NYC NOW - February 23, 2024 : Evening Roundup

Episode Date: February 23, 2024

New York state lawmakers could vote on the new congressional map as soon as Monday. Plus, the Harlem Renaissance is the subject of a new show opening at the Met Museum this weekend. And finally, WNYC���s Michael Hill talks with Newsday reporters Maura McDermott and Jonathan LaMantia about its newly published database that breaks down which real estate agents have been penalized for housing discrimination on Long Island.

Welcome to NYC Now, your source for local news in and around New York City from WNYC. I'm Jenae Pierre. Lawmakers in Albany will vote on the state's new congressional map as soon as Monday. But it'll ultimately be up to Governor Kathy Hochle to sign or veto whatever they pass. And so far, she's not revealing her hand. The next step is the legislature, and let's see what they come up with. And so I will not be putting my finger on the scale. The legislature will have to vote on a map created by a bipartisan commission.

But so far, top Democrats aren't pleased with a proposal, including House Democratic leader, Hakeem Jeffries. If the legislature voted down, its Democratic majorities could step in to make changes. But if that's the case, Republicans are vowing to sue. The Harlem Renaissance is the subject of a new blockbuster show opening at the Met Museum on Sunday. WMYC's Ryan Kylath looks into one artist the show is spotlighting. When I asked Duke University art historian Richard Powell to describe the work of painter William H. Johnson, he said, Well, I'm pausing because it depends on which William H. Johnson artwork you're standing in front of.

Powell says Johnson moved to New York as a teenager in the 1920s, and over three decades, Johnson's style evolved dramatically, from classical portraiture through French impressionism and German expressionism, on to something almost like folk art depicting Harlem Street Life. My answer is that William H. Johnson produced an amazing array of artworks that walk us through modernism in world art with a focus in particular on black culture. Powell hopes the Mets show will bring renewed attention to Johnson's career. You can read more about William H. Johnson and the Mets Harlem Renaissance show at our news site, Gothamist.

An undercover investigation into housing discrimination on Long Island has resulted in penalties for some real estate agents and brokers. More on that after the break. New York's Department of State is stepping up enforcement against housing discrimination on Long Island. In recent years, the state has punished real estate agents in Nassau and Suffolk counties for violating fair housing standards. Many of the agents were discovered in an investigation by news,

Day. The three-year-long undercover probe found widespread unequal treatment of would-be homebuyers. WNYC's Michael Hill talked with Newsday reporters, Maura McDermott, and Jonathan Lamantia, about their newly published database that breaks down which real estate agents have been penalized in their offenses. Jonathan, Long Island has a history of housing discrimination and segregation. Would you set the scene for us? What led to this investigation? Sure. So in 2019, Newsday published this investigation. investigation, which it called Long Island Divided, in which it had paired testers. They would pair a would-be white homebuyer with a black, Asian, or Hispanic homebuyer. And they had them

meet with real estate agents, and the findings of that showed that in 40% of cases, there was some unequal treatment between the paired testers. So what we've done now in 24 is looked at how the Department of State took on these cases and, you know, imposed some discipline in certain cases against some of the agents that were named. Here's a part of a recording taken by a white person who was posing as a home buyer in 2016. They asked the real estate agent selling homes in Siazid about the best school district on the island. The agent says Huntington, but tells a tester, he wouldn't want to live there. Huntington is a mixed neighborhood.

Residence wise. Residence with home. You have commercial, you are residential, you are white, you have black, you're Latino, you have Indians. Chinese, European. Oh, population, ethnic distribution. It's a mini-United nation. Moore, there was some back and forth about what kind of punishment the agent should receive. What ultimately ended up happening here?

Ultimately, that real estate agent's license was revoked. And of the 15 cases in which the state did hand down discipline for the agents who were named in Long Island divided, there were three cases where agents' licenses were revoked. And that, of course, is the most serious penalty that the state can hand. hand down. There were seven instances in which licenses were suspended and five agents were fined. In that particular case, why was the license revoked? In that particular case, the license was revoked because of the inappropriateness of those comments that were made. And the comments were not made to the paired tester. Those comments were made to the white tester. How rare is it for state

government to take this kind of action against real estate agents found of broken anti-discrimination laws. Well, what Newsday's analysis found was that in the four years before Long Island divided was published, there were only four cases in which real estate agents were disciplined for fair housing violations. In three of those cases, there were fines, and in one case, there was a reprimand. However, in the four years since then, there have been 40 cases of discipline that have been handed down in fair housing cases. Here's a clip of a real estate agent with Remax beyond in East Meadow in Nassau County, whose case was dismissed.

This is what she said to a white tester in 2017. Well, when I send you the houses, they have the school district on it, and again, I'm not allowed to steer you. Right, right. You go on, and I'm not going to send you anything you want to. Unless you don't want to start your car to buy your craft, Unless she doesn't want to walk up the state. Wow.

Wow. In case that was hard to understand, the town she refers to is wine dance, and she insinuates to testers, should only move there if she wants easy access to crack. Would you lay out this case, and what led up to it ultimately being dismissed by the judge? On appeal, this agent's license was suspended until she completed a fair housing course, which she did so the day that she was notified of this. The appeals officer found no evidence of discrimination or steering in this case, but found her comments inappropriate and troubling. I'm wondering, is the kind of punishment that's handed out, is it really up to the discretion of the individual judges?

So the individual judges who are, you know, administrative law judges from the Department of State and then an executive appeals officer who's deputized to take on that role, you know, they're in charge of licensing real estate agents. And so the standard for issuing a real estate license and for agents to hold those real estate license is they have to be trustworthy and competent. So if there's evidence that they are untrustworthy or incompetent, you know, that's the standard that they're going on on whether to take any action against these agency licenses. Now, you've spoken to experts in the field. I'm curious about what are they saying? Do New York's fair housing laws and their recent punishments go far enough in their opinion? So what experts have told us is that they are, of course, glad that the law is being enforced. They're also glad that there are new laws to address housing bias, including a law that imposes new license fees on real estate agents that have funded a $3 million fair housing testing program that's now being run by the state attorney general's office.

They also say that they would like more to be done. One suggestion that we've heard is that just like mortgage lenders, real estate agents, they say, should have to collect and report. report data about the demographics of their clients so that their practices can be monitored. There have also been suggestions that there should be more affordable housing in a wider range of communities so that communities will become less segregated over time and also that there should be efforts made to attract a more diverse group of real estate agents to the industry. As I listened to, you talk about this investigation and we started this segment talking about how Long Island still has some of the most segregated communities.

Is it any wonder that this segregation still exists as widespread as it is on the island with these kind of practices? You know, I think a lot of people would be surprised by the extent to which segregation does still exist. On Long Island, Newsday's analysis in our 2019 series shows that of the almost 300 communities on Long Island, most black residents live in about a dozen of. them. This segregation goes back a very long time. You know, Long Island, of course, was one of the nation's first suburbs, and Levittown was, you know, one of the first of those suburbs on Long Island.

And when Levittown was first started after World War II, there were restrictive covenants that limited the occupants of the houses there to members of the Caucasian race. So it is something that is still very much a factor in the day-to-day lives of Long Islanders and people living in other communities across the country. That's Moore McDermott and Jonathan Lamantia, two reporters from Newsday, talking with WNYC's Michael Hill. Thanks for listening to NYC now from WMYC. Shout out to our production team.

It includes Sean Bowdage, Amber Bruce, Ave Carrillo, Audrey Cooper, Leora Noam Kravitz, Jared Marcel and Wayne Schoemeister, with help from the entire WMYC Newsroom. Our show art was designed by the folks at Buck, and our music was composed by Alexis Quadrado. I'm Jenae Pierre. Have a nice weekend. We'll be back on Monday.