor and village trustees. In addition to single-family homes, there are co-ops, condominiums, rental apartments, several senior residential developments and two hotels.
Prices range from $225,000 for a one-bedroom co-op in Great Neck Plaza to $35 million for a waterfront mansion in the village of Kings Point, according to the Multiple Listing Service of Long Island Inc. The median home value is $940,000, according to MLSLI.
A buyer looking for a four-bedroom house will generally pay $1 million or $1.5 million in certain villages such as Kensington, said Hong Guo, also known as Dana, a real estate broker with Keller Williams Realty in Great Neck.
Great Neck has been confronted with changes over the years as different waves of newcomers move to the area, transforming the community each time.
After World War II, Ashkenazi Jews left the city and relocated to Great Neck. In the 1980s, the peninsula was a refuge for Iranian Jews who fled Iran after the country’s monarch was overthrown. As the Persian community grew, they built the Iranian Jewish Center, the North Shore Sephardic Temple and the Mashadi Jewish Center of Great Neck.
Village of Great Neck officials in July approved the site plan of a proposed three-story, 75,000-square-foot Mashadi Jewish community center in a residential neighborhood.
“One of the reasons I moved to Great Neck was because of the growing Persian community in Great Neck,” said Jacqueline Harounian, a lawyer who moved to Kings Point from Old Westbury more than three decades ago. “When I moved to the community, it was much, much smaller. Now it’s much, much larger.”
The latest wave of newcomers, Asians, arrived in greater numbers in the 2000s.
“If you live in Flushing, Bayside or College Point and you’re looking to move to Long Island, the first choice is Great Neck or Jericho,” said Youngsoo Choi, 47, a lawyer who moved from Flushing to Spinney Hill, in Manhasset, a decade ago with his wife and their two school-age children.
Great Neck has one school district, with 6,438 students, that serves the entire peninsula as well as North New Hyde Park and part of Manhasset Hills. The majority of Spinney Hill students attend the district.
Asians made up 12.8 percent of the student population in the Great Neck schools in the 1999-2000 school year, but their ranks had grown to 26 percent a decade later, according to state data. In the 2017-18 school year, 36.6 percent of the district’s students were Asian.
While Asian students made up 15.1 percent of the population in Great Neck North High School in 2017-18, they were the majority, at 53.5 percent, in Great Neck South High School.
In the last decade or so, as Asians move to Great Neck, some said differences between the newcomers and the more established population have led to tensions.
In the 1980s and ’90s, Iranians in Great Neck, who spoke in their native Farsi, stood out among the area’s Ashkenazi Jewish residents.
“Yes, when the Persians moved in, they opened restaurants; they spoke a different language; they looked a little different; their values were a little different. And, I am sure that made a lot of people very uncomfortable,” said Harounian, whose parents emigrated from Iran. “And, yes, you see the same thing happening with the Asian community.”
Agents who complied with fair housing laws
In Newsday’s real estate investigation, the following 52 tests, which involved 56 agents, complied with fair housing standards.
In another 34 cases, Newsday’s fair housing experts found evidence suggesting fair housing violations including steering and denial of equal service. View those case histories including the experts’ opinions and agents’ responses, if any.
Uniondale
Uniondale’s supporters acknowledge many view their community as a troubled place, but they say those with that perception need to look a little closer.
Sergio Argueta, a longtime community activist and a Uniondale school district social worker, said there are parts of Uniondale where well-kept homes with manicured lawns on quiet streets have been passed down over the generations, while other areas face economic challenges.
He says there exists an invisible line within the community between the north and south sides.
“Uniondale [is] perfectly situated in terms of it being lower, middle and upper classes,” he said.
Longtime Uniondale resident Mary-Ellen Kreye laughed when told of the negative things some people have to say about her community – high crime, poverty, a gang problem.
“They just don’t know a good thing when they see it,” said Kreye, 83, who serves as vice president of the Uniondale Community Council. Kreye has lived in Uniondale since 1966.
“We have a fabulous community where people work together for the betterment of the community, we participate in civic organizations and coordinate and cooperate, we attend town and legislative meetings, our young people do very well all over the world,” she said.
“It’s very interesting, things people say. They see what they want to see.”
Newsday’s paired tester investigation of real estate brokers and agents on Long Island found evidence of steering and disparate treatment toward minority buyers in individual tests. It also uncovered a larger pattern that showed agents avoid sending buyers to predominantly minority communities like Uniondale.
“Uniondale is basically black and now Hispanic,” said Ernie Catanese, a Uniondale resident since 1954. “Some people don’t appreciate that. They want a white neighborhood.”
Uniondale is a sprawling community in southern Nassau County with neighborhoods featuring a variety of home styles: capes, ranches, high ranches and colonials, along with high-density communities for the aged and people with lower incomes. College students attending nearby Hofstra University in Hempstead have plenty of options for rentals.
The community boasts numerous active civic associations, the 65-acre county-owned Purcell Preserve and a huge library.
Uniondale is home to NYCB Live’s Nassau Coliseum and the region’s largest hotel, the Long Island Marriott. That area is now poised for another transformation. In December, the Nassau County Legislature took the first step in pushing forward a plan to transform 72 vacant acres surrounding the coliseum into a housing, office and biotech research development known as the Hub.
Manhattan-based cancer care system Memorial Sloan Kettering in April officially opened its $180 million, 114,000-square-foot cancer facility there.
But the community’s challenges are real. Amid an increase in crime more than a decade ago, Argueta said, the U.S. Department of Justice in 2007 designated Uniondale as a Weed and Seed community. The program attempts to weed out violent crime, gang activity and drugs, then restore the community through prevention, intervention, treatment and social and economic revitalization.
“Unfortunately, we do have some gun violence and gang violence,” Argueta said. “It’s part of the unique challenges that many of our young people are facing. It’s the same young people that live in communities where there are a lack of resources, employment opportunities and positive engagement.”
He said some of the economic adversity faced by Hempstead and Roosevelt to the south also impacts Uniondale and that it brings with it residual effects such as low high school graduation rates. Uniondale High School’s graduation rate in 2018 was 73 percent, while the state average was 80 percent.
But Uniondale has advantages over some other communities, he said.
“It’s predominantly an African American and Latino community,” Argueta said. “But because of all of the businesses, there’s still a high quality of life within the region that doesn’t currently exist in a lot of the other communities that are predominantly of color.”
Kreye, who is white, has fought for years to keep Uniondale diverse, joining with other concerned residents to lobby for the community. She said that when she and her family moved from Hempstead to Uniondale, they found exactly what they were seeking.
“We wanted a diverse community that was integrated like the country is supposed to be, and we felt very lucky to buy in Uniondale,” she said. “We’ve never regretted it.”
Uniondale started off like most other Long Island communities: farmland. But by 1988 there were only two farms left, including the last 3.5 acres of the Goehner Family Farm, which 100 years before had been 17 acres. Now, the only remnant is what used to be the Goehner farm stand, which has been relocated and preserved as a museum.
Uniondale has a notable history dating to the Revolutionary War, when it served as an enlistment center, plus a more recent rich military history that helped shape the community.
Mitchel Field, an Army Air Corps base during World War II, was established in 1917 within the Hempstead Plains, the first known prairie in America. After the war, many of those who lived on the base moved to Uniondale, Kreye said. Because the base was also a source for civilian jobs, it helped the community expand.
Nearby military manufacturers such as Grumman, Fairchild and Republic were a quick commute and made Uniondale attractive.
“It’s a convenient area to live in and it was open,” Kreye said. “The covenants in Levittown, which I still can’t believe, that prevented people from selling their homes to people of color, made Uniondale a welcome option.”
When Catanese and his wife, Marie, moved to Uniondale from Brooklyn in 1954, he wanted an easy commute to his job at Grumman in Syosset. The couple also sought an integrated community with good schools.
They picked Uniondale as a direct rebuke of Levittown’s racist policies.
“We just didn’t want to live like that,” said Ernie Catanese, who is white. “It’s not right.”
While Uniondale was integrated overall, whites lived on the north side of town and black people lived south of Jerusalem Avenue.
Eventually, white flight took off.
“When we moved on our block of 54 homes, there were no black families,” Catanese said.
Now, he says, he and his wife are the last white family. “And that’s fine,” Catanese said. “They’re better neighbors; their lawns look better than ours.”
According to the census in 1960, the resident population was 95 percent white and 5 percent black. By 1990 the numbers were 45 percent white and 46 percent black.
In 2010 the census counted 24,759 residents, with 10 percent white, 47 percent black, 2 percent Asian and 39 percent Hispanic.
In 2017 the total number of residents had grown to 31,597, with 21 percent white, 37 percent black, 3 percent Asian and 35 percent Hispanic, according to the census’ American Community Survey. That survey expanded the Uniondale boundaries to include parts of the community known as East Garden City, which will not be a separate census tract in the 2020 census.
Kreye acknowledges Uniondale was far from perfect. Black children from south of Jerusalem Avenue had to be bused to the north side of town to integrate schools.
She said many of the civic organizations in Uniondale were created to make sure the community got its fair share of government funds for beautification, public works projects and street cleaning as compared to surrounding areas.
After the Korean War, war-related work dried up and people began to leave. Kreye said real estate agents tried to pressure residents into selling their homes, saying the area was becoming unsafe.
She said the community developed a “do-not-solicit” list to keep real estate agents from seeking listings from residents not interested in selling. “I do think that it helped,” Kreye said.
Catanese said he’s aware of his community’s reputation, recounting a story about the family of a suitor of their daughter.
“She said, ‘Where do you live?’ And we said ‘Uniondale,’ and she said ‘ugh,'” Catanese said. “It was very, very upsetting.”
James M. Sharpe III, a former Uniondale school board president who has lived in bordering Hempstead Village for about three decades, said he thinks Uniondale overall has a good reputation.
“There’s a transient population. You worry about overcrowding in houses,” he said.
Kreye, Catanese and Sharpe say the latest demographic change, the growing Hispanic population, just adds to the fabric of a diverse community.
What concerns them all are the things that concern many communities: fear of overdevelopment, traffic, absentee landlords, overcrowded schools.
“The people in this community wants what every other community wants: good schools, good neighbors, safety,” Sharpe said. “It doesn’t matter what the people look like.”
But when told real estate agents avoided showing testers homes in his community as well as other minority neighborhoods, he said he was not surprised.
“People have a predisposition of certain areas of Nassau based on what they hear, what’s in the paper, on radio and TV,” he said. “People’s perceptions become their reality.”
He added that he has noticed that when homes are put on the market in his neighborhood and surrounding communities, they are most often represented by independent brokers who are minorities.
“Not showing homes to house hunters does a disservice to everyone involved,” he said. “There’s nothing going on here that’s not going on in any other neighborhood on Long Island, and I mean that in a good way.”
Argueta said Uniondale is a good community.
“We have some incredible things happening in the community that are positive. Ninety percent of our community is the way that it needs to be,” he said. “Unfortunately, you do have some of the same challenges and issues you find in high poverty areas where there’s a lack of resources and opportunities.”
House-hunting while black on LI
Thirty-nine times, black men and women engaged with real estate agents as paired undercover testers in Newsday’s investigation. In 19 of those times, the testing suggested they experienced disparate treatment compared with matched white testers. Additionally, one agent warned white and Asian testers to avoid predominantly black communities.
Kelvin Tune, 54, a federal employee, met with nine courteous, professional agents. He had no idea that seven of those meetings produced evidence of unequal service, with one agent in effect shutting him out of considering houses in the bedrock Long Island community of Plainview.
“I wasn’t welcomed to Plainview for her,” said Tune on learning the results of that test.
Johnnie Mae Alston, 65, a retired state worker, had no idea that an agent refused to provide her service on the same terms offered to a white client.
“I would have never known,” Alston said on learning how her experiences as a tester in Newsday’s investigation compared with the experiences of her white counterparts.
Speaking of the real estate agents she met, Alston added: “They make you feel like they are treating you like everybody else. That’s because you don’t see the other side. But once you see the other side, you realize that you aren’t treated that well.”
All these testers – both minority and white – discovered for the first time how their experiences compared when Newsday brought them together for joint interviews.
Testing found evidence that:Black testers experienced unequal treatment
49% of the time
- Newsday’s black testers experienced disparate treatment at higher rates than did Hispanic (39 percent) and Asian testers (19 percent).
- In 11 cases, agents directed black testers to different neighborhoods than white testers in comparisons that showed evidence of steering.
- In five instances, agents imposed conditions on black testers that amounted to the denial of equal service compared with conditions requested of white testers.
- In three cases, agents either spoke about steering to the white tester but not the black tester or volunteered information about the ethnic makeup of communities only to white testers.
- Altogether, agents provided white testers an average of 50 percent more listings than they gave to black counterparts – 39 compared with 26, including instances when agents provided no listings to one tester.
There was no such gap in paired testing for other minorities. Agents gave both Hispanic and white testers an average of 42 listings. Asians received 18 compared with 22 given to white testers.
Limiting choices can help guide buyers toward and away from communities.
“Probably the most powerful tool for steering is through information withholding,” said Jacob Faber, an assistant professor of sociology at New York University who studies segregation.
“So that job as information conveyors is just really important.”
Before the changes driven by the civil rights movement, real estate agents often refused outright to serve black buyers. Today, experts say discrimination more likely takes the form of subtly directing buyers of different backgrounds toward different communities or requiring minorities to overcome higher financial barriers than whites.
Following are four case histories that show evidence of the disparate treatment hidden in house hunting while black on Long Island a half century after passage of the federal Fair Housing Law. They are accompanied by the findings of fair housing consultants Fred Freiberg, executive director of the Fair Housing Justice Center, and Robert Schwemm, professor at the University of Kentucky College of Law.
The opinions of Freiberg and Schwemm are based on data provided by Newsday. Their judgments are not legal conclusions.
The case histories each include the experts’ findings, and responses of agents and the companies they represent.
Agent diverts a black buyer from agent’s hometown Plainview
Anthony Congiano, who is white, met agent Donna Rogers in the Douglas Elliman Real Estate office in Plainview in May 2016. He was looking for a three-bedroom house within 30 minutes of neighboring Bethpage. He said his wife had gotten a job there. His maximum price was $550,000.
Rogers advised that $550,000 would buy access to houses requiring minimal renovations in Plainview and Bethpage.
“For the budget that you’re giving me in Bethpage, you’ll definitely find something, you know, that’s going to be less work, you know, less stuff to do. In Plainview, it’s a good budget. You know, Plainview you may have to do one or two things,” she said.
Congiano indicated that he would be willing to do some repairs. “I can get my hands dirty, if I have to, you know, fix a few things, that’s not really a problem for me,” he told the agent.
Rogers responded: “OK. I mean, I’m confident we can definitely find you something. Pretty much, you know, you might just have to go in and rip up the carpets, paint.”
Black Tester:
Kelvin Tune
Listings Given:
11
Census Tracts:
72% white on average
White Tester:
Anthony Congiano
Listings Given:
10
Census Tracts:
82% white on average
In fact, Rogers told Congiano that her childhood home, where her mother still lived, was on the market for $539,000. She said she had lived in Plainview for 29 years and in the Plainview-Old Bethpage area for 43. She described the house as “all renovated, basically.”
“You may not like the carpet so you may have to change out the carpet or something. Little things, you know,” Rogers said.
Kelvin Tune, who is black, met with Rogers five months later, also seeking a three-bedroom house within 30 minutes of Bethpage. He said his elderly mother lived in the community.
Tune mentioned nearby Hicksville as a place his purported wife had suggested, but then immediately focused on Bethpage, telling Rogers, “my mom’s lived here in Bethpage,” and saying both that “we’d like within a half-hour range” and a “30-minute radius.”
His top was also $550,000. Now, Rogers said that a $550,000 budget would limit choices in Plainview.
“For instance, in, say, Bethpage, you’ll probably find a house pretty much done. You may have to do like one bathroom, you know, or something like that, or maybe just go in and paint, or something like that. You’ll get a nice house for 550. This area you get nothing,” she told Tune. “Nothing for five, but you will get something that needs a total renovation.”
Only a month before speaking with Tune, the house that Rogers had touted to Congiano as her well-maintained childhood home was taken off the market. On her brokerage web page, Rogers described the house as featuring an eat-in kitchen with new central island, two “new full” baths, a Jacuzzi tub, a “newer” roof and siding and “new” fencing. The house sold for $485,000.
When Tune asked, “So the district is, Plainview is out of the question?” Rogers responded, “Right. Plainview, you’re not going to find something – it’s going to be tough to find something that’s like what you’re looking for.”
Rogers suggested other possibilities: Hicksville, East Meadow and Farmingdale. The school populations in those communities were 33 percent white, 54 percent white and 65 percent white – compared with higher than 70 percent in Plainview and Bethpage. She did not mention Hicksville, East Meadow and Farmingdale to Congiano.
Rogers talked about school districts with both Congiano and Tune, providing different information.
Speaking with Congiano, Rogers said Plainview and Bethpage both “have the good school districts.”
“They have very high ratings for Plainview, you know, Plainview, Bethpage,” she said, “Actually, I think Bethpage did really, really well. They might have even surpassed Plainview, to be honest with you.”
She added: “And I’m a mom, so I know, you know what I mean? So, look, you know, when you’re looking for a house, especially when you have a child, that has to be like, you know, number one no matter what. You know, you want a good school district.”
In contrast, while speaking with Tune, Rogers said nothing about the quality of the Plainview or Bethpage schools as a selling point. Instead, she told him, “You need to do research on school districts” by consulting ratings that are available online.
She also counseled Tune to take the ratings “with a grain of salt.” Showing him one such computation, she noted that Garden City High School was rated at 96.2 while East Islip scored 70.9.
“It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just — it’s just giving you a basic idea, OK?” Rogers said, adding: “They’re all good schools. You just – you know, just some of the ratings are different. That’s all.”
Rogers provided listings that directed Tune as far as 10 miles away from Plainview while centering Congiano there and in Bethpage.
She located Congiano in areas with a higher percentage of whites than in the areas she suggested to Tune. Additionally, she placed Tune in school districts with higher minority representations.
Congiano’s listings – five in Plainview, five in Bethpage – fell in census tracts where whites made up 82 percent of the population.
Tune’s listings – a total of 11 spread among Hicksville, Levittown, Bethpage, East Meadow and Farmingdale – landed in tracts where whites had a 10 percentage-point smaller share of the population at 72 percent. Rogers included none in Plainview.
Drawing on data it purchases from the Multiple Listing Service of Long Island, the system used by the Island’s real estate industry to market homes, Zillow computed that more than 30 houses were on the market in the Plainview ZIP code on the dates of both tests.
“It makes me feel almost sick to my stomach that she did it, because that’s, in my perception, I see that as steering him away. But I am not shocked about it. I’m not shocked because she did do it subtly,” Congiano said on learning the test results.
Experts’ Opinions
Freiberg: The agent’s comments and conduct suggest racial steering.
The agent was willing to provide an unqualified opinion on the high quality of schools in certain areas to the white tester, while telling the African American tester to do his own research on schools and cautioning that online school ratings may not be the best indicators of school quality.
The agent provided home listings to the African American tester that were in areas with slightly larger minority populations served by school districts with a larger minority student population when compared to the home listings the agent provided to the white tester. For instance, the agent did not select any listings for the African American tester in Plainview (where the agent has resided) and discouraged him from considering Plainview based on his price range, but the same agent provided the white tester with home listings in Plainview in the same price range.
Schwemm: The facts show steering not so much regarding the number of listings in white areas, but the zero listings for the black tester in Plainview while the white tester got lots there.
Agent and Company Responses
Representing both Rogers and the Douglas Elliman company, an attorney with the Kasowitz Benson Torres LLP law firm watched the video recordings of the agent’s meetings with testers and reviewed listings maps. Firm partner Jessica Rosenberg then challenged the validity of Newsday’s findings.
Rosenberg said that black tester Tune had influenced Rogers’ choice of listings by indicating both a desire to avoid traffic and citing Hicksville as a possible choice.
Explaining why Rogers chose Plainview only for the white tester, Rosenberg said Rogers may have misinterpreted the black tester’s “willingness to do a renovation.” Rosenberg said that the white tester had said “I can get my hands dirty,” when asked about doing work on a house, while the black tester had said, “I don’t want to do too much work.”
Rosenberg failed to note that after saying he could get his hands dirty the white tester added, “Nothing that major. But if I have to, you know, fix a few things, that’s not really a problem for me.”
Rosenberg did not comment on Rogers’ statement to the black tester, “This area you get nothing” for $550,000.
Explaining the different information Rogers provided to the testers about schools, Rosenberg said that, between the dates of the two tests, Rogers “attended a continuing legal education class regarding the Fair Housing Act” at which she was instructed “to avoid making any comments on the quality of school districts to avoid any steering accusations.”
Rogers was licensed in 2012. Like all real estate agents in New York, she was required to complete four hours of training in fair housing and discrimination as part of a 75-hour licensing course and exam. Agents also must complete three hours of fair-housing training every two years as part of their 22.5 hours of mandated continuing education.
Agent demands identification from a black buyer but not a white buyer
Kimberly Larkin-Battista, who is white, told Realty Connect USA agent Margaret Petrelli in June 2016 that she and her husband were looking for a house within an hour of Manhattan with a $600,000 maximum price. She advised Petrelli that they had a 4-year-old son.
“So, you’re gonna wanna put him in a good school district,” responded Petrelli, who was located in Levittown.
She wrote district names on a piece of paper, citing Wantagh as “blue ribbon” and touting Seaford, Plainedge, Bethpage, Levittown, Bellmore, North Bellmore and Merrick. The populations of those communities ranged from 79 percent to 92 percent white.
“All of these areas are good, and they’re beautiful,” Petrelli said.
She also highlighted 91 percent white Massapequa – but not the section of Massapequa that falls within the neighboring Amityville district, saying, “You’re not going to like those schools.”
The Amityville school population is 92 percent black and Hispanic. In 2018, 19 percent of the high school graduates achieved a Regents diploma with advanced designation, indicating passage of eight Regents exams. The Massapequa district proportion was 66 percent.
Black Tester:
Liza Colpa
Listings Given:
2
Census Tracts:
58% white on average
White Tester:
Kimberly Larkin-Battista
Listings Given
8
Census Tracts:
88% white on average
Five months later, Petrelli looked elsewhere for $600,000 houses after meeting with Liza Colpa, who is black. Colpa told Petrelli that “school districts are super important to us” as the parents of a 4-year-old. Petrelli offered no written recommended districts list.
Now, Petrelli emphasized East Meadow, then 69 percent white, and Hicksville, 57 percent white, and Levittown, 79 percent white. She also looked as far away as New Hyde Park, 50 percent white, and Floral Park, 80 percent white, both more than 10 miles distant from her office.
All told, Petrelli mentioned Merrick, Bellmore, Wantagh, Seaford, Massapequa, Bethpage and Plainedge 22 times when speaking with white customer Larkin-Battista. She never mentioned those communities to black customer Colpa.
Conversely, Petrelli referenced East Meadow and Hicksville 26 times while speaking with Colpa and never while talking with Larkin-Battista.
Most striking, Petrelli asked Colpa for identification after escorting Larkin-Battista on house tours without requesting ID. A Newsday reporter, posing as Colpa’s husband, followed up in a phone conversation with Petrelli. On the call, Petrelli asserted that it was office policy to ask all customers for identification.
“We always do that,” Petrelli said, adding, “That’s what we do with everyone.”
Petrelli sent Larkin-Battista eight listings in Levittown and Wantagh census tracts that averaged 88 percent white. She recommended two homes to Colpa, one in East Meadow, one in Hicksville, in census tracts that averaged 58 percent white.
Petrelli’s demand for identification unsettled the testers.
“The identification part really shocks me, because I was never asked in any instance for identification. And just the fact that she did that and also said, after the fact, that she does that all the time. And obviously, she doesn’t,” Larkin-Battista said.
Experts’ Opinions
Freiberg: Denial of equal service to the African American tester, the disparaging statement made to the white tester about a predominantly minority school district and the provision of home listings in different areas raise very serious concerns about both racial steering and discriminatory treatment.
The agent told the African American tester it was office policy to require a valid ID from all prospective buyers before agents could take them to view homes for sale even though the same agent took the white tester out to view homes for sale without asking for identification.
Also, the agent, in mentioning Massapequa as an area the white tester might want to consider, steered the white tester away from a part of that community that feeds into the predominantly minority Amityville school district stating “you’re not going to like those schools” while the agent did not make similar statements to the African American tester.
Finally, the agent provided home listings to the African American tester that were in areas with slightly greater minority populations served by school districts that had greater minority student populations when compared to the home listings the agent provided to the white tester.
Schwemm: Evidence of blatant difference in treatment (inferior treatment of black tester) and steering.
The key here is discrimination against the black tester, who is told about few homes, while the white tester is told about many.
Thus, the agent is making many houses “unavailable” – apparently based on the black tester’s race.
Agent and Company Responses
Informed of Newsday’s findings, Petrelli initially accepted Newsday’s invitation to view video recordings of meetings with testers. Because of a scheduling conflict, Newsday asked her to choose another time. She responded once saying an alternate time would not work for her. She has since not responded to a follow-up email or phone call.
27 homes recommended to black buyer, agent warns white buyer of gangs
In November 2016, Kelvin Tune, who is black, met with agent Le-Ann Vicquery in the Keller Williams Hauppauge office. He expressed interest in finding a house within 30 minutes of Brentwood, where his wife had taken a job. His top price was $400,000.
Vicquery told Tune she enjoyed working with clients in Brentwood, which has among the highest proportion of minority residents on Long Island. At the time, the community was counted as 64 percent Hispanic, 14 percent black, 18 percent white and 2 percent Asian.
“I have to tell you, my clients in Brentwood are the nicest clients,” Vicquery told Tune. “I always tell everybody that every time I get a new listing in Brentwood, or a new client, I get so excited because they’re the nicest people.”
Twelve days after his office visit, Tune began a series of emails, asking Vicquery to send him house listings. Vicquery responded by asking Tune whether he could tour houses on a Friday afternoon with a colleague named Jean Gillin. For a decade, Vicquery and Gillin had done business in a working partnership.
Tune responded that he would be available. Vicquery wrote back, sending a copy of the email to Gillin:
“Great! We will send you homes sometime tomorrow and go from there.”
The next day, 37 listings were forwarded to Tune from Gillin’s email account, with the notation, “Here are a few homes with your criteria.” It continued, “Let us know the ones you are interested in seeing.”
Twenty-seven of the 37 listings centered Tune on Brentwood in census tracts averaging 17 percent white populations.
Black Tester:
Kelvin Tune
Listings Given:
37
Census Tracts:
31% white on average
White Tester:
Richard Helling
Listings Given:
11
Census Tracts:
86% white on average
Richard Helling, who is white, met with Vicquery two months after Tune. He, too, specified houses within 30 minutes of Brentwood with a maximum cost of $400,000.
While touring homes with Vicquery, Helling said that he had identified two houses in Brentwood that seemed interesting. He handed her printouts of the listings, found through an online home search service.
“I’ll look into them for you,” Vicquery told Helling.
Later that day, Vicquery warned Helling about gang violence.
“Hi dean, you may want to look into recent gang killings in the Brentwood area online,” she text-messaged, using the first name of Helling’s tester alias “Dean.”
She repeated the warning in an email: “as mentioned please kindly do some research on the gang-related events in that area for safety.”
Members of the MS-13 gang had allegedly beaten and hacked to death two teenage girls, Nisa Mickens, 15, and Kayla Cuevas, 16, in Brentwood in September 2016, two months before Tune’s visit. Gang members had also committed additional murders.
The Mickens and Cuevas murders sparked intense coverage by local print and television outlets as well as national media interest after President Donald Trump cited a Newsday front-page headline that spoke of an “extremely violent” gang faction.
Between the double murder and black tester Tune’s meeting with Vicquery, Newsday published 25 stories related to MS-13 activity in Brentwood, including five that took over the front page. By the end of the year, the coverage included 28 stories and then abated.
Vicquery did not warn Tune about the gang activity.
In contrast to the house locations recommended to Tune, Vicquery sent Helling no Brentwood listings. Instead, her 11 choices directed Helling to census tracts that averaged 86 percent white residents by picking homes in Hauppauge (five miles from Brentwood), Smithtown (eight miles from Brentwood) and St. James (10 miles from Brentwood).
Experts’ Opinions
Freiberg: The facts in the summary of this test provide a textbook example of racial steering. The agent (Vicquery) discouraged the white tester from considering housing in Brentwood because of recent gang killings and provided no listings of homes in Brentwood to the white tester. The same agent informed the African American tester that there are the “nicest people” in Brentwood. The agent, with assistance from another agent with whom she works closely, provided multiple listings of homes in Brentwood for his consideration. Overall, the home listings provided to the African American tester were in areas with much greater minority populations when compared to the home listings provided to the white tester.
Schwemm: This appears as a classic example of modern steering – nobody uses racial epithets anymore. The community that the black tester is being shown is different from the white tester’s area. There are also the statements about gang violence and other situations that are mentioned only to the white tester. I don’t know whether there’s an outright refusal to show the white tester Brentwood homes, but it comes pretty close to that. The Vicquery-Gillin arrangement does not excuse the differential treatment here.
Agent and Company Responses
Before publication of Long Island Divided, Newsday informed Vicquery and Gillin about the investigation’s tentative findings by letter and invited them to view videos of office meetings, as well as to review maps of the listings provided to each tester. The letters also solicited their perspectives.
The two agents did not respond. Reached by telephone then, Vicquery declined to comment. Gillin did not respond to a message left on her voicemail.
Seven weeks after publication, Vicquery contacted Newsday by email. She pointed out that Newsday’s article had not described Gillin’s role in the test, prompting a revision to reflect that the listings transmitted to black tester Tune came from Gillin’s email account.
Asked why she had not warned the black tester about gang violence in Brentwood, Vicquery said that she had not been fully aware of the highly publicized events in a community she served as a real estate agent. She said her lack of knowledge showed “what a bubble I live in.”
Vicquery said that she later warned the white tester because she had heard a gang-related story on television or radio on the day she escorted the tester on house tours.
“There was a big thing that exact day and it scared the crap out of me,” she said, while adding that she does not remember what had been reported.
Questioned about pointing the white tester away from Brentwood, Vicquery said that she had researched the suitability and availability of every house there that had shown up in the Multiple Listings Service of Long Island database.
All were outside the requested price range, required extensive renovations or were subject to an accepted purchase offer, she said. She also stated that the database had expired, making it impossible to verify her research.
“I understand that steering goes on and I am absolutely disgusted by it,” Vicquery said, adding, “I can guarantee you I did not steer.”
At the same time, Vicquery said she did not remember looking into the availability of the two Brentwood houses suggested to her by the white tester.
Queried about her role in the test, Gillin wrote in an email that she has no recollection of the events. Referring to Tune, she wrote, “I did not have knowledge that he was black until I met him.”
On the question of how Tune came to be pointed toward houses in Brentwood, she wrote, “The houses that were sent are computer generated from criteria given to me unquestionably from Le-Ann (Vicquery) since she is the only one that had contact with him.” She later wrote that Vicquery may have used Gillin’s email account to send the listings. She pointed out that she had no contact with the white tester.
Newsday’s two fair housing experts reevaluated the test results in light of Gillin’s role and a description of the agents’ working partnership. They affirmed opinions that the test showed differential treatment.
Asked for comment about the actions of Keller Williams agents, including Vicquery and Gillin, chief executive officer Gary Keller responded through the firm’s national spokesman, Darryl Frost, who said in an emailed statement: “Keller Williams does not tolerate discrimination of any kind. All complaints of less than exemplary conduct are addressed and resolved in partnership with our leaders to ensure compliance with our policies, as well as with local, state and federal laws.
“In addition, we require all Keller Williams agents to take the National Association of Realtors Code of Ethics training, developed in accordance with the Fair Housing Act, before they earn their Realtor’s license and thereafter, every two years to maintain it. Every Keller Williams franchise also receives extensive industry training and resources that reinforce best practices in fair housing.”
Correction: The name of real estate agent Jean Gillin, and her role in the test case, were omitted in a previous version of this story.Agent says Freeport homes bad investment for white buyer, fine for black buyer
Twenty-two days apart in June 2016, agent Dianne Etri met separately with Cindy Parry and Johnnie Mae Alston in Coldwell Banker’s Bellmore office. Parry and Alston sought homes within 30 minutes of Garden City at a maximum price of $450,000.
Etri focused Alston, who is black, on Franklin Square, a community that borders Garden City and that has a 65 percent white population. She never mentioned Franklin Square to Parry.
Instead, Etri centered Parry, who is white, on communities roughly 10 miles from Garden City: Bellmore, whose population was 88 percent white, and Merrick, whose population was 87 percent white. Bellmore and Merrick surround Etri’s office.
Black Tester:
Johnnie Mae Alston
Listings Given:
7
Census Tracts:
76% white on average
White Tester:
Cindy Parry
Listings Given:
16
Census Tracts:
83% white on average
Saying that she wanted to ensure a solid long-term investment, Etri advised Parry to avoid Freeport, a village of 43,000 that adjoins Merrick and has a predominantly minority population: 42 percent Hispanic, 30 percent black, 24 percent white and 1 percent Asian.
“So a lot of people will say to me, ‘Oh, I don’t care. I’ll take Freeport and all the houses are cheap there. I don’t care about the school district. I don’t have any children.’ I say, ‘But you have to protect your investment,'” she told Parry, adding, “You’re not really putting your money in the right place, because now you’re in a bad school district, and that’s not good for resell value.”
While similarly pledging to protect Alston’s investment, Etri gave her an opposite perspective on Freeport, saying, “You can do Freeport,” and, “You might like Freeport.”
Twenty percent of Freeport High School’s 2017 graduating class achieved a New York Regents diploma with advanced designation, requiring passage of eight Regents exams, and the graduation rate was 73 percent. The Nassau County graduation rate was 90 percent and the rate for a Regents diploma with advanced designation was 57 percent.
Freeport Schools Superintendent Kishore Kuncham said the district’s graduation rate was just above 80 percent when students who graduate by August are factored in.
“We’re trying to improve those numbers,” Kuncham said, adding that such scores reflected a student body that included many “newcomers,” his term for students who are immigrants that he said compose 20 to 25 percent of the student body.
Nevertheless, Kuncham said Freeport was a school district that provided a rigorous academic environment, offering more than 30 college credit courses and at least 27 Advanced Placement courses for the 2019-20 school year. The district also partners with colleges and universities on the Island, as well as with scientists at the Brookhaven National and Cold Spring Harbor labs to give opportunities in STEM fields, a reference to science, technology, engineering and math.
Kuncham said the district had an “open house policy,” inviting real estate agents and the public to visit schools to see the district’s offerings.
Etri also told Alston that 1 percent white Roosevelt was “a terrible area” and said that 69 percent white East Meadow “could be a little shady.”
She provided white tester Parry with 16 listings in Merrick, North Merrick, Bellmore, North Bellmore and Wantagh, all at least a 15-minute drive from Garden City.
In contrast, Etri directed black tester Alston to three houses across the border from Garden City in Franklin Square, as well as one that carried a Garden City address but was in a district served by Franklin Square schools. She also suggested three houses in Merrick or Bellmore.
Etri’s recommendations for Parry were in census tracts where whites averaged 83 percent of the population. Alston’s census tracts averaged 76 percent white population.
Parry: “What I am surprised at is the sheer discrepancy between the two of us … This was pretty extreme.”
Alston: “She was steering me to one area that she felt that, I guess, that she thought I would be more comfortable in instead of giving me more of a variety of choices. What she did, as I said, she took my choices of where to live from me.”
Experts’ Opinions
Freiberg: The agent’s statements, coupled with home listings provided to the testers, suggest possible steering.
“The agent discouraged the white tester from considering housing in Freeport, stating that it has a bad school district and that could be bad for resale, while the same agent informed the African American tester that she could consider Freeport and that ‘You might like Freeport.’ Even though Franklin Square is close to the area both testers requested, the agent encouraged only the African American tester to consider this racially diverse area and provided home listings to that tester. The agent made disparaging statements to the African American tester about a predominantly minority community, Roosevelt, calling it ‘a terrible area’ and additionally suggested that an integrated area, East Meadow, ‘could be a little shady.’ These comments were not made to the white tester.
“Most of the home listings the agent selected for the African American tester were in Franklin Square, a racially diverse area. The same agent provided listings to the white tester only in predominantly white neighborhoods served by the Bellmore-Merrick school district, which has a predominantly white student population.”
Schwemm: Strong evidence of steering here, and a classic example of treating people differently because of race, which is illegal.
Most of the black-only listings are in heavily diverse western areas and most of the white-only listings (along with a couple of black-only and both) are in heavily white eastern areas. In addition to showing that blacks are being steered away from this eastern area, the black tester could complain that the agent is making many houses “unavailable” based on race in this eastern area.
The difference in counseling, a lot greater counseling for the white home-seeker and weaker for the black home-seeker, is a classic example of discrimination, and particularly the different statements about Freeport, which we can presume is race-based because they’re only made to the white tester.
Agent and Company Responses
Etri did not respond to a letter notifying her of Newsday’s findings, or to an invitation by letter and email to view video recordings of meetings with testers and requesting an interview. She did not return a phone message.
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 Etri and additional Coldwell Banker agents.
The company’s national director of public relations, Roni Boyles, wrote in an emailed statement:
“Incidents reported by Newsday that are alleged to have occurred more than two years ago are completely contrary to our long-term commitment and dedication to supporting and maintaining all aspects of fair and equitable housing. Upholding the Fair Housing Act remains one of our highest priorities, and we expect the same level of commitment of the more than 750 independent real estate salespersons who chose to affiliate with Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage on Long Island. We take this matter seriously and have addressed the alleged incidents with the salespersons.” “
Sources: Demographic data in maps from Census Bureau 2016 American Community Survey five-year estimates.