More than three years after Westchester County signed a
landmark desegregation settlement, black and Latino home seekers still often face
discrimination in the county’s whitest communities, results of a fair housing
audit released this week show.
Between April 2011 and October 2012, Westchester Residential Opportunities Inc.
– a
private fair housing group — sent trained testers into communities targeted by
the settlement to test for discrimination by real estate agents and landlords
based on race or national origin. Testing is considered the best way to check
for compliance with fair housing laws.
Under the audit
designed by Westchester Residential Opportunities, first a black or Latino
tester would inquire about an apartment or home. Then a white tester with
slightly lower financial qualifications would ask about the same place.
The audit found that black and Latino testers were
discriminated against in 40 percent of the 90 tests conducted. They were
treated the same as white testers in 48 percent; 12 percent of the tests were
inconclusive.
Overall, the tests showed that black and Latino home seekers
still face significant odds of being steered to heavily minority areas by real
estate agents and denied the opportunity to view apartments.
The results seem to belie County Executive Rob Astorino’s insistence that racial discrimination is no
longer a significant problem in Westchester. In an investigation published last
November, ProPublica
chronicled the county’s resistance to the mandate to integrate at the heart
of the settlement it reached with the federal government in 2009.
The audit seems to bolster mapping
by ProPublica that found that race – and not just income, as some
county officials have contended – contributes to the county’s residential
segregation patterns.
The audits covered towns such as Cortlandt, Yorktown,
Scarsdale, Bronxville, North Castle and Dobbs Ferry. In Mount Pleasant, where Astorino lives, African Americans and Latinos were treated
differently than white testers in six of 13 tests. In affluent Scarsdale, which
has a long history of animosity toward affordable housing, black and Latinos
faced unequal treatment in four cases and were treated the same as white testers
in just one.
Read the entire
study here.
