About Real Estate; Housing Discrimination: Study Of City Is Updated
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Six years ago, an investigation of Manhattan apartment-renting patterns conducted jointly by The New York Times and the Open Housing Center of New York concluded that racial discrimination was ”widespread” and that it ”works to deny many choice apartments to blacks and other minority group members despite their ability to afford them.” Does racial discrimination still occur to a significant extent in New York City’s housing market? Without another full-scale inquiry, this question cannot be answered definitively. But the issue has been brought into bold relief by three recent, well-publicized incidents involving racial discrimination here. In one, a Manhattan cooperative board voted down the purchase of an apartment by the New York Public Library as the residence for the institution’s current president (who is of Armenian descent) because, one board member later explained, the board felt that at some point in the future the library might elect a black or a Hispanic person as president. In the second incident, a Federal jury in Brooklyn found that a realty company had discriminated against a black man who had sought an apartment in one of its buildings. The jury awarded the man, an aide to the Manhattan borough president, $50,000 in damages. The sum is believed to be the biggest jury award ever in a housing discrimination case. Finally, earlier this month, a Federal jury in Manhattan awarded a young black woman, a Yale graduate who works for a bank, damages of $38,000 after finding that a realty concern had discriminated against her when she sought an apartment. To some, these incidents indicate that housing discrimination is indeed still widespread and affects all classes of black and Hispanic New Yorkers. ”Our callers come from the spectrum of occupations,” said Betty Hoeber, director of the 18-year-old Open Housing Center, ”from postal workers, factory workers, clerical workers, right up to topline professionals. The fact that affluent blacks meet it is striking evidence that landlords and brokers aren’t paying attention to an individual’s ability to pay. They see a black face or hear a Spanish surname or accent and that’s it.” Mrs. Hoeber said that her office averaged 75 to 100 calls a week from individuals complaining of purported housing discrimination. Isaiah E. Robinson Jr., chairman of the city’s Human Rights Commission, also believes racial discrimination in housing ”very pervasive.” ”And the complaints we get are only the tip of the iceberg,” he continued, ”because when people are looking for shelter, their first priority is to find an apartment. If they think they’ve been discriminated against, they’re likely to feel they wouldn’t be able to prove it, or that trying to prove it would subject them to retribution.” Source : query.nytimes.com |