NY Senate Releases Fair Housing On LI Report: 'Tragic' Bias Found

LONG ISLAND, NY — Long Island has long been considered one of the most racially segregated suburbs in the nation, and a new report released Wednesday by the State Senate reviewed evidence of discrimination in real estate practices that may be contributing. The committee tasked with creating the final Fair Housing and Discrimination on Long Island 97-page report "collected information from Newsday's Long Island Divided investigative series, witness testimony, subpoenaed documents, policy meetings, and committee research."

The report was partially spurred by Newsday's Long Island Divided three-year investigative series that used undercover home buyers to find what the report described "evidence of widespread separate and unequal treatment of minority potential homebuyers and minority communities on Long Island."

The State Senate report summarized the findings: "The investigation's findings—the product of paired testing over 90 real estate agents, recording over 200 hours of interactions, and analyzing 5,700 home listings—revealed widespread discriminatory treatment of racial minority testers: 49% of the time against Blacks testers, 39% against Hispanic testers, and 19% against Asian testers."

"The in-depth probe asserted that many of Long Island's dominant brokerage firms participate in behaviors that help to solidify racial and ethnic segregation on Long Island, including imposing unequal conditions and steering potential homebuyers toward certain communities depending on their perceived race or ethnicity."

The investigation points out that Long Island has 291 communities but the vast majority of its black residents live in just 11 of those.

The committee offered a multi-step recommendation to address the problems, including calls for more testing of fair housing laws, demographic data collection, enhanced training for real estate agents and brokers, increased penalties for those who violate fair housing laws, and calls for brokerage firms to diversify their staff and office locations.

The Fair Housing Act, approved as part of the 1968 Civil Rights Act, bans discrimination in housing based on race, religion, national origin, sex, handicap or family status.

"This report... reflects the tragic fact that we still have much work to do... to achieve equality among all Americans and the goals of the Fair Housing Act itself," the report reads.

Have you experienced or witnessed bias in the real estate industry on Long Island? Tell us in the comments.