Tag: REP

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eventually, white flight took off.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Argueta said Uniondale is a good community.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TEST 67

Agent diverts a black buyer from agent’s hometown Plainview

Anthony Congiano, who is white, met agent Donna Rogers in the Douglas Elliman Real Estate office in Plainview in May 2016. He was looking for a three-bedroom house within 30 minutes of neighboring Bethpage. He said his wife had gotten a job there. His maximum price was $550,000.

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Rogers advised that $550,000 would buy access to houses requiring minimal renovations in Plainview and Bethpage.

“For the budget that you’re giving me in Bethpage, you’ll definitely find something, you know, that’s going to be less work, you know, less stuff to do. In Plainview, it’s a good budget. You know, Plainview you may have to do one or two things,” she said.

Congiano indicated that he would be willing to do some repairs. “I can get my hands dirty, if I have to, you know, fix a few things, that’s not really a problem for me,” he told the agent.

Rogers responded: “OK. I mean, I’m confident we can definitely find you something. Pretty much, you know, you might just have to go in and rip up the carpets, paint.”

Test 67 The house search Within 30 minutes of Bethpage and up to $550,000

Black Tester:

Kelvin Tune

Listings Given:

11

Census Tracts:

72% white on average

White Tester:

Anthony Congiano

Listings Given:

10

Census Tracts:

82% white on average

In fact, Rogers told Congiano that her childhood home, where her mother still lived, was on the market for $539,000. She said she had lived in Plainview for 29 years and in the Plainview-Old Bethpage area for 43. She described the house as “all renovated, basically.”

“You may not like the carpet so you may have to change out the carpet or something. Little things, you know,” Rogers said.

Kelvin Tune, who is black, met with Rogers five months later, also seeking a three-bedroom house within 30 minutes of Bethpage. He said his elderly mother lived in the community.

Tune mentioned nearby Hicksville as a place his purported wife had suggested, but then immediately focused on Bethpage, telling Rogers, “my mom’s lived here in Bethpage,” and saying both that “we’d like within a half-hour range” and a “30-minute radius.”

His top was also $550,000. Now, Rogers said that a $550,000 budget would limit choices in Plainview.

“For instance, in, say, Bethpage, you’ll probably find a house pretty much done. You may have to do like one bathroom, you know, or something like that, or maybe just go in and paint, or something like that. You’ll get a nice house for 550. This area you get nothing,” she told Tune. “Nothing for five, but you will get something that needs a total renovation.”

Only a month before speaking with Tune, the house that Rogers had touted to Congiano as her well-maintained childhood home was taken off the market. On her brokerage web page, Rogers described the house as featuring an eat-in kitchen with new central island, two “new full” baths, a Jacuzzi tub, a “newer” roof and siding and “new” fencing. The house sold for $485,000.

When Tune asked, “So the district is, Plainview is out of the question?” Rogers responded, “Right. Plainview, you’re not going to find something – it’s going to be tough to find something that’s like what you’re looking for.”

Rogers suggested other possibilities: Hicksville, East Meadow and Farmingdale. The school populations in those communities were 33 percent white, 54 percent white and 65 percent white – compared with higher than 70 percent in Plainview and Bethpage. She did not mention Hicksville, East Meadow and Farmingdale to Congiano.

Rogers talked about school districts with both Congiano and Tune, providing different information.

Speaking with Congiano, Rogers said Plainview and Bethpage both “have the good school districts.”

“They have very high ratings for Plainview, you know, Plainview, Bethpage,” she said, “Actually, I think Bethpage did really, really well. They might have even surpassed Plainview, to be honest with you.”

She added: “And I’m a mom, so I know, you know what I mean? So, look, you know, when you’re looking for a house, especially when you have a child, that has to be like, you know, number one no matter what. You know, you want a good school district.”

In contrast, while speaking with Tune, Rogers said nothing about the quality of the Plainview or Bethpage schools as a selling point. Instead, she told him, “You need to do research on school districts” by consulting ratings that are available online.

She also counseled Tune to take the ratings “with a grain of salt.” Showing him one such computation, she noted that Garden City High School was rated at 96.2 while East Islip scored 70.9.

“It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just — it’s just giving you a basic idea, OK?” Rogers said, adding: “They’re all good schools. You just – you know, just some of the ratings are different. That’s all.”

Rogers provided listings that directed Tune as far as 10 miles away from Plainview while centering Congiano there and in Bethpage.

She located Congiano in areas with a higher percentage of whites than in the areas she suggested to Tune. Additionally, she placed Tune in school districts with higher minority representations.

Congiano’s listings – five in Plainview, five in Bethpage – fell in census tracts where whites made up 82 percent of the population.

Tune’s listings – a total of 11 spread among Hicksville, Levittown, Bethpage, East Meadow and Farmingdale – landed in tracts where whites had a 10 percentage-point smaller share of the population at 72 percent. Rogers included none in Plainview.

Drawing on data it purchases from the Multiple Listing Service of Long Island, the system used by the Island’s real estate industry to market homes, Zillow computed that more than 30 houses were on the market in the Plainview ZIP code on the dates of both tests.

“It makes me feel almost sick to my stomach that she did it, because that’s, in my perception, I see that as steering him away. But I am not shocked about it. I’m not shocked because she did do it subtly,” Congiano said on learning the test results.

Experts’ Opinions

Freiberg: The agent’s comments and conduct suggest racial steering.

The agent was willing to provide an unqualified opinion on the high quality of schools in certain areas to the white tester, while telling the African American tester to do his own research on schools and cautioning that online school ratings may not be the best indicators of school quality.

The agent provided home listings to the African American tester that were in areas with slightly larger minority populations served by school districts with a larger minority student population when compared to the home listings the agent provided to the white tester. For instance, the agent did not select any listings for the African American tester in Plainview (where the agent has resided) and discouraged him from considering Plainview based on his price range, but the same agent provided the white tester with home listings in Plainview in the same price range.

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Schwemm: The facts show steering not so much regarding the number of listings in white areas, but the zero listings for the black tester in Plainview while the white tester got lots there.

Agent and Company Responses

Representing both Rogers and the Douglas Elliman company, an attorney with the Kasowitz Benson Torres LLP law firm watched the video recordings of the agent’s meetings with testers and reviewed listings maps. Firm partner Jessica Rosenberg then challenged the validity of Newsday’s findings.

Rosenberg said that black tester Tune had influenced Rogers’ choice of listings by indicating both a desire to avoid traffic and citing Hicksville as a possible choice.

Explaining why Rogers chose Plainview only for the white tester, Rosenberg said Rogers may have misinterpreted the black tester’s “willingness to do a renovation.” Rosenberg said that the white tester had said “I can get my hands dirty,” when asked about doing work on a house, while the black tester had said, “I don’t want to do too much work.”

Rosenberg failed to note that after saying he could get his hands dirty the white tester added, “Nothing that major. But if I have to, you know, fix a few things, that’s not really a problem for me.”

Rosenberg did not comment on Rogers’ statement to the black tester, “This area you get nothing” for $550,000.

Explaining the different information Rogers provided to the testers about schools, Rosenberg said that, between the dates of the two tests, Rogers “attended a continuing legal education class regarding the Fair Housing Act” at which she was instructed “to avoid making any comments on the quality of school districts to avoid any steering accusations.”

Rogers was licensed in 2012. Like all real estate agents in New York, she was required to complete four hours of training in fair housing and discrimination as part of a 75-hour licensing course and exam. Agents also must complete three hours of fair-housing training every two years as part of their 22.5 hours of mandated continuing education.

Watch videos of the test

TEST 76

Agent demands identification from a black buyer but not a white buyer

Kimberly Larkin-Battista, who is white, told Realty Connect USA agent Margaret Petrelli in June 2016 that she and her husband were looking for a house within an hour of Manhattan with a $600,000 maximum price. She advised Petrelli that they had a 4-year-old son.

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“So, you’re gonna wanna put him in a good school district,” responded Petrelli, who was located in Levittown.

She wrote district names on a piece of paper, citing Wantagh as “blue ribbon” and touting Seaford, Plainedge, Bethpage, Levittown, Bellmore, North Bellmore and Merrick. The populations of those communities ranged from 79 percent to 92 percent white.

“All of these areas are good, and they’re beautiful,” Petrelli said.

She also highlighted 91 percent white Massapequa – but not the section of Massapequa that falls within the neighboring Amityville district, saying, “You’re not going to like those schools.”

The Amityville school population is 92 percent black and Hispanic. In 2018, 19 percent of the high school graduates achieved a Regents diploma with advanced designation, indicating passage of eight Regents exams. The Massapequa district proportion was 66 percent.

Test 76 The house search Within an hour of Manhattan and up to $600,000

Black Tester:

Liza Colpa

Listings Given:

2

Census Tracts:

58% white on average

White Tester:

Kimberly Larkin-Battista

Listings Given

8

Census Tracts:

88% white on average

Five months later, Petrelli looked elsewhere for $600,000 houses after meeting with Liza Colpa, who is black. Colpa told Petrelli that “school districts are super important to us” as the parents of a 4-year-old. Petrelli offered no written recommended districts list.

Now, Petrelli emphasized East Meadow, then 69 percent white, and Hicksville, 57 percent white, and Levittown, 79 percent white. She also looked as far away as New Hyde Park, 50 percent white, and Floral Park, 80 percent white, both more than 10 miles distant from her office.

All told, Petrelli mentioned Merrick, Bellmore, Wantagh, Seaford, Massapequa, Bethpage and Plainedge 22 times when speaking with white customer Larkin-Battista. She never mentioned those communities to black customer Colpa.

Conversely, Petrelli referenced East Meadow and Hicksville 26 times while speaking with Colpa and never while talking with Larkin-Battista.

Most striking, Petrelli asked Colpa for identification after escorting Larkin-Battista on house tours without requesting ID. A Newsday reporter, posing as Colpa’s husband, followed up in a phone conversation with Petrelli. On the call, Petrelli asserted that it was office policy to ask all customers for identification.

“We always do that,” Petrelli said, adding, “That’s what we do with everyone.”

Petrelli sent Larkin-Battista eight listings in Levittown and Wantagh census tracts that averaged 88 percent white. She recommended two homes to Colpa, one in East Meadow, one in Hicksville, in census tracts that averaged 58 percent white.

Petrelli’s demand for identification unsettled the testers.

“The identification part really shocks me, because I was never asked in any instance for identification. And just the fact that she did that and also said, after the fact, that she does that all the time. And obviously, she doesn’t,” Larkin-Battista said.

Experts’ Opinions

Freiberg: Denial of equal service to the African American tester, the disparaging statement made to the white tester about a predominantly minority school district and the provision of home listings in different areas raise very serious concerns about both racial steering and discriminatory treatment.

The agent told the African American tester it was office policy to require a valid ID from all prospective buyers before agents could take them to view homes for sale even though the same agent took the white tester out to view homes for sale without asking for identification.

Also, the agent, in mentioning Massapequa as an area the white tester might want to consider, steered the white tester away from a part of that community that feeds into the predominantly minority Amityville school district stating “you’re not going to like those schools” while the agent did not make similar statements to the African American tester.

Finally, the agent provided home listings to the African American tester that were in areas with slightly greater minority populations served by school districts that had greater minority student populations when compared to the home listings the agent provided to the white tester.

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Schwemm: Evidence of blatant difference in treatment (inferior treatment of black tester) and steering.

The key here is discrimination against the black tester, who is told about few homes, while the white tester is told about many.

Thus, the agent is making many houses “unavailable” – apparently based on the black tester’s race.

Agent and Company Responses

Informed of Newsday’s findings, Petrelli initially accepted Newsday’s invitation to view video recordings of meetings with testers. Because of a scheduling conflict, Newsday asked her to choose another time. She responded once saying an alternate time would not work for her. She has since not responded to a follow-up email or phone call.

Watch videos of the test

TEST 96

27 homes recommended to black buyer, agent warns white buyer of gangs

In November 2016, Kelvin Tune, who is black, met with agent Le-Ann Vicquery in the Keller Williams Hauppauge office. He expressed interest in finding a house within 30 minutes of Brentwood, where his wife had taken a job. His top price was $400,000.

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Vicquery told Tune she enjoyed working with clients in Brentwood, which has among the highest proportion of minority residents on Long Island. At the time, the community was counted as 64 percent Hispanic, 14 percent black, 18 percent white and 2 percent Asian.

“I have to tell you, my clients in Brentwood are the nicest clients,” Vicquery told Tune. “I always tell everybody that every time I get a new listing in Brentwood, or a new client, I get so excited because they’re the nicest people.”

Twelve days after his office visit, Tune began a series of emails, asking Vicquery to send him house listings. Vicquery responded by asking Tune whether he could tour houses on a Friday afternoon with a colleague named Jean Gillin. For a decade, Vicquery and Gillin had done business in a working partnership.

Tune responded that he would be available. Vicquery wrote back, sending a copy of the email to Gillin:

“Great! We will send you homes sometime tomorrow and go from there.”

The next day, 37 listings were forwarded to Tune from Gillin’s email account, with the notation, “Here are a few homes with your criteria.” It continued, “Let us know the ones you are interested in seeing.”

Twenty-seven of the 37 listings centered Tune on Brentwood in census tracts averaging 17 percent white populations.

Test 96 The house search Within 30 minutes of Brentwood and up to $400,000

Black Tester:

Kelvin Tune

Listings Given:

37

Census Tracts:

31% white on average

White Tester:

Richard Helling

Listings Given:

11

Census Tracts:

86% white on average

Richard Helling, who is white, met with Vicquery two months after Tune. He, too, specified houses within 30 minutes of Brentwood with a maximum cost of $400,000.

While touring homes with Vicquery, Helling said that he had identified two houses in Brentwood that seemed interesting. He handed her printouts of the listings, found through an online home search service.

“I’ll look into them for you,” Vicquery told Helling.

Later that day, Vicquery warned Helling about gang violence.

“Hi dean, you may want to look into recent gang killings in the Brentwood area online,” she text-messaged, using the first name of Helling’s tester alias “Dean.”

She repeated the warning in an email: “as mentioned please kindly do some research on the gang-related events in that area for safety.”

Members of the MS-13 gang had allegedly beaten and hacked to death two teenage girls, Nisa Mickens, 15, and Kayla Cuevas, 16, in Brentwood in September 2016, two months before Tune’s visit. Gang members had also committed additional murders.

The Mickens and Cuevas murders sparked intense coverage by local print and television outlets as well as national media interest after President Donald Trump cited a Newsday front-page headline that spoke of an “extremely violent” gang faction.

Between the double murder and black tester Tune’s meeting with Vicquery, Newsday published 25 stories related to MS-13 activity in Brentwood, including five that took over the front page. By the end of the year, the coverage included 28 stories and then abated.

Vicquery did not warn Tune about the gang activity.

In contrast to the house locations recommended to Tune, Vicquery sent Helling no Brentwood listings. Instead, her 11 choices directed Helling to census tracts that averaged 86 percent white residents by picking homes in Hauppauge (five miles from Brentwood), Smithtown (eight miles from Brentwood) and St. James (10 miles from Brentwood).

Experts’ Opinions

Freiberg: The facts in the summary of this test provide a textbook example of racial steering. The agent (Vicquery) discouraged the white tester from considering housing in Brentwood because of recent gang killings and provided no listings of homes in Brentwood to the white tester. The same agent informed the African American tester that there are the “nicest people” in Brentwood. The agent, with assistance from another agent with whom she works closely, provided multiple listings of homes in Brentwood for his consideration. Overall, the home listings provided to the African American tester were in areas with much greater minority populations when compared to the home listings provided to the white tester.

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Schwemm: This appears as a classic example of modern steering – nobody uses racial epithets anymore. The community that the black tester is being shown is different from the white tester’s area. There are also the statements about gang violence and other situations that are mentioned only to the white tester. I don’t know whether there’s an outright refusal to show the white tester Brentwood homes, but it comes pretty close to that. The Vicquery-Gillin arrangement does not excuse the differential treatment here.

Agent and Company Responses

Before publication of Long Island Divided, Newsday informed Vicquery and Gillin about the investigation’s tentative findings by letter and invited them to view videos of office meetings, as well as to review maps of the listings provided to each tester. The letters also solicited their perspectives.

The two agents did not respond. Reached by telephone then, Vicquery declined to comment. Gillin did not respond to a message left on her voicemail.

Seven weeks after publication, Vicquery contacted Newsday by email. She pointed out that Newsday’s article had not described Gillin’s role in the test, prompting a revision to reflect that the listings transmitted to black tester Tune came from Gillin’s email account.

Asked why she had not warned the black tester about gang violence in Brentwood, Vicquery said that she had not been fully aware of the highly publicized events in a community she served as a real estate agent. She said her lack of knowledge showed “what a bubble I live in.”

Vicquery said that she later warned the white tester because she had heard a gang-related story on television or radio on the day she escorted the tester on house tours.

“There was a big thing that exact day and it scared the crap out of me,” she said, while adding that she does not remember what had been reported.

Questioned about pointing the white tester away from Brentwood, Vicquery said that she had researched the suitability and availability of every house there that had shown up in the Multiple Listings Service of Long Island database.

All were outside the requested price range, required extensive renovations or were subject to an accepted purchase offer, she said. She also stated that the database had expired, making it impossible to verify her research.

“I understand that steering goes on and I am absolutely disgusted by it,” Vicquery said, adding, “I can guarantee you I did not steer.”

At the same time, Vicquery said she did not remember looking into the availability of the two Brentwood houses suggested to her by the white tester.

Queried about her role in the test, Gillin wrote in an email that she has no recollection of the events. Referring to Tune, she wrote, “I did not have knowledge that he was black until I met him.”

On the question of how Tune came to be pointed toward houses in Brentwood, she wrote, “The houses that were sent are computer generated from criteria given to me unquestionably from Le-Ann (Vicquery) since she is the only one that had contact with him.” She later wrote that Vicquery may have used Gillin’s email account to send the listings. She pointed out that she had no contact with the white tester.

Newsday’s two fair housing experts reevaluated the test results in light of Gillin’s role and a description of the agents’ working partnership. They affirmed opinions that the test showed differential treatment.

Asked for comment about the actions of Keller Williams agents, including Vicquery and Gillin, chief executive officer Gary Keller responded through the firm’s national spokesman, Darryl Frost, who said in an emailed statement: “Keller Williams does not tolerate discrimination of any kind. All complaints of less than exemplary conduct are addressed and resolved in partnership with our leaders to ensure compliance with our policies, as well as with local, state and federal laws.

“In addition, we require all Keller Williams agents to take the National Association of Realtors Code of Ethics training, developed in accordance with the Fair Housing Act, before they earn their Realtor’s license and thereafter, every two years to maintain it. Every Keller Williams franchise also receives extensive industry training and resources that reinforce best practices in fair housing.”

Correction: The name of real estate agent Jean Gillin, and her role in the test case, were omitted in a previous version of this story.

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TEST 45

Agent says Freeport homes bad investment for white buyer, fine for black buyer

Twenty-two days apart in June 2016, agent Dianne Etri met separately with Cindy Parry and Johnnie Mae Alston in Coldwell Banker’s Bellmore office. Parry and Alston sought homes within 30 minutes of Garden City at a maximum price of $450,000.

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Etri focused Alston, who is black, on Franklin Square, a community that borders Garden City and that has a 65 percent white population. She never mentioned Franklin Square to Parry.

Instead, Etri centered Parry, who is white, on communities roughly 10 miles from Garden City: Bellmore, whose population was 88 percent white, and Merrick, whose population was 87 percent white. Bellmore and Merrick surround Etri’s office.

Test 45 The house search Within 30 minutes of Garden City and up to $450,000

Black Tester:

Johnnie Mae Alston

Listings Given:

7

Census Tracts:

76% white on average

White Tester:

Cindy Parry

Listings Given:

16

Census Tracts:

83% white on average

Saying that she wanted to ensure a solid long-term investment, Etri advised Parry to avoid Freeport, a village of 43,000 that adjoins Merrick and has a predominantly minority population: 42 percent Hispanic, 30 percent black, 24 percent white and 1 percent Asian.

“So a lot of people will say to me, ‘Oh, I don’t care. I’ll take Freeport and all the houses are cheap there. I don’t care about the school district. I don’t have any children.’ I say, ‘But you have to protect your investment,'” she told Parry, adding, “You’re not really putting your money in the right place, because now you’re in a bad school district, and that’s not good for resell value.”

While similarly pledging to protect Alston’s investment, Etri gave her an opposite perspective on Freeport, saying, “You can do Freeport,” and, “You might like Freeport.”

Twenty percent of Freeport High School’s 2017 graduating class achieved a New York Regents diploma with advanced designation, requiring passage of eight Regents exams, and the graduation rate was 73 percent. The Nassau County graduation rate was 90 percent and the rate for a Regents diploma with advanced designation was 57 percent.

Freeport Schools Superintendent Kishore Kuncham said the district’s graduation rate was just above 80 percent when students who graduate by August are factored in.

“We’re trying to improve those numbers,” Kuncham said, adding that such scores reflected a student body that included many “newcomers,” his term for students who are immigrants that he said compose 20 to 25 percent of the student body.

Nevertheless, Kuncham said Freeport was a school district that provided a rigorous academic environment, offering more than 30 college credit courses and at least 27 Advanced Placement courses for the 2019-20 school year. The district also partners with colleges and universities on the Island, as well as with scientists at the Brookhaven National and Cold Spring Harbor labs to give opportunities in STEM fields, a reference to science, technology, engineering and math.

Kuncham said the district had an “open house policy,” inviting real estate agents and the public to visit schools to see the district’s offerings.

Etri also told Alston that 1 percent white Roosevelt was “a terrible area” and said that 69 percent white East Meadow “could be a little shady.”

She provided white tester Parry with 16 listings in Merrick, North Merrick, Bellmore, North Bellmore and Wantagh, all at least a 15-minute drive from Garden City.

In contrast, Etri directed black tester Alston to three houses across the border from Garden City in Franklin Square, as well as one that carried a Garden City address but was in a district served by Franklin Square schools. She also suggested three houses in Merrick or Bellmore.

Etri’s recommendations for Parry were in census tracts where whites averaged 83 percent of the population. Alston’s census tracts averaged 76 percent white population.

Parry: “What I am surprised at is the sheer discrepancy between the two of us … This was pretty extreme.”

Alston: “She was steering me to one area that she felt that, I guess, that she thought I would be more comfortable in instead of giving me more of a variety of choices. What she did, as I said, she took my choices of where to live from me.”

Experts’ Opinions

Freiberg: The agent’s statements, coupled with home listings provided to the testers, suggest possible steering.

“The agent discouraged the white tester from considering housing in Freeport, stating that it has a bad school district and that could be bad for resale, while the same agent informed the African American tester that she could consider Freeport and that ‘You might like Freeport.’ Even though Franklin Square is close to the area both testers requested, the agent encouraged only the African American tester to consider this racially diverse area and provided home listings to that tester. The agent made disparaging statements to the African American tester about a predominantly minority community, Roosevelt, calling it ‘a terrible area’ and additionally suggested that an integrated area, East Meadow, ‘could be a little shady.’ These comments were not made to the white tester.

“Most of the home listings the agent selected for the African American tester were in Franklin Square, a racially diverse area. The same agent provided listings to the white tester only in predominantly white neighborhoods served by the Bellmore-Merrick school district, which has a predominantly white student population.”

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Schwemm: Strong evidence of steering here, and a classic example of treating people differently because of race, which is illegal.

Most of the black-only listings are in heavily diverse western areas and most of the white-only listings (along with a couple of black-only and both) are in heavily white eastern areas. In addition to showing that blacks are being steered away from this eastern area, the black tester could complain that the agent is making many houses “unavailable” based on race in this eastern area.

The difference in counseling, a lot greater counseling for the white home-seeker and weaker for the black home-seeker, is a classic example of discrimination, and particularly the different statements about Freeport, which we can presume is race-based because they’re only made to the white tester.

Agent and Company Responses

Etri did not respond to a letter notifying her of Newsday’s findings, or to an invitation by letter and email to view video recordings of meetings with testers and requesting an interview. She did not return a phone message.

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

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

“Incidents reported by Newsday that are alleged to have occurred more than two years ago are completely contrary to our long-term commitment and dedication to supporting and maintaining all aspects of fair and equitable housing. Upholding the Fair Housing Act remains one of our highest priorities, and we expect the same level of commitment of the more than 750 independent real estate salespersons who chose to affiliate with Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage on Long Island. We take this matter seriously and have addressed the alleged incidents with the salespersons.” “

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

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Back to main story Part 3:
Whites Privileged

More on this topic

A tester’s story A black Newsday tester’s reaction after he learned how he had been treated by real estate agents.

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.