Report:
LI segregation unchecked
Published: April 18, 2005 8:00 PM
By MARTIN C. EVANS. STAFF
WRITER
Local and county government agencies responsible
for
combating
discrimination are doing little or nothing to break patterns that
have made Long Island the third most segregated suburb in the nation, according
to a study by Erase Racism, a Long Island advocacy group.
Government fair housing agencies fail to investigate
discrimination
complaints,
local governments cling to zoning practices that perpetuate
segregation, and real estate agencies that steer black and Latino renters and
home buyers
away from predominantly white neighborhoods face little risk of
prosecution, the report said.
Calls to the Long Island Board of Realtors were not
returned.
"Yes,
housing discrimination is very real," said Nassau County Executive
Thomas
Suozzi. "This is a good example of where you have lots of good laws
passed at the national, state and local level and there has been
no effective
coordination
of resources to enforce the existing laws."
Elaine Gross, president of the advocacy group that did the study, said
county human rights commissions in Nassau and
Suffolk leave it to the state to
investigate fair housing complaints, which often go unresolved.
The study said although local governments seeking federal Housing
and Urban
Development
funds must file "analysis of impediment" plans for overcoming
discriminatory housing patterns, few governments offered meaningful
proposals.
In
one example, the study noted Huntington Town, which it said has been
cited by HUD for exclusionary zoning practices, although its most
recent
analysis
of impediment report offered no action to address neighborhood
segregation.
Just 15 percent of 2.75 million Long Islanders live in communities where
both blacks and whites each make up more than 15 percent of the population,
according to a 2001 report by the Lewis Mumford Center for Comparative Urban
and Regional Research, at the State University at Albany. The other 2.3 million
are in communities that are predominantly white or black.
The Erase Racism report, which is based on a survey of government and
private data, said racial
steering continues to keep neighborhoods segregated,
citing a survey in which 85 white testers and 79 African-American or Hispanic
testers asked real estate
agents about the availability of housing.
White applicants were told an apartment was available 93 percent of the
time, compared to 53 percent of the time for African-American
or Latino
applicants,
according to the report.
Among the personal stories cited in the report was one of Deborah Post, a
black Touro Law Center professor, who was shown six
homes in largely black and
Latino Huntington Station, when she had asked to see homes in predominantly
white Smithtown.
These findings were part of a 2004 survey conducted
by the Association of
Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, one of the organizations
whose records were cited in the Erase Racism report.
Testing by the Long Island
Housing Services, a fair housing group, in
Oyster Bay, North Hempstead and Smithtown last year, also cited in the Erase
Racism report, showed similar results.
"The statistics and our research show this
is pervasive across Long
Island," said Cathryn Harris, the report's author. "Long Island is the third
most segregated [suburb] in the United States" behind suburban Newark, N.J.,
and
Cleveland.
A
spokesman for Suffolk County Executive Steve Levy said local governments
are handcuffed by laws that place enforcement responsibility in the
hands of
state
government.
