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Black Buyers Face Blatant Discrimination When Using Brokers To Buy Real Estate In Long Island, ‘One Of The Most Liberal’ Regions The U.S.

Black Buyers Face Blatant Discrimination When Using Brokers To Buy Real Estate In Long Island, ‘One Of The Most Liberal’ Regions The U.S.

Long Island
House hunting on Long Island exposes Black home buyers to discrimination, putting them at a disadvantage half the time when they use real estate brokers, according to a Newsday investigation. Image: Tony Fischer/Flickr

House hunting on Long Island poses substantial risks of discrimination for Black home buyers, who are at a disadvantage almost half the time when they use real estate brokers to look for a home, according to a three-year investigation by Newsday.

It has been 51 years since the Fair Housing Act was created in 1968 as a follow-up to the Civil Rights Act. Fair Housing was meant to protect people from discrimination when renting or buying a home, getting a mortgage and seeking housing assistance or other housing-related activities.

Here’s a glimpse of how that’s going in Long Island, part of one of the most educated, most liberal regions of the U.S.

The investigation showed that Long Island’s dominant residential real estate brokerages help solidify racial separations. Realtors frequently directed white customers to areas with the highest white representations and Black buyers to more integrated neighborhoods. They also avoided business in communities with populations that are mostly Black or people of color.

The investigation relied on paired testing, recognized as the only viable method for detecting violations of fair housing laws by agents, according to Newsday. In paired testing, two undercover testers – for example, one Black and one white – separately solicit an agent’s help in buying a house. They present similar financial profiles and request identical terms for houses in the same areas. The agents’ actions are then reviewed for evidence of disparate service.

Newsday conducted 86 matching tests from the New York City line to the Hamptons and from Long Island Sound to the South Shore. Thirty-nine of the tests paired Black and white testers. All tests were recorded on hidden cameras.

Black testers experienced disparate treatment 49 percent of the time – compared with 39 percent for Hispanic and 19 percent for Asian testers. In 8 percent of the tests, agents refused to provide listings or home tours to non-white testers unless they met financial qualifications that weren’t imposed on white counterparts.

Agents gave white testers an average of 50 percent more listings than they gave Black testers.

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“My assumption would be that everybody would be provided with the same listings based on their economic and geographic requirements,” said Martine Hackett, a Black tenured professor of public health at Hofstra University.

As licensed gatekeepers of housing choices, agents and brokers bear the responsibility for applying fair housing standards, Newsday reported.

State-required continuing education classes in real estate law and practices are supposed to cover fair housing regulations and how agents and brokers can inadvertently or intentionally discriminate. However, Newsday attended six classes found that training on Fair Housing left a lot to be desired.

Eight fair housing experts reviewed transcripts and notes of the classes and found that in five of the six classes, instructors provided information that was wrong, incomplete, confusing, insufficient or of poor quality.

“This is something that didn’t happen in the deep South,” said Greg Squires, professor of public policy at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. “It happened in one of the most educated, most liberal regions of the country. These are significant numbers.”