By Gianna Costanzo
After years of renovating and updating their home, a Black couple was finally ready to have the value of their home appraised, Ian Wilder, executive director of Long Island Housing Services, said. To their surprise, the house was valued at $1 million.
They were expecting the house to be valued much higher because of the extensive renovations that it had undergone. Their suspicion led them to ask a White friend to pose as the homeowner, hide all race-identifying decor and have the home reappraised.
The house was assigned a value nearly a half-million dollars more than the previous appraisal.
Discrimination’s role in housing
Racial discrimination has been a constant in the Long Island housing market dating back decades, even centuries. The lack of diversity in many, if not most, neighborhoods is in part the result of “redlining,” a systemic and now illegal practice that riddled the Island from the 1930s to the mid-60s, and racial “steering,” in which real estate agents and brokers steer people of color away from majority-White neighborhoods.
In the mid-20th century, bank officials circled Black, Hispanic and other neighborhoods of color with red pens, denoting they were ineligible for federally backed mortgages. The discriminatory practice denied people of color access to the loans that they needed to buy houses, whether or not the prospective homeowners met the financial requirements for mortgages.
“When we talk about structural racism, what we’re talking about is larger power structures,” said Michael Glass, political and urban historian and assistant professor at Boston College. “We’re talking about longer histories that create resource disparities, that create power disparities.”
In particular, redlining was widely practiced in the post-World War II era, when GIs returning from war were competing for scarce housing. White veterans were eligible for federally backed mortgages. Veterans of color were not. Federal law did not strictly prohibit them from receiving the loans, but how banks distributed the mortgages, favoring White homebuyers, barred Black and other people of color.
“The reason why [Long Island] is so segregated is because of the heavy role of the federal government in [its] housing market after World War II,” said Tim Keough, associate history at Queensborough Community College.
Today, Long Island is a diverse region with approximately 2.9 million residents in Nassau and Suffolk counties. In Nassau, about 41% of the population identifies as people of color and 59% as White, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. In Suffolk County, roughly 37% of the population identifies as people of color and 63% as White.
Most people of color in Nassau reside in Elmont, Freeport, Hempstead, Roosevelt, Uniondale and Westbury, along with Inwood, North Lawrence, and parts of Long Beach and Glen Cove. This division of races by neighborhood was not accidental. It was perpetuated by redlining. Despite being banned by the federal Fair Housing Act of 1968, discriminatory housing practices continued on Long Island and have at times been reported even in recent years.
“The Fair Housing Act has not been sufficiently enforced,” Wilder said. “So, the patterns that existed in 1968 when the Fair Housing Act was passed still exist today on Long Island.”
The role of restrictive convenants
The creation of Levittown is one of the most notable examples of the discriminatory housing practices on Long Island. William Levitt, real estate developer, is most known for mass producing houses in his namesake community, where construction began in 1947. After houses were built, homeowners were required to sign a restrictive covenant that prohibited people of color from living in the homes built by Levitt’s company, Levitt & Sons. Thereafter, the homes could not be sold to Black and other people of color.
“This is just taking away people’s just fundamental private freedoms. It says no one but the Caucasian race can live in this home … It’s part of a larger project of controlling people.”
Tim Keough, Associate History Professor, Queensborough Community College.
“This is just taking away people’s just fundamental private freedoms,” Keough said. “It says no one but the Caucasian race can live in this home … It’s part of a larger project of controlling people. And you know, you’re becoming a property owner. But the freedoms that come with that aren’t really there.”
The National Community Reinvestment Coalition, a network of organizations dedicated to fostering a nation that values the wealth of all individuals, regardless of race, reported in 2018 that three out of every four neighborhoods across the U.S. that were redlined in the 1930s are still low to moderate income today. The NCRC also reported that two-thirds of the neighborhoods that were redlined are now predominantly populated by people of color.
Housing discrimination has proved to be damaging on many levels. “Housing is the basis for everything,” Wilder said. “Housing is the basis for access to quality education, because communities of color were segregated into often under-resourced schools compared to majority-White communities. They also often have food shopping places that have higher prices, lower quality and less quality.”
Keough does not see an end to housing disparities in the future. “The one thing that racism did while in the housing market is it made racism profitable,” he said. “It’s very profitable, and that’s why it still exists.”
“I think [the] main point about structural racism is that it allows us to see that racism is something that harms everyone, and that can be hard to see sometimes,” Glass said. “And, of course, what racism does is it disproportionately harms certain people more than others.”
Wilder noted, “Segregation keeps White people from living in diverse neighborhoods. So, if there’s segregation, it not only affects communities of color being excluded from neighborhoods that are majority-White, it keeps majority-White people from being able to live in a diverse neighborhood. I can’t tell you a particular town that is free of it. Whether it’s because of their exclusionary zoning or historical practices, it exists everywhere.”
In addition to redlining and racial steering, discriminatory housing practices are also perpetuated by landlords, who are not required to receive training in federal law on housing discrimination. Landlords ultimately determine who can — and who cannot — rent from them. At times, they inexplicably refuse to rent to people of color.
Wilder and the Long Island Housing Services are urging governments in New York State to require landlords to receive training in Fair Housing Act requirements.
“We have been pushing for villages and towns to regulate landlords by issuing them rental permits to just require them — the landlords — to adopt a baseline policy that lists what the Fair Housing protected classes are,” Wilder said. “It’s cheaper for landlords to understand and obey the law, so it protects landlords, and it protects tenants.”
Long Island Divided
In 2016, Newsday launched an investigation into racial bias in the real estate market that culminated in a 2019 report. During the three-year probe, the daily newspaper sent 25 undercover testers to investigate possible unequal treatment by real estate agents across Long Island.
Dr. Martine Hackett, associate professor and chair of the Department of Population Health at Hofstra University, was among the testers. “In this project, they were looking at real estate agents and how they are presenting information about the availability of houses to purchase on Long Island, both Suffolk and Nassau County, and how that might differ by the race of the person who’s asking for the information,” Hackett said.
The investigation, which proved decades-long allegations of housing discrimination, racial bias and disparities to be true, led to certain policy changes in New York.
“New York State has done a lot after the Long Island Divided series in Newsday,” Wilder said. “New York State has tightened up Fair Housing laws. They’ve increased funding. They provided funding for organizations like [Long Island Housing Services] … They’ve increased protected classes to make sure [that] people being discriminated against are being protected.”
Wilder said, however, that more needs to be done. “Segregation and housing discrimination harms us all. Our communities are stronger when they’re diverse. Our children are more prepared for the world they’re going to live in when they go to a school with a diversity of people,” he said. “We’re stronger together. It’s sad to me that we’ve lost the ideas that we had when I was growing up, that we are a nation of immigrants, all of us, that we are a melting pot that welcomes diverse people.”
