Category: Long Island

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It’s a mini, mini United Nations.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hispanic tester

Received 58 listings in Huntington

White tester

Received no Huntington listings

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

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

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

Hispanic tester

Received 12 listings in Huntington

White tester

Received one Huntington listing

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

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

Three of those homes were north of Route 25A.

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

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

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

Hispanic tester

Received nine listings in Huntington

White tester

Received no Huntington listings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why would real estate agents do that?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Beverly and Arlington Brewster moved to North Amityville in 1975 to a largely segregated community. By some measures, the segregation is now deeper.

Fifty years ago, black couples like the Brewsters who wanted to become homeowners had few options. “Places like Levittown — you could go there and they wouldn’t even show you the house,” recalled Beverly Brewster, 70, a retired Amityville schools teacher, with Arlington Brewster, 73, a retired correction officer, in their Harrison Avenue home.

In 1970, according to the census, North Amityville had a population of 11,840, 65 percent black and 35 percent white. Median family income was $64,861 in today’s dollars, trailing its neighbor to the south, Amityville Village, by $13,219. Newsday, in 1966 articles, had described a place with no parks and few theaters or street lights. Factories and abandoned warehouses dotted the land.

Today, the hamlet has grown to 19,774, roughly 90 percent black or Hispanic, according to the U.S. Census’ 2017 American Community Survey five-year population estimate.

Median family income in North Amityville is $86,933, trailing Amityville Village by $18,692. Residents are more likely to rent than their incorporated village neighbors to the south, and they are more likely to be stretched by housing costs. The median home value in North Amityville is $278,700, while the village’s is $382,200, according to the census.

Through paired testing of real estate agents on Long Island, Newsday found evidence of separate and unequal treatment of minority potential homebuyers and minority communities. It found some agents urged home buyers to avoid areas, including North Amityville, where the school districts had a high proportion of minority students.

Ninety-two percent of the student body in the Amityville school district, which serves both areas, was black or Hispanic in the 2017-18 school year, according to the New York State Education Department. Eighty-two percent of the student body is considered “economically disadvantaged” by New York State, and 20 percent of the students speak little or no English.

White residents, who in 2000-01 composed 16.5 percent of the student body, in 2017-18 composed 4 percent. About 20 percent of local children attend private or parochial schools, above the state average of 13.2 percent.

The Brewsters’ memories of the place are less bleak than the Newsday accounts from 1966 described. His family had lived in the area for generations; his ancestors, some of whom were Shinnecock Indians, gave their name to local streets and helped found Bethel AME, the oldest African American church on Long Island, where the Brewsters now belong. She was a child of the Bronx whose parents, seeking better schools and housing, had moved to North Amityville’s Ronek Park, an early Long Island subdivision that did not discriminate against blacks, according to archives compiled by Babylon Town historian Mary Cascone. “The development will be unique in that buyers contracts will be devoid of the restrictive covenants spotlighted last year when Negroes were refused the right to purchase a home in the tremendous Levittown community,” a 1950 Newsday article read.

The Brewsters met in Amityville public schools, which they said were racially mixed.

There were good-paying jobs at defense contractors like Fairchild-Republic and Grumman and work to be had too in Amityville Village, where some of Ollie Brewster’s aunts worked as domestics for the wealthy families who lived south of Merrick Road.

The Brewsters recalled walking through “the block,” the commercial heart of the hamlet at Great Neck Road and Albany Avenue, occupied by a candy shop, an Associated Supermarket, a bar and a barbershop. They took swimming lessons at the Amityville Village beach, where the black children from the hamlet had to leave by 1 p.m., the Brewsters said. Young Arlington won the end-of-season races and was told to wait for his medal in the mail instead of attending an awards ceremony, he said.

The neighborhood “was families,” Beverly Brewster recalled, down to the cabbies who served it. “If you got in a car, you knew you could trust them.”

But by the 1970s, Babylon Town Supervisor Rich Schaffer said, some of the downsides of Long Island’s post-war growth had become clear in North Amityville and other predominantly minority communities.

Local government played a role through zoning, he said. “Communities that didn’t have representation and financial resources to fight a decision” suffered, Schaffer said. North Amityville had prominent civic leaders like Irwin Quintyne, Arlington Brewster said, but “never had people in office, in town or the state.”

Zoning decisions permitted industrial uses such as factories in parts of North Amityville, Schaffer said. School district lines drawn decades ago had already divided the community between Amityville and Copiague, carved big commercial taxpayers out of Amityville and left in other establishments that paid no property taxes at all, like the Dominican Sisters of Amityville, Schaffer said.

North Amityville was hit hard when Long Island began to bleed defense jobs, Arlington Brewster said. “When a lot of the jobs went out of the area, the houses started going.” It happened, he said, “all of a sudden.”

By the early 1980s, “the block” had become infamous as “the corner,” an open-air drug and prostitution mart where police made hundreds of arrests per year. “North Amityville became identified with that,” Arlington Brewster said. Crime at the corner subsided by the end of the decade, pushed in part by a big police presence and town takeover of some of the nearby property, Newsday reported.

In the years since, neighbors the Brewsters had known for years moved out or died. Their own children went to college and scattered across the United States. They offered the house on Harrison to their daughter Jill Brewster, an accounts receivable manager in Charlotte, North Carolina. She turned it down, telling Beverly Brewster, “Mom, I’m not coming back.”

Their neighbors now are American-born blacks, blacks from the West Indies and Hispanics, they said. Hispanics, who did not even appear in census tallies of the hamlet until 1990, made up about 35 percent of its population, according to the 2017 ACS. Hispanic children made up 52 percent of the Amityville schools’ student body of 2,941 for the 2017-18 school year, according to the New York State Education Department.

According to the state, 654 students, or 22 percent of the student body that year, understood little or no English. Amityville schools superintendent Mary Kelly said district staff members have developed programs to serve them. But, she said, “We also have to focus on the needs of students who are experiencing poverty and how that impacts their learning.”

“It’s very well known that Long Island is among the most segregated areas of the United States,” she said. “What has occurred as a result is housing patterns that reflect segregation, and subsequently school systems in different communities where de facto segregation has taken root.”

The portion of district students who scored proficient in Regents exams trailed the New York State average in every subject in 2017-18.

But the district’s outlook is improving, Kelly said, thanks in part to a voter-approved $66.9 million bond referendum in 2016 for major capital improvements, the first since the 1990s. The district has in recent years expanded its advanced placement offerings, created an independent science research program and started a full-day pre-K center.

“We’ve done a lot to take down barriers and get across ethnic, racial and socioeconomic lines,” she said.

In the northern part of Amityville Village, one resident, a contractor named Katrina Conway, said many of these newer residents tend to be renters, not owners. “They’re not vested, they don’t come out, they don’t join, they stay exclusively to themselves … The newer ones, they don’t vote,” she said.

The Brewsters said they welcomed the diversity in their neighborhood but missed the sense of community identity. “It’s not as cohesive as it should be,” Arlington Brewster said.

The neighborhood might once have unified around issues like illegal dumping on Albany Avenue or a halfway house on Harrison Avenue where fights and noise brought the police repeatedly before it was closed last summer, Beverly Brewster said.

Bethel AME and an alliance of local ministers have advocated for residents concerning some of these local issues, she said. She and others are also trying to build a civic association to promote awareness of quality-of-life problems and local development.

Essential ties have withered, though. “We don’t know neighbors two doors down from us,” she said.

Real estate agents on Long Island and across the nation have helped tens of millions of people buy and sell houses. They’ve helped shape communities and let buyers achieve the American dream of homeownership, often bolstering their financial well-being.

They also have engaged in practices that worsened segregation and denied African Americans equal access to the benefits of homeownership.

The industry’s record of discrimination parallels prevailing racial attitudes of the last century. It began in sync with overtly racist government policies from the early 20th century through the 1960s, evolved through the strife of the civil rights era and often continues today through practices both subtle and insidious.

Racial bias in the real estate industry “has shifted from explicit and public to kind of implicit and hidden,” said Jacob Faber, an assistant professor of sociology at New York University who studies segregation.

1866

Congress passes the Civil Rights Act of 1866, granting all citizens the right to “purchase, lease, sell, hold and convey real and personal property,” among other rights.

1895

The Amityville school district excludes black children from a new school. During a school board meeting, black parents threaten a boycott. The district admits black children.

1917

Roslyn closes its all-black school in response to parents’ pressure.

1923

The Ku Klux Klan burns crosses in a dozen villages across Long Island.

1924

The National Association of Real Estate Boards, the predecessor of the National Association of Realtors, adopts a code of ethics stating, “A Realtor should never be instrumental in introducing into a neighborhood a character of property or occupancy, members of any race or nationality, or any individuals whose presence will clearly be detrimental to property values in that neighborhood.”

1926

The Ku Klux Klan rallies at the Mineola Fair Grounds, and more than 30 Long Island real estate companies purchase ads in the event’s fundraising journal. Advertisers include the prominent L’Ecluse, Washburn & Company real estate brokerage in Manhasset, as well as firms in East Moriches, Roosevelt, Lynbrook, Riverhead, Bay Shore, Bellmore, Seaford, East Islip, Elmont, Sayville, Baldwin, Freeport, Northport and Hempstead. It was one of several KKK events attended by thousands of people on Long Island, including a march through Freeport (above) and a 1929 cross burning in Wantagh.

1927

The National Association of Real Estate Boards advocates racially restrictive covenants on deeds to prevent homes from being occupied by African Americans who were not servants of the “rightful owner or occupant.”

1936

The Federal Housing Administration’s underwriting manual states that deed restrictions should prohibit occupancy of homes “except by the race for which they are intended,” and that “incompatible racial elements” would cause housing values to fall.

1947

Levitt and Sons Inc. begins constructing homes in Levittown. Even though African Americans worked on the construction of the Levittown development, restrictive covenants state the homes could not “be used or occupied by any person other than members of the Caucasian race,” except for servants. Photo credit: Newsday

1948

The U.S. Supreme Court rules that race-restrictive covenants cannot be enforced.

1949

Levitt and Sons drops its race-restrictive clauses on Levittown homes, but master builder William Levitt says he will continue to accept only white families: “It is the same policy that all builders in this area have adopted and the elimination of the clause has changed absolutely nothing.”

The 1950s

African Americans gradually start moving into previously all-white communities. On Long Island, a practice called blockbusting explodes. Real estate agents go door to door, warning homeowners that black homebuyers are coming and saying property values will plummet. The scare tactics help agents earn commissions on rapid sales. Some agents buy houses at low prices from panicked white homeowners and sell them at a premium to minority buyers, pocketing the difference.

Over two decades, the practice speeds the transition of communities such as Lakeview, Hempstead, Roosevelt, Uniondale and Freeport from largely white to largely minority – and helps reinforce Long Island’s entrenched segregation.

1953

William and Cynthia Cotter, an African American couple who had evaded Levittown’s racially restrictive policies by subletting a home, face eviction when the lease expires. The first time marshals try to remove them, 60 protesters stand in the way. Later, marshals evict them. Eventually, the Cotters buy a different Levittown home directly from its owner. Photo credit: Newsday/Bill Sullivan

1959

Suffolk Real Estate Board President Louis Modica tells Newsday that certain “disreputable” agents were engaging in blockbusting. Modica says the board will investigate complaints and seek to “stamp out this vicious practice that turns prejudice into profit.” The practice had been reported in Brentwood and Amityville. In Freeport, a council is formed to prevent blockbusting.

1960-1961

In Lakeview, a racially mixed group of residents complain to the state attorney general that agents from 10 real estate brokerages were going door-to-door with messages about the community’s changing demographics.

One broker, identified in a Newsday article as a black man, sent letters advising white homeowners that they need not fear being the first to sell to an African American family. He wrote, “please hesitate no longer. There are such families living in your section presently.” Local residents launch a “Freedom Dwellers” campaign to try to halt panic selling. Photo credit: Newsday/Dick Kraus

1961

New York Secretary of State Caroline K. Simon issues the nation’s first regulation prohibiting blockbusting.

Hempstead has four nearly all-black or nearly all-white schools. The state orders the district to end the racial imbalances. Whites flee the community.

1962

The anti-blockbusting regulation empowers the state to revoke the license of a Suffolk County agent who had gone door to door in North Bellport, urging residents to sell quickly since their homes would soon be “valueless” because of the arrival of “colored people.” The agent handled the sales of more than 50 homes in the area and owned 55 more as a landlord, historian Neil P. Buffett said.

1963

After 275 Hempstead homeowners complain to the state about daily phone calls, mailings and door-to-door visits by agents, the secretary of state promises to order brokers to stop soliciting them.

The state education commissioner orders an end to segregated schools in Malverne. The U.S. Supreme Court later upholds the order.

1964

New York Secretary of State John P. Lomenzo revokes the license of a Huntington Station real estate broker for blockbusting. The broker implied to a Greenlawn homeowner that her home value would decline because African Americans were moving next door. He offered to buy her house for about $7,000 less than its $17,000 listing price. He and two associates also were found to have used the names of other people to buy and sell properties, illegally hiding their own roles in the transactions.

A federal judge rules that maintaining a 99 percent black school in Manhasset violated the 14th Amendment.

1965

New York Secretary of State John P. Lomenzo says he hopes to create an investigative unit to crack down on racial discrimination. He says the probe would require adding about 15 investigators to the 20 already assigned to the metropolitan area, and it would cost $100,000 to $150,000 – or $800,000 to $1.2 million in today’s dollars.

April 1968

Six days after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., Levitt and Sons announces that it will adopt a policy of “open housing” as a memorial to King. Earlier in the year, Levitt had sold his company to the International Telephone and Telegraph Corp. but remained as president, and this is his last order of business before he leaves. It is viewed as a stunning admission of his past racist policies.

One day later the Fair Housing Act is signed by President Lyndon Johnson. The most blatant forms of racial discrimination begin to give way to less visible practices, such as steering black house hunters toward minority or integrated areas and whites to houses in overwhelmingly white areas.

July 1968

Nine real estate brokers and agents lose their licenses on racial discrimination charges as a result of Lomenzo’s bias investigation. Among them are two Port Washington real estate professionals who had refused to rent an apartment to an African American woman. The agency says it has scheduled 13 hearings on bias charges against other real estate agents and brokers, and it expects more to follow.

1969

The state legislature outlaws blockbusting. Gov. Nelson Rockefeller calls for a crackdown, telling his attorney general to recover profits made by real estate agents who engage in the practice.

The New York secretary of state launches an investigation into complaints that real estate brokers are blockbusting and submitting fraudulent mortgage loan applications in Nassau County. The agency sends 10 investigators to the county.

The same year, Les Payne, a Pulitzer Prize-winning Newsday reporter, columnist and editor who is pictured above, is steered by a real estate agent to a house in Huntington Station following military service in Vietnam. Payne, who was African American, wrote later: “With a down payment of $10,000 from my years in the Army, my wife and I shopped at the mercy of a squad of real estate agents who all showed us the same dozen houses.”

“There were stops in Wyandanch, Central Islip, North Amityville, Greenlawn and Huntington Station, all predominantly black neighborhoods,” Payne wrote.

One agent, based in overwhelmingly white East Northport, kept coded lists of houses designated for African American buyers, separate from more extensive rosters for white buyers, Payne wrote. Confronted, the agent “nervously explained that it would be very difficult for us to buy a house in a white neighborhood on Long Island,” Payne recalled. Photo credit: Defense Visual Information District

Summer 1970

In a case that drew national attention, one of the first African American families to buy property in Massapequa Park discovers the home they are building has been defaced with racist graffiti and damaged with a sledgehammer. Three neighbors tell Newsday they do not object to the family moving in and they did not see the vandalism take place. “You run across that any place,” one man says. “You get it in the finest of neighborhoods.” Other neighbors organize a patrol to protect the home from further vandalism. Photo credit: Newsday/ Naomi Lasdon

1971

New York’s secretary of state restricts real estate solicitation in certain areas of Nassau County, Brooklyn and Queens. State officials say they have received 15,000 blockbusting complaints from Long Island homeowners, including more than 1,000 from Freeport.

1972

The U.S. Justice Department rules racial steering illegal under the Fair Housing Act. The New York secretary of state launches an investigation into alleged blockbusting in Uniondale.

1976

Wheatley Heights residents file a federal lawsuit against three real estate brokerages, 10 agents and the Multiple Listing Service of Long Island, charging the brokerages showed blacks properties only in Wheatley Heights and did not show Wheatley Heights homes to white clients.

1977

New York Secretary of State Mario Cuomo revokes the licenses of a large West Babylon real estate firm and six of its employees who were found guilty of steering white families away from Wheatley Heights. The same year, Cuomo imposes fines and temporary suspensions on agents at five brokerages in Rockville Centre, Baldwin and Merrick after a year-long bias investigation aided by 40 Freeport volunteers found that agents were steering African American buyers to Freeport while making negative comments about the village to white buyers.

The state education commissioner orders school desegregation in Rockville Centre.

May 1979

Freeport’s federally funded effort to stem white flight – a program called Homefinders Service, which brokers home sales without the usual brokerage fee – handles 41 sales in 18 months, village officials tell Newsday. “We’re really fighting the forces that want to make Freeport all black,” one official says. But brokers and minority leaders say all 41 homes were sold to whites, and one critic tells Newsday, “They want to stabilize Freeport, all right. They want to stabilize it white.”

August 1979

A cross is burned on the lawn of a black family that moved into a house on a previously all-white Valley Stream street. The homeowner, Inga Grant, says she believes her neighbors “are not racist” and says, “Let us not forget that we are all God’s children and human beings.”

A neighbor, who is quoted by name, tells Newsday: “The black people should stay in the black neighborhoods and then these things wouldn’t happen … I don’t hate blacks, but I don’t want them in the neighborhood.”

October 1979

In a Newsday article, Long Island Board of Realtor’s executive vice president David Taylor calls racial steering a “serious problem.” “The attitude of the community is: Don’t bring in any blacks,” he says. “I would say that some brokers have to respond to that pressure, even brokers who are aware that it is against the law.”

February 1980

State Attorney General Robert Abrams sues a Franklin Square real estate company for steering black home buyers to Elmont, Hempstead and West Hempstead while showing whites homes in Franklin Square, Floral Park and North Valley Stream. The brokerage ends up settling the suit for $50,000.

The case started when a black New York City police officer reported that a broker refused to allow an engineering inspection of a house for sale in Franklin Square and demanded the couple pay the full purchase price immediately. Abrams sent in a white couple as testers, and the broker served them without the same obstacles.

March 1980

Two men who pleaded guilty to burning a cross on Inga Grant’s lawn in Valley Stream are sentenced to probation. The head of the Nassau County Interracial Task Force calls the sentence “a travesty” and calls for harsher punishments. Newsday reports there had been 75 incidences of cross burnings and racial vandalism in Nassau since the Valley Stream cross burning, resulting in 30 arrests.

March 1981

The state orders real estate agents to stop contacting 1,400 Uniondale homeowners who complained to the state about blockbusting and steering. Uniondale was then 70 percent white and now is 21 percent white, 37 percent black and 35 percent Latino, according to 2017 census figures.

1985

Elmont residents crammed a public hearing on banning real estate solicitation in Elmont, Valley Stream and South Floral Park. “Our area was once integrated,” one resident, Jean Bradley, said. “But now it’s been segregated. These brokers create artificial social engineering that should stop.” Later that year, the state files an order blocking agents from contacting homeowners in those communities.

1986

After an 18-month investigation by state, county and local agencies uncovers a pattern of racial discrimination, four Nassau real estate agencies reach settlements with the state attorney general. The agencies – in Westbury, Floral Park, East Meadow and Baldwin – pay $54,000 total to settle the charges.

The investigation found that the agencies took white testers to white areas and black testers to more heavily minority neighborhoods. In some cases, agents readily showed whites houses in their price ranges, while telling blacks who made identical requests no homes were available.

1989

The New York Court of Appeals strikes down a state order banning real estate solicitation in certain areas, saying it is too broad. In response, the New York secretary of state issues new orders banning certain kinds of solicitation in certain areas of Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and Nassau County.

Port Washington resident Marjorie Bowens-Wheatley sues two real estate brokerages, charging they tried to steer her to Elmont. She eventually wins damages and a consent order.

1990

More than one out of five African Americans on Long Island say in a Newsday survey that they have experienced discrimination in buying a home, and three-quarters said real estate agents steered black homebuyers to black areas.

1992

Three shotgun blasts shatter the front doors and windows of a South Hempstead brokerage whose owner, Antonio Patino, had received phone calls warning, “If you keep bringing blacks into the neighborhood, we will blow up your store.” Photo credit: Newsday/ J. Conrad Williams

1994

A federal appeals court rules in favor of the real estate industry, finding that the state’s orders banning real estate solicitation in certain areas restrict agents’ free speech rights.

1997

In an effort to combat housing bias, Andrew Cuomo, then secretary of the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, awards $15 million to 67 housing groups nationwide, including Long Island Housing Services in Islandia.

1999

Century 21 American Homes in Westbury agrees to pay $20,000 to settle charges that one of its agents discriminated against prospective homebuyers upon discovering that one of the buyers was black.

2002

With the anti-blockbusting law struck down, New York starts collecting names of homeowners who do not want to be contacted by agents soliciting clients. Homeowners in certain areas of Nassau County, Brooklyn and the Bronx, and all of Queens, are eligible to place their names on the list. The areas covered by the lists change as the lists expire and get renewed. By 2019, the lists include certain parts of Queens and the Bronx, and the Village of Chestnut Ridge in Rockland County.

2005

ERASE Racism, a Syosset-based advocacy group, asserts in a report that government agencies are doing too little to combat discrimination and segregation.

The report cites the experience of Deborah Post, a black Touro Law Center professor and Harvard Law School graduate, who asked an agent to show her homes in predominantly white Smithtown. The agent took her instead to six houses in largely black and Latino Huntington Station.

The report says real estate agents practice bias “without fear of reprisal due to the lack of serious fair housing enforcement and the weakness of penalties.”

2015

The Supreme Court rules 5-4 that to win a housing discrimination lawsuit, a plaintiff does not need to prove intentional bias. Instead, it is enough to use statistics and other evidence to prove there was a “disparate impact” on a protected group.

2018

Following a decade-long legal battle waged by fair housing advocates, a federal judge ordered the village of Garden City to pay $5.3 million in attorney fees and costs to the plaintiffs’ lawyers after the judge found the village had “acted with discriminatory intent” by rezoning publicly owned land to prevent construction of affordable housing.

2019

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

It has the tallest building in Nassau County, a high school near a major jail and a recreational oasis that is larger than Central Park.

And today, East Meadow is changing. It long had a predominantly white and Jewish population but is now seeing an influx of Asians – from China, Korea, India, Bangladesh and Pakistan – and a departure of Jewish residents. The Hispanic population also is growing.

Temple Emanu-El, a fixture in the community for decades with its striking round, stained glass sanctuary, shut down in June and is being gutted to make way for senior citizen housing. A sign out front says, “Thanks for 68 years East Meadow.”

Meanwhile, East Meadow has a mosque that caters to its expanding Muslim population. A decade old, it is looking to add a second floor.

The school district recently adopted Hindu and Muslim holy days as school holidays – Diwali and Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha.

The community has changed so much that Norma Gonsalves, a long-time resident and former presiding officer of the Nassau County Legislature, recently organized a “welcome wagon” in her neighborhood. The Wenwoods Oaks development used to have 99 Jewish families out of 105 houses, she said. Less than two decades later, there are no more than 60, with Asian families replacing many of them, Gonsalves said.

In Newsday’s paired testing, real estate brokers across Long Island split East Meadow listings roughly half-and-half between white and minority house hunters. This contrasted with two neighboring communities along Hempstead Turnpike: Uniondale, where agents chose virtually no homes for potential buyers of any race, and Levittown, where agents gave 80 percent of the listings to white customers.

Mohammed Sayed, 60, a native of Bangladesh, said he bought a house in East Meadow in 2016 because he wanted to be close to the mosque, called the Long Island Muslim Society and founded by Bangladeshis.

He lived in North Carolina when he first came to the United States in 1999, moved to Ronkonkoma five years later when he got a job in New York City and then moved to Nassau to be closer to his work.

Initially he rented in neighboring Westbury until he bought the house in East Meadow, about a mile and a half from the mosque.

“I’m very happy with my neighborhood,” said Sayed, an agricultural specialist with the Department of Homeland Security’s Customs and Border Protection agency who works at Kennedy Airport. “It’s very good, very peaceful.”

Between 1980 and 2017, East Meadow’s Asian population grew from 1.4 percent to 12 percent, according to U.S. Census figures. Hispanics went from 2.1 percent to 14.5 percent, and blacks from 1.8 percent to 4.8 percent.

Meanwhile, the white population dropped from 96.2 percent to 67.5 percent, the figures show. Some residents think whites’ current share is even lower.

Many residents say the new mix is working in East Meadow, which is bounded by the Meadowbrook Parkway on the west and Wantagh Parkway on the east and is a stone’s throw from NYCB Live’s Nassau Coliseum in neighboring Uniondale on the other side of the Meadowbrook.

“It’s very accepting for the most part of diversity,” said Scott Eckers, a member of the East Meadow Board of Education and the community’s unofficial historian. “It’s a great place to raise a family.”

It is a solidly middle-class place. The census puts its median home value at $414,200, relatively affordable compared with more upscale communities in Nassau. Residents contend it still maintains a “1950s” feel of a close-knit community.

In one section, people refer to their block as “Sesame Street” because of its friendly ways, with neighbors chatting on one another’s lawns during summer and visiting each other’s houses, said Alisa Baroukh, 43, who has lived most of her life in East Meadow.

“It’s just a very happy place,” Baroukh said. “It’s truly a community.”

It’s a community that stops to the west at the Meadowbrook Parkway, which serves as a border to two other communities, Uniondale and Hempstead, that have higher levels of poverty and lower median incomes, according to 2017 census data.

“East Meadow tends to be completely isolated from those communities,” Eckers said. “It is almost like when you cross the Meadowbrook Parkway you are in a different world, and there is very little interaction on a day-to-day basis between East Meadow and communities like Hempstead.”

When a victim of the MS-13 gang was discovered in a wooded area just west of the Meadowbrook in late August, some residents objected vociferously when police reported the body was found in East Meadow, Eckers said.

“The first thing you heard was, ‘That’s not East Meadow. That’s Uniondale,'” he said.

“We have more of an association, I would think, with North Bellmore and North Merrick,” which lie to the south of East Meadow, Eckers said. “The lines are blurred between those two.”

The minority populations in East Meadow are not clustered in enclaves but are spread throughout the community, according to local leaders. One exception is the Mitchel Homes complex near the Meadowbrook Parkway, which has 250 apartments and serves partly to house military families. According to residents, at least one-third of the residents of Mitchel Homes are black, and some estimate it as high as 50 percent.

Charlene Velasquez, 37, opened a Latino restaurant to cater to that growing population in East Meadow and beyond. Called “Pecosa,” which means “freckles,” it features dishes from El Salvador and Colombia – her parents’ native lands.

She said there were few Latino restaurants in East Meadow when Pecosa opened 11 years ago but several now.

“It’s a great community,” she said. “Mostly they are accepted,” she said, referring to Latinos.

But it isn’t wonderful for all. Nadia Marin-Molina, a Latina and former executive director of the Workplace Project in Hempstead, which assists Latino immigrants, said she didn’t face any hostility in the four years she lived in East Meadow, but she did not have close ties with neighbors, either.

“I never met any of my neighbors,” she said. “There was no welcome wagon.”

Many newcomers to East Meadow are drawn by what is seen as a solid school district with an outstanding music program, according to community leaders.

“What attracts people is the fact that the East Meadow school district is a very good school district,” said Rabbi Ronald Androphy of the East Meadow Jewish Center, where membership has dropped from 550 families in the 1980s to 350. “It may not be Jericho, Syosset, but it is still a solid school district. I think the kids here get a great education.”

East Meadow High School is down the block on Carman Avenue from the Nassau County Correctional Center, a jail with a capacity of 1,540 inmates, including MS-13 members and other felons.

Gonsalves said the jail was tiny and located on a farm when the high school opened in 1955. Then, by the late 1980s, the county wanted a major expansion of the jail. Local residents fought it, and while plans were downsized, the expansion was still substantial.

Many residents say the jail now blends into the background and that escapes are rare – though once a couple of inmates in orange jumpsuits dashed through a Home Depot undetected for a time because their clothes blended somewhat with Home Depot workers’ uniforms.

Farther down Carman Avenue is the county-run Nassau University Medical Center, a 22-story, 1,200-bed hospital on a 75-acre campus. It is the main landmark in town.

“You see the hospital and you know you are in East Meadow,” Gonsalves said.

It opened in 1935 amid what were then the potato farms of the Hempstead Plains. Today it is a Level 1 Trauma Center.

The hospital sits on the notorious Hempstead Turnpike, jammed with restaurants, stores and other businesses and known for its high rate of pedestrians being struck by cars.

West of the hospital/high school/jail section is the 930-acre Eisenhower Park, which features three 18-hole golf courses, an Olympic-sized swimming pool, 17 baseball fields and two indoor, NHL-sized skating rinks.

Many residents call it the “gem” of East Meadow.

Fair housing laws bar agents from directing whites to one community and equally qualified blacks, Hispanics or Asians to other places, a practice known as steering.

Even so, in 21 of 86 Newsday tests – 24 percent – agents located white and minority house hunters in areas that were different enough to suggest evidence of steering.

Elmont, a predominantly minority community, was suitable for a Hispanic house hunter but not for a comparable white one.

Freeport, an overwhelmingly minority village, could be a good place for a black home seeker but was a risky place to invest for a matching white tester.

Predominantly white Levittown was fit for a white buyer but more diverse East Meadow and Hicksville were appropriate for an African American.

Said one agent when speaking to a white customer: “I don’t want to use the word steer, but I try to edu – I use the word – I educate in the areas.”

Pointing out a need to study who lived in a community before buying, that agent, Rosemarie Marando of Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage, advised the customer to observe nighttime patrons of convenience stores.

“Wherever you’re going to buy diapers, you know, during the day, go at 10 o’clock at night, and see if you like the area,” she said, adding:

“There was one fellow who would – like insisted on this house, and the wife was pregnant and had a little one, and I said to him, ‘I can’t say anything, but I encourage you, I want you to go there at 10 o’clock at night with your wife to buy diapers. Go to that 7-Eleven.’ They didn’t buy there.”

“I have to say it without saying it, you know?” Marando confided.

She also counseled: “What I say is always to women, follow the school bus. You know, that’s what I always say. Follow the school bus, see the moms that are hanging out on the corners.”

Finally, Marando remembered hearing similar advice from an agent as a first-time homebuyer three decades ago and thinking, “What a creep.”

Marando made no similar comments when visited by a black tester. She gave both testers comparable listings in similar areas, showing no evidence of steering.

Newsday’s two fair housing consultants found that Marando had used “coded language” or “a euphemism” to describe steering while talking only to the white tester.

Based on information provided by Newsday, Robert Schwemm, law professor at the University of Kentucky College of Law, concluded:

“This agent knows what steering is and has come up with a euphemism for it that she is willing to share only with the white tester, not the black tester.

“Instead of ‘steering,’ she uses ‘location.’ She is saying she learned over time that this is particularly important. She is now displaying the behavior she criticized in her original agent. And not saying the same things to the black homebuyer is really problematic. Does she think minorities don’t want that?”

Fred Freiberg, executive director of the Fair Housing Justice Center, concluded:

“This agent appeared to use coded language to urge the white tester to consider the racial composition of neighborhoods when considering where to buy a home.

“The agent said, ‘Look at who’s on the school bus. Look at who’s buying diapers in the grocery store.’ These statements were not made to the African American tester.

“While both testers were provided home listings in predominantly white areas, some of the statements made by the agent suggest that the agent is not interested in taking buyers to racially diverse neighborhoods.”

Newsday notified Marando of its findings by letter and email, invited her to view recordings of meetings with testers and requested an interview. She did not return phone messages.

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 Marando 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.

A map of the 5,763 house listings gathered by Newsday represents the collective choices made by the tested agents. All things being equal, white and minority listings should appear in roughly 50-50 proportions across the Island.

They did not.

The map revealed divided racial and ethnic patterns that would help shape both lives and communities, in some cases speeding demographic change and in others blocking it.

Most stark: Agents directed white buyers most heavily to areas with the highest white concentrations while most often suggesting that black buyers focus on areas with lower white representations.

“They’re putting you in a place that they think you belong. They’re telling you that you don’t belong on this side of town because of your race or whatever and it’s not right,” said black tester Johnnie Mae Alston, a retired state worker, adding:

“But just because you think I would rather be here or because I’m a certain race you think that I should be over here. But what about my choices of where I want to live?”

Both blatant and widely accepted before the civil rights revolution, racial steering by real estate agents has receded largely from view.

Where agents once openly shut black buyers out of white communities, some now apply courteous professionalism while sorting buyers based on race or ethnicity.

“The issue of discrimination is very subtle,” said Claudia Aranda, a director of field operations for the Urban Institute, a nonprofit group that oversaw more than 8,000 paired tests in a nationwide study sponsored by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in 2010.

That study found real estate agents engaged less frequently than in the past in more explicit forms of discrimination, such as not showing available houses to minority buyers. However, the study also showed that agents placed minority buyers in more integrated neighborhoods at a higher rate than white buyers.

“In the absence of treatment that’s more overt, in the absence of particular discriminatory comments, individual home seekers will never have potentially any reason to suspect discrimination,” Aranda said.

Newsday’s tests sought to get behind the smiles and handshakes that can mask evidence of steering by comparing how agents responded to paired buyers while video recorders were running.

Working one-on-one with an agent, an individual house hunter generally would never know whether the agent has suggested different options to other buyers, let alone determine whether the differences were based on race or ethnicity.

Evidence can emerge if an agent advises one or both testers about the racial or ethnic makeup of a community.

Century 21 agent Muhammad Chowdhry, for example, counseled a white tester about the advisability of searching for homes near the Nassau border with Queens, where some communities have significant immigrant populations.

“Mixed neighborhood like Guyana, you know, and, you know, from the island people. There are mixed people, you know?” Chowdhry said, adding, “So, you see, the closer you get to the city you have a subway and buses so other people that’s coming into the area, you know, the safety factor, it’ll go down.”

Chowdhry provided comparable listings to black and white testers. Still, based on the statements, Newsday fair housing consultant Robert Schwemm, a University of Kentucky College of Law fair housing law professor, concluded:

“The conversation with the white ‘customer’ is concerning, particularly when not given to the black tester. The ‘mixed neighborhoods like Guyana’ might have a claim against this agent for steering all customers away.”

Newsday’s second fair housing consultant, Fred Freiberg, executive director of the Fair Housing Justice Center, found:

“The agent made inappropriate and discriminatory statements to the white tester.

“While the agent provided both the African American and white tester with listings in similar areas, the agent cautioned the white tester to stay further away from New York City (Queens) due to the race/national origin of the people in that area. The agent implied that the presence of a ‘mixed neighborhood like Guyana’ raised a ‘safety factor.'”

In many cases, the locations of listings provided to each tester can be key to judging whether an agent appears to have engaged in steering – or has properly recommended houses in different neighborhoods based on information provided by one tester and not the other.

Ideally, an agent will suggest homes in similar places to customers who are conducting similar searches, offer comparable qualifications and are matched except for race or ethnicity.

Consider, for example, how Realty Connect USA agent Vivian Kamath provided listings to a white and a Hispanic buyer when each sought help finding $400,000 homes within 30 minutes of West Islip.

Kamath, who declined an interview request, placed the choices for both testers – 23 for the Hispanic, 18 for the white – wholly in West Islip.

Kamath provided parallel listings to the white and Hispanic testers in the same community. In this case, the community happened to be 89 percent white.

Realty Connect USA agent Vivian Kamath concentrated the choices for the white and Hispanic testers in a community that was 89 percent white.

Now, consider how Realty Connect USA agent Joseph Jannace recommended homes when black and white testers requested $400,000 homes within 30 minutes of Bay Shore, a community that neighbors West Islip but has a 38 percent white population.

Jannace’s choices stretched more than 40 miles from west to east. He placed only the white tester in the overwhelmingly white communities of North Bellmore, Seaford, Massapequa and Commack, and located only the black tester in largely minority Amityville, Copiague and Bay Shore.

The agent picked census tracts that averaged 67 percent white for the white tester and 58 percent white for the black tester.

Realty Connect USA agent Joseph Jannace picked census tracts that averaged 67 percent white for the white tester and 58 percent white for the black tester.

“The apparent steering is particularly evidenced by the white tester’s getting no listings in Amityville and getting lots of listings in west/white areas where the black tester did not,” wrote fair housing consultant Schwemm based on Newsday’s data.

In May, Jannace viewed Newsday’s video recordings of his meetings with the testers and was shown maps of the listings he suggested. In June, he declined to comment.

Newsday presented its findings by letter to Kevin McClarnon, listed as chairman on the Realty Connect website, and to Michael Ardolino, Fern Karhu and Bert Cafarella, listed there as owner-brokers. None responded to the letters or follow-up phone calls.

Agents are not required to give precisely identical listings to house hunters who have embarked on similar searches. Differences begin gelling into evidence of steering when an agent has placed two sets of listings in distinctly different locations that diverge racially or ethnically, experts say.

For example: An agent selects listings for a white customer in one town with a high white population level and chooses a second more integrated community for a minority customer.

Hispanic tester

Sent to more diverse Hicksville

White tester

Sent to mostly white Bethpage

Hispanic and white testers, Liza Colpa and Lizzy Lee, asked Century 21 agent Palma Napolitano Reyhing for help finding $500,000 houses within 30 minutes of Bethpage. Lee said that her husband had taken a job at St. Joseph’s Hospital, a local medical center. Colpa said her mother lived in a Bethpage apartment.

Reyhing limited white tester Lee’s listings to Bethpage, a community that was 86 percent white. She offered Lee 13 home choices there, compared with three selections for Hispanic tester Colpa.

She instead focused Colpa on neighboring Hicksville, where the population was 57 percent white and 16 percent Hispanic. She gave Colpa eight listings to consider in Hicksville, compared with zero for Lee.

St. Joseph’s Hospital, where the white tester’s husband was said to work, and the street on which the Hispanic tester’s mother purportedly lived were roughly 1.5 miles apart in southern Bethpage. Reyhing concentrated the white tester’s listings in the area surrounding the hospital. She focused only the Hispanic tester’s listings to the north of Bethpage in Hicksville, as much as four miles from the location given for the mother’s residence.

Overall, Reyhing placed the white tester’s choices in census tracts that averaged 84 percent white, while the tracts selected for the Hispanic tester averaged 65 percent white.

“Steering seems clear,” concluded Newsday consultant Schwemm, citing the divergent demographics of the listing locations. Based on the same data provided by Newsday, fellow consultant Fred Freiberg wrote, “The locations of the listings selected by the agent raises a concern about possible steering.”

Notified that the test had “suggested evidence of steering,” Reyhing viewed Newsday’s video recordings of her meetings with the testers, as well as the maps of the listings she provided.

“I feel that your findings are totally unfair,” she wrote in an emailed response, also stating, “I am adamantly denying” steering.

She stated: “I do not look up the demographics for these towns or any other towns,” adding that she started both house searches in Bethpage.

Explaining her selections for the white tester, Reyhing wrote that “it made sense to start her off with just the Bethpage area” because of the location of her husband’s workplace.

Reyhing also stated that the tester “seemed confused and needed clarification on the different styles of homes;” was “overwhelmed” by possibilities that Reyhing had called up on her office computer; and said that she had “explained I would share more once she digested the current options.”

Referring to the Hispanic tester, Reyhing similarly wrote, “I did not want to overwhelm her with too many listings to look at.” She stated, “I did not have as much time to spend with her,” and added that she conveyed to the tester, “If need be, in time, we could extend to other areas within the time distance she wanted (30 minutes).”

The transcript of Reyhing’s meeting with the Hispanic tester shows that she said: “Maybe we’ll just do Bethpage and Hicksville, and we’ll start with that … And then we’ll do Farmingdale. I’ll add that on next week.” Farmingdale was 75 percent white with a 13 percent share of Hispanic residents.

Newsday presented the test findings to Century 21 Real Estate LLC president and chief executive officer Michael Miedler by letter. He did not respond to the letter or a follow-up telephone call.

Black tester

Sent to more diverse East Meadow and Hicksville

White tester

Greater opportunities in mostly white Bethpage and Levittown

Black tester Martine Hackett and white tester Kimberly Larkin-Battista consulted Douglas Elliman Real Estate agent Lisa Casabona for assistance in searching for $500,000 homes in the Bethpage area. Hackett said her husband worked at the Northrop Grumman defense company, a major employer in the community. Larkin-Battista said her mother lived in an apartment there.

Casabona recommended 26 houses to Larkin-Battista in neighborhoods that averaged 80 percent white, compared with 12 homes for Hackett in areas that were 74 percent white. The racial gap was driven by three factors:

• Casabona suggested 18 listings in 79 percent white Levittown to Larkin-Battista, and three in Levittown to Hackett.
• She offered six homes in 89 percent white Bethpage to Larkin-Battista and two to Hackett.
• She placed a total of six listings, only for Hackett, in East Meadow (69 percent white) and Hicksville (57 percent white).

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

“While the agent selected home listings for both testers in predominantly white areas, only the African American tester received listings in the more racially diverse communities of East Meadow and Hicksville, raising concerns about possible steering.”

Newsday’s second consultant, Schwemm, wrote:

“Different listings given to the two testers is evidence of both steering and differential treatment.”

He cited the differences in listings provided to the white and Hispanic testers in Bethpage (8 to 3) and in Levittown (18 to 3).

“Both towns have higher proportions of white residents,” Schwemm concluded. “Even if the agent wanted to keep the white tester closer to her mother’s residence, this doesn’t explain why the agent failed to give the minority tester similar access to Bethpage and Levittown.”

Strenuously defending her commitment to fair housing, Casabona said of the white tester: “The way that I interpreted it is that the woman wanted to be near her mother.” She added, “So to be near my mother meant I could walk to my mother to take care of her.”

Casabona also said that a five-mile commute to work would be reasonable for the black tester.

“I didn’t say to somebody go live in some terrible town far away,” Casabona said in an August telephone interview. She pointed to her own neighborhood in Levittown, near the border of Hicksville, where she said she had neighbors of various races and ethnicities. She said that she had served as a broker to a number of them.

“I sold my whole neighborhood to every ethnicity with no judgment, no discrimination to anybody,” she said.

Representing both Casabona 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 presented a reason why Casabona did not suggest houses in Hicksville and East Meadow to the white tester:

“Ms. Casabona, correctly or not, believed that the black tester had more flexibility in terms of location” because “the black tester said her spouse worked at Grumman; the white tester said her mother lives in Bethpage.”

Rosenberg did not explain why those differences would influence flexibility in choosing a house location, nor did she address the imbalance between Casabona’s placement of white and black listings in Levittown.

Black tester

Sent to areas that averaged 66% white

White tester

Sent to areas that averaged 89% white

Three months apart in 2017, black tester Ryan Sett and white tester Steven Makropoulos consulted Keller Williams Realty agent Suzanne Greenblatt about finding homes priced at up to $450,000 within an hour commute from Manhattan.

Greenblatt, who is based in Massapequa Park, suggested six houses to Makropoulos – all located in a cluster of overwhelmingly white South Shore communities made up of Bellmore, Wantagh, Seaford and Massapequa.

In contrast, her selections for Sett – 84 in all – stretched almost the entire east-west width of Nassau County, approaching the Suffolk County border in Massapequa Park on the east and nearing the New York City line in Valley Stream. North and south, the listings reached roughly 12 miles.

The communities Greenblatt recommended for Sett included some with the highest proportions of minority residents on the Island. Those included Westbury, Freeport, Baldwin and Elmont. As a result, the listings produced a 23 percentage point white-black gap between the areas selected for the two testers: Sett’s listings landed in census tracts that averaged 66 percent white while the tracts chosen for Makropoulos averaged 89 percent white.

Newsday fair housing consultant Freiberg found “possible racial steering,” writing: “The agent provided the white tester with home listings only in predominantly white areas while giving the African American tester home listings in surrounding areas, including many racially diverse and predominantly minority areas.”

After viewing video recordings of her meetings with the testers and reviewing where she suggested listings to each tester, Greenblatt said that the white tester “did not seem like a serious buyer” so “I just sent the most recent listings with the higher probability being available and that’s all that we had agreed to.” She said of the black buyer, “We had conversations that led me to believe he was a serious buyer.”

Greenblatt said she compiled the listings for the black tester by inserting home search criteria into the Multiple Listing Service of Long Island computer system based on his price range for all of Nassau County. Asked whether it was natural for the search to produce listings in the predominantly minority communities as well as some predominantly white areas, she responded that some towns have a larger number of “older-style houses.”

Schwemm concluded: “The predominance of black-only listings in the heaviest minority areas strongly suggests steering. In addition, the white tester could complain that the agent denied opportunities of living in more diverse areas.

“Also, those areas where the map shows black-only listings could sue for having their housing market racially impacted by this agent’s behavior.”

Asked for comment about the actions of Keller Williams agents, including Greenblatt, 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.”

Hispanic tester

Sent only to more diverse East Meadow

White tester

Sent to six communities, four mostly white

Hispanic and white testers, Ashley Creary and Lizzy Lee, asked RE/MAX agent Christopher Hubbard for help finding $450,000 houses within 30 minutes of Hempstead.

Hubbard advised white tester Lee that Hempstead, Uniondale, Roosevelt, Baldwin, Freeport and Elmont were either poorly rated or “not as nice.” Their populations ranged from 63 percent to 99 percent minority.

He recommended that Lee focus instead on Merrick, Bellmore and Wantagh, as well as possibly Seaford and Massapequa. There, the populations ranged from 87 percent to 91 percent white. He also suggested East Meadow, which was 69 percent white.

In contrast, Hubbard told Hispanic tester Creary that she “can maybe do” largely minority Baldwin or Uniondale, while adding that the schools in the two communities were not as highly rated as the schools in East Meadow.

Speaking about another of the predominantly minority communities, he shifted from telling white tester Lee that Elmont was “not as nice” to advising minority tester Creary, “Elmont, you know, it’s – it’s OK. It’s good.” He added, “But the school district is maybe not as prime as some other towns.”

Hubbard selected 14 listings for Hispanic tester Creary, all of them in 69 percent white East Meadow. He placed two listings for white tester Lee in East Meadow and gave her the additional opportunity to consider four houses in overwhelmingly white North Merrick, North Bellmore, Seaford and Levittown, plus 57 percent white Hicksville.

Overall, the tracts chosen for the white tester averaged 73 percent white, while the tracts selected for the Hispanic tester averaged 70 percent white.

“I don’t think he really gave me much of an option,” Creary said, adding, “I think they’re nice towns. I was brought up in Elmont so, I don’t know, that kind of hurts my feelings.”

Her eyes welling with tears, Creary concluded: “I didn’t think this would make me sad … People just judge you.”

Hubbard said that he relied on a website that purports to ascribe “livability” indexes to communities based on factors including crime levels.

He said he felt justified in calling Elmont “not as nice” because the website, areavibes.com, graded the community as C-plus in crime while grading East Meadow B-plus. At the same time, he felt justified calling Elmont “OK” and “good” because C-plus was a better grade than given to other areas.

A look behind areavibes.com’s grades revealed that the website based them on no official crime data for the communities. Since FBI and local law enforcement data were not available, the site used factors such as median income and home prices to estimate crime levels, the site’s founder, Jon Russo, said in an email.

Its projections proved inaccurate by a wide margin.

Areavibes.com ascribed crime rates to both Elmont and East Meadow that were roughly three times higher than they actually are, according to Nassau County Police Department statistics.

Similarly sized at roughly 37,000 people, the two communities experienced an average of fewer than one violent crime per week in 2018 – Elmont totaling 44 and East Meadow 37, including crimes such as assaults and robberies.

In the same period, Elmont reported 181 property crimes and East Meadow 123. Those included thefts, stolen vehicles and burglaries.

The two communities had different patterns of crime last year, county figures show. Elmont had 18 reported felony assaults and East Meadow had 28. There were 21 robberies in Elmont and five in East Meadow. One rape and two cases of sexual abuse were reported in each community. There were two murders in Elmont and one in East Meadow.

Property crime patterns varied last year, too. There were 119 reported grand larcenies in Elmont and 72 in East Meadow. Elmont had 35 burglaries and East Meadow had 43. Vehicle thefts were reported 27 times in Elmont and eight times in East Meadow.

Overall, the combined property and violent crime rates were lower in both communities than in Nassau County as a whole, county crime figures show.

Similarly, both communities had per-capita rates of violent and property crime that were substantially lower than the rates for New York State and the nation as a whole – roughly one-third to one-fifth the state and national rates, a comparison of county and FBI crime statistics shows.

Asked why he located the Hispanic tester’s listings exclusively in East Meadow while offering the white tester houses in Levittown, Seaford, North Bellmore and North Merrick, Hubbard sent a written explanation stating that he scattered the white tester’s listings to allow the tester to view a variety of house styles and citing the fact that the white tester would be commuting into Queens.

Referring to the Hispanic tester, he wrote that he chose homes in East Meadow to allow her to look at house styles there as a start and “would review every town that may be an option” after determining the tester’s interests.

While noting that the tester and her husband would be commuting into Queens and the city, he raised the possibility of exploring some of the same communities he selected for the white tester: North Merrick, North Bellmore, and Levittown. He also placed the listings for both testers in adjoining communities, as little as five- to eight-minute drives apart.

The vice president of communications for Hubbard’s parent company, RE/MAX LLC, provided a statement covering three tests of the firm’s agents, including Hubbard:

“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.

Based on Newsday’s data, fair-housing consultants Freiberg and Schwemm independently described the test results as showing the earmarks of a “classic example of steering.” They cited both the locations of the listings and Hubbard’s “exact opposite statements to testers based on their race and about the quality of neighborhoods.”

Black tester

Sent to areas that averaged 75% white

White tester

Sent to areas that averaged 83% white

On the same day in August 2016, Martine Hackett met separately with two real estate agents in Bridgehampton, a mainstay community in Long Island’s fabled Hamptons.

One agent worked for The Corcoran Group, the other for Douglas Elliman Real Estate at the time of the tests. Their offices were roughly one mile apart.

Hackett, who is black, told each agent that she and her husband had a school-age child and hoped to purchase a house for a price of up to $2.5 million somewhere among the Hamptons’ many distinct communities.

She related to both agents that she had visited friends for several years in Springs, a community with small lot sizes that had become home both to artists and to working-class residents. Hackett also made clear that she wanted to explore the Hamptons generally.

Two months later, again on a single day, white tester Gretchen Olson Kopp individually asked the same agents – Kevin Geddie at Douglas Elliman and Frederick Wallenmaier at Corcoran – for help with a comparable search:

She and her husband had a school-age child and were in the market for a $2.5 million Hamptons house. She told them both that her mother-in-law was in a rehabilitation center in Southampton.

Same agents. Same home searches. Two different results.

Wallenmaier provided the black and white testers with listings in a broad swath of the Hamptons that stretched from Southampton to East Hampton, giving both testers choices in Southampton, Bridgehampton and Sag Harbor. They carried an average price of $2.7 million for the black tester and $2.5 million for the white tester.

After touting Sag Harbor schools, Wallenmaier recommended six listings there to the black tester and four to the white tester.

Corcoran agent Frederick Wallenmaier chose listings in census tracts that averaged exactly 78.2 percent white for each tester.

In contrast, Geddie offered listings to Olson Kopp and Hackett along lines that divided the Hamptons to the west for the white tester in Southampton, Water Mill and Sag Harbor and to the east for the black tester in East Hampton, Amagansett and Springs. The price tags averaged a million dollars less for the black tester: $2.4 million for the white, $1.4 million for the black.

Geddie, too, cited the quality of Sag Harbor schools.

He told the black tester: “They really do have one of the best rated elementary schools in the country.”

He told the white tester: “Sag Harbor Elementary is, you know, country known. People love it there.”

Geddie offered the white tester five choices in Sag Harbor and provided none to the black tester.

Douglas Elliman agent Kevin Geddie’s tracts were 83 percent white for the white tester and 75 percent white for the black tester.

While speaking with white tester Olson Kopp, Geddie described the ethnic makeup of Springs this way:

“What you see a lot more in East Hampton is the Hispanic community came in – and they really took over Springs in Northwest Woods area – which is great, because we have a lot more kids now – so their high school is drastically bigger than Southampton is.”

Talking with black tester Hackett about the same high school, Geddie said only:

“East Hampton is really, really – I don’t know how to say – it’s overpopulated, I feel like.”

In an email, Geddie described his statement about the Hispanic community as “out of context,” adding:

“I apologize for this remark and I look forward to continually improving in order to service all of my clients with respect.”

He said the statement “does not represent who I am as a person and does not reflect my professional commitment to treat everyone – clients, family, and friends – equally and with respect.”

Douglas Elliman lawyer Rosenberg wrote that Geddie’s remarks “are inconsistent with Douglas Elliman policies and applicable law, and are not tolerated. Had Douglas Elliman been informed of such remarks at the time they were made, Douglas Elliman would have taken immediate and appropriate corrective disciplinary action.”

Geddie left Douglas Elliman and began working with the Compass real estate agency in January 2018. He attributed the differences in the locations of the listings he provided to the black and white testers to reductions in the number of homes in the marketplace between August and October, adding, “Claiming discrimination under these circumstances is off base.”

Despite the difference in time frame, Wallenmaier more broadly distributed 27 listings to the black tester in August 2016 and 28 listings to the white tester in October 2016.

Drawing on data it purchases from the Multiple Listing Service of Long Island, the system by which agents can follow which homes are on and off the market, Zillow computed that the number of houses available in the requested price range differed by less than 2 percent on the dates Geddie was tested.

“It comes out I wanted to give my potential buyer a more diverse look and background of the Hamptons and what they like, based off of the area,” said Wallenmaier, who is now an agent with Nest Seekers.

After reviewing Geddie’s interactions with Hackett and Olson Kopp, Freiberg cited Geddie’s comments “about Hispanics having taken over one area;” recommendation of houses in that area only to Hackett; and the fact that he provided listings only to Olson Kopp in Sag Harbor and Southampton after praising the schools.

“The agent’s conduct indicates differential treatment and steering,” Frieberg wrote.

Schwemm concluded: “The different placement of the listings provided to the two testers is evidence of steering and would indicate a need to retest the agent” if legal action was contemplated.

Selecting Houses, Shaping Communities

The drive from Uniondale into East Meadow into Levittown is a six-mile journey through three worlds: one minority, one integrated, one largely white. It can illustrate how the individual actions of real estate agents can play roles in the composition of communities.

Some Long Island real estate agents tested by Newsday provided listings that followed the color line along the route.

Hempstead Turnpike ties the three Nassau County communities. Traveling west to east on the busy road, the makeup of the populations changes with abrupt increases in white representations: Uniondale, 21 percent white; East Meadow, 69 percent white; Levittown, 79 percent white.

Traveling the same route, agents chose virtually no homes for any potential buyers in Uniondale; split East Meadow listings roughly half-and-half between white and minority house hunters; and gave 80 percent of their Levittown listings to white customers.

The parallels between the makeups of the populations and the makeups of the house listings in the three neighboring communities offer a particularly vivid illustration of how race and ethnicity often correlated with the choices agents made for buyers of different backgrounds.

Uniondale joined Roosevelt, Freeport and Hempstead in a cluster of overwhelmingly minority western Nassau areas that agents avoided almost entirely, in effect steering away potential buyers of all races and ethnicities.

The four communities have a combined population of 147,000 people and range from 76 percent minority to 99 percent minority. Based on Newsday’s test zones, agents had 142 opportunities to choose houses for customers there.

Only four agents made such choices, providing a total of 44 listings in the four communities. A single agent serving an Asian customer provided all the listings gathered in Uniondale and Roosevelt (five each), as well as all but one of the listings provided in Hempstead (24).

In comparison, agents in 14 tests recommended 199 listings in East Meadow, while agents in 11 tests suggested 173 listings in Levittown.

Cumulatively, agents tested by Newsday kept their distance from Long Island’s overwhelmingly minority areas and focused instead on communities with higher than average white populations.

They recommended homes in census tracts where whites made up the majority of the population at twice the rate they did in tracts were minorities composed more than half the residents: almost 14 listings per tract where whites predominated compared with seven per tract where minorities were most prevalent.

Agents gave the fewest listings in the least white census tracts

Each group represents one-tenth of Long Island’s census tracts — statistical boundaries with roughly equal-sized populations.

Census tract groups

Listings

212

0-20% white

20-52% white

409

52-65% white

523

65-72% white

609

72-77% white

784

77-82% white

613

82-85% white

620

85-89% white

738

672

89-91% white

91-100% white

583

Agents gave the fewest listings in the least white census tracts

Each group represents one-tenth of Long Island’s census tracts — statistical boundaries with roughly equal-sized populations.

Census tract groups

Listings

212

0-20% white

409

20-52% white

523

52-65% white

609

65-72% white

784

72-77% white

613

77-82% white

620

82-85% white

738

85-89% white

672

89-91% white

583

91-100% white

Overall, the agents chose houses for white potential buyers in tracts that averaged 78 percent white and minority house hunters in tracts that averaged 75 percent white.

That white-minority gap was narrowed by two factors: First, agents almost entirely avoided the predominantly minority communities that are home to Long Island’s largest concentrations of black and Hispanic residents. Second, some of Newsday’s test zones placed both white and minority house hunters in areas with overwhelmingly white populations.

At the same time, differences widened between the white and minority populations in neighborhoods selected by agents when predominantly white communities were located closer to more diverse areas. In those circumstances, the gap between white and minority populations on individual tests ran as high as 55 percentage points.

A comparison of the neighborhoods chosen for paired white and black buyers produced correlations between the race of testers and the racial composition of the recommended areas.

One-third of the 5,763 listings gathered by Newsday fell in census tracts that were less than 73 percent white, one-third in tracts that were 73 percent to 84 percent white and one-third in tracts that were 85 percent white or more.

• Where the white population was lowest, agents gave white testers their lowest share of listings (24 percent on average) and blacks their highest share (36 percent on average).
• Where the white population was highest, the count was reversed: White testers got the highest share of their listings (42 percent on average) and black testers got their lowest (31 percent on average).

Average share of listings for black and white testers by census tract

Agents gave listings in comparatively high-minority areas to black testers more frequently on average than white testers.

Avg. black share

42%

Avg. white share

35%

33%

34%

31%

24%

0-73%

white tracts

73-85%

white tracts

85-100%

white tracts

The trends were different in the placement of listings provided to Asian and Hispanic testers compared with the listings provided to their white counterparts.

As happened with white testers, the agents gave Asian testers more of their listings in areas with higher proportions of white residents than they did in neighborhoods with fewer whites. The pattern was similar for Hispanic testers, although less pronounced.

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