1/ Newsday has just published a damning account of persistent housing discrimination on Long Island, using matched white and non-white customers, a time-honored practice. This is must-reading for everyone who wants to understand race and segregation today. projects.newsday.com/long-island/re…
2/ Listen to this real estate broker steering white customers: “What I say is always to women, follow the school bus. You know, that’s what I always say. Follow the school bus, see the moms that are hanging out on the corners.”
3/ Steering 101: "Agents directed white buyers most heavily to areas with the highest white concentrations while most often suggesting that black buyers focus on areas with lower white representations."
4/ "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."
5/ "Merrick, Levittown & Rockville Centre in Nassau County emerged in the testing as places that...agents overwhelmingly chose for the white customers but not for their matching, paired minority home seekers. The makeup of the communities ranges from 75% white to 88% white."
6/ "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."
7/ These practices are behind the grim reality that metropolitan NY ranks among the top most racially segregated metropolitan areas in the United States and metro NY ranks at the top in rates of segregated education by race.
8/ New York has long forbidden discrimination by race in housing. Since 1968, with the passage of Title VIII of the Civll Rights Act (shortly after MLK, Jr's assassination), discrimination in real estate transactions has been illegal under federal law. But we have not overcome.
9/ I have written extensively about housing and civil rights, esp. in Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North. The North has not been--and still isn't--a bastion of racial equality. Newsday's report reinforces the point. amazon.com/Sweet-Land-Lib…
10/ Essential reading on fair housing today: amazon.com/Fight-Fair-Hou…
11/ Postscript on racial steering: When I bought my first house, in Philadelphia's Mount Airy neighborhood in 1992, my real estate broker offered this advice when we wanted to look at a house on a predominantly African American block: "Do your neighborhood research."
