Racial Discrimination Adapts Over Time, But It Always Produces the Same Results
This a story that is not About Race, because nothing ever is About Race.
One of the first people I met when I began working at the Boston Globe in 2002 was a guy named Bill Dedman, who was described to me as the newspaper’s "data reporter." I had no idea what that was, having left daily newspapering behind in 1989. I just assumed a lot of things had changed since then, and I’d figure out what they were directly. Eventually, Bill’s gifts at building solid empirical foundations for big stories became clear. He has moved on to Newsday and, a couple of weeks ago, he gave me a heads-up on a massive project that publication had put together concerning ongoing racial discrimination in the housing market on Long Island. The project popped this past weekend, and it is gobsmacking.
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.
The Newsday team put three years of work into the project. They used every possible technique available to investigative journalism, including sending reporters out undercover to expose how the culture of discrimination worked first-hand.
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.
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.
These results come from one of the most affluent, most liberal areas in the country. As one of the expert consultants called on by Newsday to analyze the results said, "This is something that didn’t happen in the deep South."
Most commonly in the seven cases, agents refused to provide house listings or home tours to minority testers unless they met financial qualifications that weren’t imposed on white counterparts. “I won’t do it,” Signature Premier Properties agent Anne Marie Queally Bechand said in refusing to take a black customer to tour houses unless the customer produced evidence that a lender had preapproved a mortgage loan. One month earlier, Queally Bechand had asked a white customer who had yet to secure mortgage preapproval, “When can you start looking at houses?”
The project focuses mainly on the problem of what is called “steering,” a method of sorting prospective homeowners by race that is blatantly illegal.
One example: Amid MS-13 gang murders in Brentwood, a 79 percent Hispanic and black community, Le-Ann Vicquery, at the time a Keller Williams Realty agent, told a black customer: “Every time I get a new listing in Brentwood, or a new client, I get so excited because they’re the nicest people.” She emailed the paired white customer: “please kindly do some research on the gang related events in that area for safety.”
The series is too long, and too vastly detailed for easy summation here, but what is apparent from its findings is (again) the way racial discrimination within American society adapts to changing circumstances and perceptions but, somehow, always comes out with the same results. Read the whole thing. Bear in mind that it is not About Race, because nothing ever is About Race.
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