News &
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Long Island Divided
In one of the most concentrated investigations of discrimination by real estate agents in the half century since enactment of America’s landmark fair housing law, Newsday found evidence of widespread separate and unequal treatment of minority potential homebuyers and minority communities on Long Island.
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 findings are the product of a paired-testing effort comparable on a local scale to once-a-decade testing performed by the federal government in measuring the extent of racial discrimination in housing nationwide.
Long Island Divided: Full Investigative Report
Investigation Team Videos
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 findings are the product of a paired-testing effort comparable on a local scale to once-a-decade testing performed by the federal government in measuring the extent of racial discrimination in housing nationwide.
Long Island Divided: Full Investigative Report
Investigation Team Videos
Qualified Renters Need Not Apply:
Race and Voucher Discrimination in the Metro Boston Rental Housing Market
A study conducted by The Boston Foundation, Suffolk University Law School, and the Analysis Group
The field work for this study about race and housing voucher discrimination was conducted at a time of keen focus on the lack of affordable housing in Greater Boston and the threat that crisis poses to our region’s continued prosperity. Our own Greater Boston Housing Report Cards in recent years have shown that we must expand our housing stock at all price points and in all of the cities and towns around Boston to meet ongoing needs. The analysis in this report, however, shows that just as important as supply is the issue of access to existing and new housing for all— especially for those left behind by Boston’s advancing prosperity.
That remains true even as, in the last few months, our region’s focus has by necessity turned to other pressing tragedies. These have included the coronavirus pandemic and all of its fallout, with medical and health issues tied ever more obviously to social and economic issues, as well as the brutal killing of George Floyd and other African Americans, and the nationwide protests that have intensified awareness of systemic racism and inequity in America.
This study offers further evidence of the entrenchment of discrimination and the unequal application of rights, with its close examination of Boston’s rental housing practices. To survive and thrive in any city, but especially in Boston with its high-priced real estate market, fair and equitable access to rental housing is essential. It should be a right, not a privilege, that all individuals and families have the same opportunities to secure decent housing, which is so central to our physical and mental health.
Yet race- and source-of-income-based discrimination exists and persists to an alarming degree. The data in this report demonstrate that race and class play a major role in how fairly one is treated when seeking housing. Would-be renters who are clearly qualified are being shut out by brokers and landlords who have devised complicated systems of barriers. It’s a situation that we must address by exposing and combating the underlying negative biases that pervade our current housing voucher system—along with so many parallel inequities in other systems that have power over people’s lives.
The ramifications of discrimination based not only on race, but on class, extend far beyond the microcosm of the rental housing realm. They help to perpetuate the inequalities that keep Boston from reaching its true potential.
Evaluating issues related to race-based and voucher-based discrimination, especially with scientific approaches, such as the matched pair testing reflected in this study, is imperative if we want to solve the problem of discrimination in the rental market. And we do. Our mission of creating a city and region in which opportunity and justice are extended to everyone depends on it.
-Paul S. Grogan President & CEO The Boston Foundation
Qualified Renters Need Not Apply Webpage
Qualified Renters Need Not Apply Report
The field work for this study about race and housing voucher discrimination was conducted at a time of keen focus on the lack of affordable housing in Greater Boston and the threat that crisis poses to our region’s continued prosperity. Our own Greater Boston Housing Report Cards in recent years have shown that we must expand our housing stock at all price points and in all of the cities and towns around Boston to meet ongoing needs. The analysis in this report, however, shows that just as important as supply is the issue of access to existing and new housing for all— especially for those left behind by Boston’s advancing prosperity.
That remains true even as, in the last few months, our region’s focus has by necessity turned to other pressing tragedies. These have included the coronavirus pandemic and all of its fallout, with medical and health issues tied ever more obviously to social and economic issues, as well as the brutal killing of George Floyd and other African Americans, and the nationwide protests that have intensified awareness of systemic racism and inequity in America.
This study offers further evidence of the entrenchment of discrimination and the unequal application of rights, with its close examination of Boston’s rental housing practices. To survive and thrive in any city, but especially in Boston with its high-priced real estate market, fair and equitable access to rental housing is essential. It should be a right, not a privilege, that all individuals and families have the same opportunities to secure decent housing, which is so central to our physical and mental health.
Yet race- and source-of-income-based discrimination exists and persists to an alarming degree. The data in this report demonstrate that race and class play a major role in how fairly one is treated when seeking housing. Would-be renters who are clearly qualified are being shut out by brokers and landlords who have devised complicated systems of barriers. It’s a situation that we must address by exposing and combating the underlying negative biases that pervade our current housing voucher system—along with so many parallel inequities in other systems that have power over people’s lives.
The ramifications of discrimination based not only on race, but on class, extend far beyond the microcosm of the rental housing realm. They help to perpetuate the inequalities that keep Boston from reaching its true potential.
Evaluating issues related to race-based and voucher-based discrimination, especially with scientific approaches, such as the matched pair testing reflected in this study, is imperative if we want to solve the problem of discrimination in the rental market. And we do. Our mission of creating a city and region in which opportunity and justice are extended to everyone depends on it.
-Paul S. Grogan President & CEO The Boston Foundation
Qualified Renters Need Not Apply Webpage
Qualified Renters Need Not Apply Report