Tag Archives: fair housing and discrimination

Undercover investigation reveals evidence of unequal treatment by Long Island real estate agents II Newsday Discrimination Testing

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We sent white, black, Hispanic and Asian testers undercover to see if they would be treated equally by LI real estate agents. Many were not.

In one of the most concentrated investigations of discrimination by real estate agents in the half century since enactment of America’s landmark fair housing law, Newsday found evidence of widespread separate and unequal treatment of minority potential homebuyers and minority communities on Long Island.

The three-year probe strongly indicates that house hunting in one of the nation’s most segregated suburbs poses substantial risks of discrimination, with black buyers chancing disadvantages almost half the time they enlist brokers.

Additionally, the investigation reveals that Long Island’s dominant residential brokering firms help solidify racial separations. They frequently directed white customers toward areas with the highest white representations and minority buyers to more integrated neighborhoods.

They also avoided business in communities with overwhelmingly minority populations.

From the editor

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The findings are the product of a paired-testing effort comparable on a local scale to once-a-decade testing performed by the federal government in measuring the extent of racial discrimination in housing nationwide.

Regularly endorsed by federal and state courts, paired testing is recognized as the sole viable method for detecting violations of fair housing laws by agents.

Two undercover testers – for example, one black and one white – separately solicit an agent’s assistance in buying houses. They present similar financial profiles and request identical terms for houses in the same areas. The agent’s actions are then reviewed for evidence that the agent provided disparate service.

Newsday conducted 86 matching tests in areas stretching 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, 31 matched Hispanic and white testers and 16 linked Asian and white testers.

Meet Newsday’s testers

Newsday confirmed that agents had houses to sell when meeting with testers based on analyses provided by Zillow, the online home search site. Zillow draws an inventory of available homes daily from the Multiple Listing Service of Long Island, the computerized system used by agents to select possible houses for buyers. MLSLI said that it does not maintain its own database of past daily inventories, as Zillow does, and so could not provide the same type of tallies. As permitted by law, all tests were recorded on hidden cameras to ensure accuracy in describing interactions between agents and customers.

See the hidden cameras

Source: Undercover investigation reveals evidence of unequal treatment by Long Island real estate agents

The Complicity of Ben Carson – Rolling Stone

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“The Housing secretary has a new rule that may force tens of thousands of children into homelessness, all because President Trump tells us we should hate their undocumented relatives.

. . . On April 18th, the very same day that Attorney General William Barr released a redacted version of Robert Mueller’s findings, Carson announced a proposal that would reinforce a 1980 law stating that undocumented immigrants are ineligible for any financial assistance related to public housing and make it even more strict. (That this new rule targets Hispanic, Latinx and Muslim communities goes without saying; if American public housing was traditionally packed with Scandinavian families, I sincerely doubt that Carson would be displaying the kind of haste manifested in the quote below.)”

Source: The Complicity of Ben Carson – Rolling Stone

Carbon monoxide is killing public housing residents, but HUD doesn’t require detectors

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Residents of a South Carolina public housing complex are demanding answers after two of their neighbors died from the gas.

Source: Carbon monoxide is killing public housing residents, but HUD doesn’t require detectors

Black homeownership is stuck near 30-year lows

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‘We haven’t made any progress’: Black homeownership is stuck near 30-year lows

By Jonnelle MarteJuly 6 at 10:48 AM 


Jani Tillery, 42, is an attorney at the Children’s Law Center in Washington who has been looking for homes since October. She’s made three offers since the end of November but lost to other bidders and she’s having a hard time finding homes in her price range of less than $200,000. (Andre Chung/for The Washington Post)

Jani Tillery thought she would be a homeowner by now.

Her parents bought a house in the Detroit suburbs in the late 1970s while living on a modest income. Her mother was a teacher. Her father worked in the automotive industry. They raised their children in the house and paid off the mortgage. They will probably live there in retirement and possibly pass the house — not only a home with rich sentimental value but also a sizable financial asset — on to their children.

Tillery, 42, hoped this would finally be the year she, too, could buy. She’s a lawyer at a nonprofit in Washington, and she recently got a promotion and raise.

Yet, she says, this part of the American Dream seems out of reach for her, as it is for many other African American workers despite notable strides in other aspects of their finances.

In many ways, African Americans have regained the ground lost during the financial crisis. Many are finding jobs and getting raises.

But the holy grail of homeownership remains elusive. Forty-three percent of blacks owned homes in 2017, according to an annual report from the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University. In contrast, 72 percent of whites did, a gap that has mostly widened during the past three decades.

[A minimum-wage worker can’t afford a 2-bedroom apartment anywhere in the U.S.]

“The overall frustration is, I am a working citizen. I pay my taxes. I’m doing a job to help kids,” said Tillery, whose nonprofit helps children with disabilities. “It’s better for me to own a home. I’m 42. I don’t want to continue renting.”

There aren’t many homes in the area that fall into her price range of $200,000 or less. When she sees a listing she can afford, she either loses out to a buyer who will pay more or waive contingencies or learns that the property isn’t approved for Federal Housing Administration mortgages, which she is relying on because they require lower down payments than conventional loans.

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     Jonnelle Marte
Jonnelle Marte is a reporter covering personal finance. She was previously a writer for MarketWatch and the Wall Street Journal. 

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