New Anti-Housing Discrimination Laws Pave Way For New LGBTQ Housing Community On Long Island
A new LGBTQ friendly senior affordable housing complex is being built in Bay Shore, New York. It is the first complex of its kind on Long Island, and it’s part of a burgeoning effort to combat the region’s long history of housing discrimination.
In February 2021, the New York State Senate passed 11 bills meant to address housing discrimination across the state. The legislation came to be after hearings regarding Newsday’s “Long Island Divided” series, which highlighted the issues of housing discrimination in both past and present of Long Island. Reporters ran tests in which they’d follow potential homebuyers of different races and ethnicities and keep track of the differences in service they received. The tests found evidence of things like POC being steered by realtors to move into areas that were already mostly POC as well as Black home shoppers not receiving equal service to their white counterparts.
The series was acclaimed for its in-depth reporting, and led to many tangible consequences. Multiple real estate agents referenced in the series were disciplined by the New York State Department of State, with one agent losing their license for discriminatory practices for the first time in over twenty years. The series brought attention to these issues of inequality that were specifically endemic to Long Island.
Long Island has quite a rich history of housing discrimination. For as long as people have lived on Long Island, the white majority has tried to keep themselves separate from the minority groups on the island. This goes back as far as 1895, when the Amityville school district decided to restrict Black children from attending. Following the Black community threatening to boycott, the district eventually reluctantly desegregated.
Perhaps most famously, discrimination was a key factor in the creation of Levittown, one of America’s first truly “mass-produced” suburbs. Levittown was constructed by Levitt and Sons Inc., and while many Black people worked on the construction of the community, there was specific language in restrictive town covenants that stated that the homes could not be “used or occupied by any person other than members of the Caucasian race”. While this language did not remain in those texts long, it was just another of countless examples of whites on Long Island doing their best to exclude people of color.
It was both the impact of the “Long Island Divided” series as well as other civil rights movements like BlackLivesMatter that led to the passage of new legislation in New York State that looks to help curb these discriminatory housing practices.
The legislation requires the State Attorney General’s office to use undercover testing to ensure that fair housing laws are complied with throughout the state, requiring implicit bias training for all real estate brokers and salespeople, and compensatory damages to those who were negatively impacted by housing discrimination. Additionally, the legislation increases scrutiny for real estate agents and the maximum penalties for real estate agents found guilty of discrimination to up to $2,000. The goal of the legislation is to discourage those working in Long Island’s housing market from discriminating against others in order to benefit themselves.
The Senate hearings for these bills mostly consisted of the discussion of housing discrimination against Black people and other POC. While these topics were discussed thoroughly and addressed directly in both the hearing and the legislation itself, housing discrimination against members of the LGBTQ community was rarely mentioned.
Samantha Friedman, an associate professor of sociology at the University at Albany, said this may be mainly due to a lack of research on the topic.
“Until recently, there have been studies done, but they just weren’t at a national level,” Friedman said. “Some were done overseas, like in Canada and Sweden, but there wasn’t a lot done here.”
Friedman led a study with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development on housing discrimination against same-sex couples in the private rental housing market in 2013. It was the first study of its kind to have been done on a national scale. “There just isn’t really a lot out there that’s known about it. It’s not as well documented as racial and ethnic discrimination in the housing market, or discrimination on the basis of disability status,” she said.
Friedman suggests that racial-based housing discrimination gets more attention because it is often connected to health disparities between different racial groups.
“The health disparities between people of color and whites is much greater than health disparities between an LGBTQ person and a cisgender heterosexual person,” Friedman said “I think that the inequalities in terms of life outcomes that are very critical to people’s well-being just have greater levels of disparity in terms of race and ethnicity, and that’s probably why there’s been more of a focus on housing discrimination for minorities because there’s a lot of evidence that where you live affects your health and, especially with the recent pandemic, it affects your mortality.”
The correlation between what is referred to by experts as “Quality of Housing” and the health of inhabitants is well-established. The Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion lists some aspects of Quality of Housing as air quality, space per individual, and whether or not the house contains asbestos, mold, or lead. Incidences like the water crisis in Flint, Michigan are alarming examples of how mostly minority communities can find themselves living in housing situations that actively harm their health. Friedman says that, at this moment, there is no evidence of this kind of phenomena in terms of the LGBT community, and so the more pressing and obvious situation for Black people and other people of color is given more immediate attention.
Despite lacking the lack of the depth of research that housing discrimination against POC has had, Luis Vasquez, a scholar of law at the Williams Institute at UCLA, said LGBTQ people do face housing discrimination in many of the same ways that other minority groups do.
“I would say that the evidence that we have available definitely suggests that LGBTQ people face housing discrimination as well,” he said. However, Vasquez said how LGTBQ people experience discrimination might look different than bias against people of color.
“All the research that we’ve done and court cases we’ve seen filed by LGBTQ people shows that, in many cases, when LGBTQ people have historically faced housing discrimination, discriminators have been more forthcoming about their intention to discriminate against LGBTQ people, Vasquez said. “We see a lot of cases where a landlord will be very explicit in saying ‘I don’t rent to gay people, or I would rent to you but I don’t want it to look bad on me that I’m renting to people like you.’ You see a lot of statements like that where people are not only willing to discriminate against LGBTQ people, but to do so openly.”
While lacking the sort of research that links LGBTQ housing discrimination to health problems later in life, Vasquez says that there are still statistical patterns concerning LGBTQ housing that are concerning. “The issue of LGBTQ people and housing instability is something that we have research on, and we know that LGBTQ young people are very much overrepresented in homeless populations.” Studies by the Williams Institute show that a whopping 8 percent of transgender people experienced homelessness in the past year, with 6 percent of Black LGBT people experiencing it as well. These rates are well above the national average.
Statistics seem to support the idea that LGBTQ people have more trouble finding housing than the rest of the population. In a series of tests in the online rental housing market, Friedman’s federally supported research found that gay men received responses 3.1% less than heterosexual couples, and lesbian women received 2.3% fewer responses .
“It’s not an incredibly high level, but still, there is a difference in the treatment,” she said.
Along with these more overt cases of discrimination, a 2017 study by the Urban Institute shows that this discrimination can take a more subtle form, as well. The study found that while lesbians seem to be largely treated the same as heterosexual women by real estate agents, gay men were shown fewer units than their heterosexual counterparts, and transgender people were shown the fewest units.
Even for those members of the LGBTQ community who don’t feel that they have experienced direct housing discrimination for their sexual orientation, it’s still a fear that looms large in their minds. Sean Sullivan, a 23-year-old gay man just getting into the housing market, says he worries constantly about this. “I’ve never felt like I’ve faced direct discrimination because most rental applications don’t ask you directly ‘are you gay?’. But once I went to apply to rent this house, and one of the questions was about sexual orientation. I immediately felt uncomfortable, because I wasn’t sure how that information was relevant to me trying to find a place to live. I wondered what the landlord would do with that information and whether it’d be used against me. I ultimately decided not to apply.”
It’s because of factors like these that searching for a place to live can be a challenge for LGBTQ people. This can be especially true for LGBTQ seniors, who are specifically catered to by the new housing complex in Bay Shore.
This is where the new housing facility hopes to come in. The development will consist of 75 apartment units, available for applicants 55 years and older. To qualify for housing, the applicants must make between 60–80% of the median income of the area. For seniors on a fixed income, this can be a potential obstacle. With Long Island being one of the most expensive regions of the country, with the average income coming in at 66 thousand dollars a year, reaching that 60–80 percent range can be quite an obstacle to overcome.
According to members of the Islip Town Board, the 80% maximum is required by law under the town’s current affordable housing ordinance and was not a specific choice of the developers.
LGBT Network Executive Director David Kilmnick said in a statement that interest in living in the development far exceeds its capacity, suggesting that LGBTQ seniors are looking for this kind of housing in droves. This supports some of the research that Luis Vasquez has done in the field.
“LGBTQ people are overrepresented in homeless populations, and while we have less research on LGBTQ elders specifically, we do know that many of the problems they experience as young people persists throughout their lives,” Vasquez said. “When they’re living in nursing homes and senior living facilities that aren’t LGBTQ affirming or specific to LGBTQ people, they report a lot of instances of various problems such as not being able to live with their same-sex partner, or receiving all sorts of microaggressions and negative comments by staff that just aren’t prepared to deal with LGBTQ people.”
The Islip Town Board approved the construction of the development unanimously in the summer of 2019, after a series of over 500 inquiries since 2014 into the topic by the LGBT Network of Long Island. It’s a collaboration between the LGBT Network and D&F Development Group, a Levittown construction company, and was also strongly advocated for by Vision Long Island, a group that advocates for environmentally responsible and economically sustainable community growth.
While the development is the first of its kind on Long Island, advocates say that, if the complex is successful, it could open the door to similar projects in the future. The recently passed anti-discrimination bills called for “the State’s obligation to affirmatively further affordable housing,” which will likely lead to many more similar projects in the next few years. For now, organizations like the Long Island LGBT Network will continue leading the charge for affordable housing for the LGBTQ community.
“As awful as it is, I’m used to having to consider the possibility of facing discrimination based on my sexuality every day,” says Sullivan. “I can only hope that, with new laws like these, there’ll come a time when applying to rent a house, something everybody should be able to get, won’t be fraught with worries about whether they’ll accept the kind of person that I am.”
