Fair Housing Task Force Presents Findings

Suffolk County’s Fair Housing Task Force, convened in response to Newsday’s Long Island Divided investigation into housing discrimination, presented its findings and recommendations to members of the County Legislature last month.

The task force identified where the Suffolk County Human Rights Law could be strengthened and how enforcement to combat illegal discrimination could be improved. Elaine Gross, the founder and president of Long Island-based civil rights organization ERASE Racism, was one of the task force members who addressed the County Legislature Government Operations, Personnel, Information Technology and Diversity Committee. She also spoke to the Express News Group about the task force’s work.

“There were two main recommendations that were made,” she said. “One had to do with the Suffolk County Human Rights Law, and the other had to do with the Human Rights Commission, which is responsible for enforcement.”

She said the members of the task force felt that the law was in “pretty good shape,” but they recommended that two groups of housing seekers be added to the list of protected classes: those with prior criminal convictions and those with limited English proficiency.

Ms. Gross noted that New York State previously prohibited asking about criminal convictions on job applications. The question is still permitted when applying for housing. “Those individuals have difficulty finding housing, even though they have served their time,” she said.

Regarding enforcement when illegal discrimination occurs, Ms. Gross said the task force learned from the members of the Human Rights Commission that the county lacks administrative law judges to hear those cases and oversee the negotiations between the involved parties.

The task force is recommending additional funding be allocated for administrative law judges as well as for paired testing.

Paired testing is a method for auditing real estate agencies and agents, and it’s the method that Newsday’s three-year investigation employed. Two undercover housing seekers — one white and one minority — with comparable income and credit qualifications are separately sent to the same office to meet with the same agent. If the agent treats the housing seekers differently from one another, that agent has failed the test and in all likelihood has broken the law.

Discrimination could take the form of an agent refusing to show houses before a client has pre-qualified for a mortgage, while not requiring the same of another client with similar financials. Another form of housing discrimination is known as “racial steering,” the practice of guiding homebuyers toward or away from certain neighborhoods based on their race.

“It’s important that the county understands that without the regular pair testing, it’s not possible for the county to really know if people are still being discriminated against,” Ms. Gross said, adding that most often, victims of housing discrimination are not aware that they have been treated differently. “So if we want to really assess what’s going on, the only way to do that is through the paired testing.”

The New York State Legislature passed seven bills to combat housing discrimination in the wake of the Newsday legislation. In addition to new state laws concerning how real estate agents are trained, Ms. Gross said the task force recommends Suffolk County include the history of housing discrimination on Long Island in the curriculum.

“Our region, we are the 10th most racially segregated metro region in the United States,” Ms. Gross told the county legislators. She said that is not something that happened by accident — racial covenants were written into contracts.

“This was all based on race,” she continued. “There are some people who will try to tell you it was based on income. It was not. Race was listed on the deeds. Race was the way in which the maps were drawn.”

Speaking to the Express News Group, Ms. Gross identified ways the county could proactively make a difference in desegregating communities.

Both the federal Fair Housing Act and New York State law include a provision called Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing, she noted. These include steps to address existing racial segregation from past discrimination.

Ms. Gross said zoning is one impediment to fair housing because Long Island has mostly single-family zoning while multifamily developments require a long process to be approved and are frequently denied — if the applications are even heard in the first place.

“The towns are not even required to take up these requests, So sometimes — a lot of times, I think — it’s not that they get blocked, it’s that they never get taken up for consideration,” she said.

Given the cost of land, materials and construction, multifamily housing is where economies of scale can be achieved to provide housing that is more affordable, according to Ms. Gross. She also pointed out that the state requires multifamily housing developers to submit marketing plans to ensure that people from different racial backgrounds will have access to the housing.

Though land use is in the hands of local municipalities, she said, there are things the county can do.

“The county, for example, could offer both carrots and sticks to try to get them to alter their zoning,” she said.

For the towns that accept federal Community Development Block Grant funding distributed by the county, the county has an obligation to ensure that municipalities are taking active steps to address existing segregation, she said. “They can withhold funds.”

Ms. Gross acknowledged that changing zoning to accommodate more multifamily housing is not an easy thing to do and said it calls for creativity. For instance, she said strip malls are opportunities for redevelopment for residential uses.

Placement of multifamily housing is also important, she noted: “If you just concentrate the affordable housing in the segregated communities, in communities that have a concentration of low-income families, then you’re not really doing anything to address the existing segregation.”