NYS punishes Long Island real estate agents after Newsday's three-year investigation on fair housing
New York State has penalized real estate professionals named in Newsday's Long Island Divided series on housing discrimination, disciplining agents for imposing unequal standards on homebuyers of different races and disparaging school districts and communities of color.
The New York Department of State, which regulates real estate agents, revoked three of the agents’ licenses, suspended the licenses of seven and fined five between $500 and $2,000, the most allowed under law, over the past four years.
The case outcomes show the state is taking a harder line in enforcing fair housing laws than it did before Newsday published its investigation in November 2019.
“It's important to punish bad actors in some way,” said Jacob Faber, an associate professor of public service and sociology at New York University. “If you're steering Black homebuyers toward neighborhoods with lower rates of home equity accumulation, you are reducing the ability of those Black homebuyers to accumulate wealth.”
The Long Island Divided series, a three-year investigation into the region’s housing market, found evidence of widespread unequal and disparate treatment of would-be homebuyers of color. The investigation made use of paired testing, which matched undercover white, Black, Asian and Hispanic testers who posed as homebuyers to engage with real estate agents.
Newsday’s analysis of more than 400 pages of disciplinary rulings and other legal documents since the series showed:
• In the four years before Newsday’s investigation, from 2016 through 2019, the Department of State disciplined four agents statewide for fair housing violations, handing down fines of up to $1,000 — the statutory maximum at the time — in three cases and a reprimand in the fourth. By contrast, in the four years from 2020 through 2023, the department penalized more than 40 agents statewide, including those linked to Long Island Divided as well as agents accused of discrimination in unrelated cases. The more recent cases included tougher penalties, with six license revocations and 21 suspensions, a Newsday analysis shows.
• In the Long Island Divided cases, the state penalized agents who used different standards for clients of different races. Disparities such as requiring a minority tester to get preapproved for a mortgage but serving a white tester without preconditions resulted in penalties ranging from a $2,000 fine to license suspension or revocation, the Department of State’s most severe penalty.
• Some agents who spoke explicitly about racial or ethnic demographics — such as by advising a white tester to avoid a “mixed neighborhood” — faced discipline ranging from a six-month suspension to revocation, Newsday's analysis of the Long Island Divided cases shows.
• Judges disciplined certain agents who discussed the quality of school districts. Agents who expressed opinions — positive or negative — about school districts in Newsday's investigation were penalized in some cases, with administrative law judges writing that such comments can be a “proxy” for steering buyers based on race, even when agents do not openly discuss race. The penalties ranged from a $500 fine to a three-month suspension.
“I'm very happy that action was taken,” said Laura Harding, president of ERASE Racism, a civil rights organization based in Syosset. "There was actual tangible action and not just kind of a smack on the wrist."
Newsday's investigation, published over two days in 2019, examined the treatment of homebuyers of different races across Long Island’s for-sale housing market. Testers recorded undercover video and audio of their interactions with real estate agents.
The investigation found Black testers faced disparate treatment when compared to white testers in 49% of the tests, Hispanics 39% and Asians 19%.
Two fair-housing experts assessed evidence gathered in Newsday’s tests and found the conduct of 36 agents to be problematic.
State officials used the results of Newsday’s tests to pursue discipline against many of the agents.
Of the 36 agents named in Long Island Divided, the Department of State has penalized 15. The state agency did not prosecute 10 agents and dropped its complaints against two agents. Administrative law judges dismissed charges against four agents. Five cases are pending.
The Department of State said in an emailed statement that all cases were “thoroughly considered by a team of attorneys before any determinations were made” about whether to pursue discipline.
The Department of State declined Newsday's request to interview New York Secretary of State Robert Rodriguez. The agency's investigation is ongoing, said Mercedes Padilla, a department spokeswoman.
The agency “will continue to work diligently to ensure each [case] is appropriately addressed and resolved,” the Department of State said.
The Long Island Board of Realtors, a 28,500-member trade group based in West Babylon, supports the state’s efforts to crack down on housing bias, said Doreen Spagnuolo, who was named chief executive officer of the group in 2023.
“I'm very happy that the Department of State took on those cases, investigated them and anyone who was found in violation of the law was sanctioned accordingly,” Spagnuolo said.
Since 2019, the nonprofit group has overhauled its anti-bias continuing education programs and formed partnerships with fair housing groups, she said.
Agents “just cannot be putting in their own opinions on what they think is good or isn't good,” she said, adding that their role is “imparting objective information.”
The state revoked the license of agent Himanshoo (Raj) Sanghvi, who was with Century 21 American Homes in Syosset at the time of the Newsday investigation. Regulators at first suspended Sanghvi's license for six months and fined him $500 for comments he made to a white Newsday tester.
Sanghvi said Huntington is a top school district, “But you don’t want to go there, it’s a mixed neighborhood … You have commercial, you have residential, you have white, you have Black, you have Latino, you have Indians, you have Chinese, you have Koreans …. It’s a mini, mini United Nations.”
A Department of State administrative law judge, Mathew Paulose Jr., wrote in 2021 that Sanghvi’s comments were a “serious” but “single act” of discrimination that should only result in suspension, not revocation, citing a 1996 case in which an agent’s license was suspended.
Both Sanghvi and the state agency’s Division of Licensing Services appealed.
In Sanghvi’s defense, his attorney maintained there was “no evidence of any unlawful steering or discrimination.”
But the division’s attorney argued Sanghvi’s license should be revoked, saying Paulose’s ruling referred to an “outdated” 1996 decision that “does not comport with modern notions and more recent decisions” from 2020 and later.
The official who heard the appeals, Special Deputy Secretary of State Daniel E. Shapiro, revoked Sanghvi’s license in 2022, writing that the agent’s comments were “egregious” and “demonstrate that he is unfit” to work as a real estate agent.
A license revocation would be a “deterrent” to others, Shapiro wrote.
Sanghvi did not respond to calls seeking comment.
In some of the cases that were dismissed, administrative law judges criticized investigators for relying too heavily on Newsday’s reporting and not doing enough investigating of their own, the rulings show.
News articles are considered hearsay according to previous administrative rulings, judges wrote. Hearsay is admissible, but a case can only rely entirely on hearsay if the evidence is “sufficiently relevant and probative” and not “seriously controverted,” the judges wrote.
One case that was dismissed involved Ann Pizaro, then a real estate agent at Signature Premier Properties in Syosset. Pizaro did not respond to requests for comment.
The state accused Pizaro of racial discrimination, citing Newsday reporting that showed Pizaro gave a white tester 18 listings in Plainview and Syosset, but none in Huntington, while giving a Hispanic tester more than 60 listings in Huntington, which has a large Hispanic school population, and seven listings in Plainview and Syosset.
Administrative Law Judge Aiesha L. Hudson dismissed the charges, writing that the state's investigation “provided insufficient evidence to establish the race of the testers,” in part because the investigator did not interview the testers, provide photos of them or determine when the photos that ran in Newsday were taken. Hudson wrote that the disparity in listings “may raise some suspicion,” but without more proof that Pizaro knew that one tester was Hispanic, the state could not prove “discriminatory intent.”
In one case, a real estate agent faced discipline for discussing schools, but not for making comments the state argued disparaged Wyandanch, a Suffolk County hamlet where more than 90% of residents are Black or Hispanic.
In 2017, two testers — one white, one Asian American — approached RE/MAX Beyond associate broker Joy Tuxson.
Speaking to the white tester, Tuxson said, “I’m not going to send you anything in Wyandanch unless you don’t want to start your car to buy your crack, unless you just want to walk up the street.”
Tuxson also made comments about school districts to both testers.
After explaining that she couldn’t tell the white tester where to look for houses, Tuxson suggested ways the tester could look into the schools herself. “One of them is Amityville … I'm not allowed to tell you where to go and where not to go, but I tell you where to look, you know, and everything is online for the school district. You're going to see who graduates, how many kids, the ethnic breakdown, how many free lunches. You can get a good idea of the socioeconomic makeup of the neighborhood when you look at the school district.”
To the Asian tester, Tuxson recalled selling a house to her nephew and asking him, “Do you really want your future children going to Amityville school district?”
The National Association of Realtors advises agents to avoid expressing opinions about communities or schools, because it could be a violation of the Fair Housing Act of 1968 and the group’s Code of Ethics.
At a hearing before an administrative law judge, Tuxson said her statements were meant “only to convey the importance of not just picking remodeled homes with pretty pictures but homes that align with your needs and preferences after doing your own research,” hearing documents show.
The judge, Paulose, dismissed the case in 2021. Paulose wrote that the comment about Wyandanch referred to property value, not race.
He also ruled the comment about Amityville schools was a "stray remark" that was not meant to direct the buyer toward or away from Amityville. Paulose wrote that Tuxson’s “demeanor, her explanations, her consistency, and the videos in their entirety rebut” the allegations of discrimination.
A finding of discrimination requires “substantial evidence of discriminatory intent, i.e., more than surmise or conjecture …. And that in the end is all we have here,” Paulose wrote.
The state appealed the dismissal. Matthew Wolf, the state's attorney, wrote that “Given the racial makeup of the Wyandanch school district, it is highly probable that [Tuxson's] jest about buying crack was intended to serve as a warning about the neighborhood … [Tuxson's] statement was clearly intended to steer the white tester away from Wyandanch.”
The Wyandanch schools’ student population was 52% Black and 46% Hispanic in the 2015-16 school year, the state's attorney said.
In a written statement during the proceeding, Wolf wrote, Tuxson acknowledged that her remark could be “a negative comment on the makeup of the town.”
Guiding buyers to different areas based on their race would “reduce property values, diminish a municipality’s tax base, threaten the local government’s ability to provide services, and cause other harms,” the state’s attorney wrote.
The appeals official, Shapiro, special deputy secretary of state, wrote that the allegations that Tuxson steered the testers away from the Amityville school district were “not supported by substantial evidence,” and he found the state also failed to prove Tuxson used the word “crack” as a coded term to steer the testers away from Wyandanch. “Crack” was code for the Black community, the state alleged in hearing records.
Shapiro ruled that Tuxson erred by discussing schools, including her advice to the white tester to “look at the school, if the school is in session, you look at the bus, who gets off the bus….”
“Although not shown to have been uttered in connection with an effort to steer the testers to any specific community … on a racial basis, the comments may be interpreted as providing a road map to a buyer who wishes to make a racially based purchase,” Shapiro wrote.
Shapiro suspended Tuxson’s license until she completed a fair housing course. She was notified about the suspension on June 9, 2022, her attorney, Christopher Cassar, said in an email. She took a three-hour online fair housing course the same day, a course certificate shows. The state restored her license the next day. Tuxson is now an associate broker with RE/MAX Integrity Leaders in Melville.
In a written statement, Tuxson said, “In my 40-plus years as a broker, I have never been faced with a claim of discrimination, steering, or any other wrongdoing. In a hearing following Newsday’s 2019 publication, an Administrative Law Judge dismissed all claims of discrimination or steering against me raised in the article. Dismissal of those claims was upheld on appeal. It is disheartening that Newsday is attempting to try in the court of public opinion what has already been tried in a court of law, without concern for the harmful effects of its publications on my personal and professional life. As I have done once before, I look forward to putting this incident behind me and continuing to provide exemplary service to all clients across Long Island.”
Scott Chang, senior counsel at the National Fair Housing Alliance in Washington, D.C., said steering prospective buyers away from communities of color could be a violation of the Fair Housing Act. Chang reviewed some of the cases at Newsday's request.
Federal law “was designed to prohibit discrimination but also was designed to look at bigger-picture issues, deal with systemic discrimination and … segregation,” he said. “The steering of prospective buyers from communities of color restricts the choices of a person, by a violation of the regulation, and helps to contribute to the segregation of our neighborhoods.”
Chang called for more stringent punishments in housing bias cases. Penalties such as fines and temporary license suspensions, Chang said, are “insufficient to deter future violations by real estate agents both in New York and, to the extent that the real estate industry is looking at how these cases come out, across the country.”
The state’s enforcement of fair housing laws has changed dramatically since Long Island Divided was published in 2019.
There’s “far more enforcement” of fair housing laws, and much more awareness among real estate agents of their obligations to serve all homebuyers and renters equally, said attorney Neil Garfinkel, who serves on the New York State Board of Real Estate, which helps set policy for the New York Department of State. Garfinkel also teaches state-mandated fair housing classes and is broker counsel to the Real Estate Board of New York, a trade group in Manhattan.
In November, Gov. Kathy Hochul signed a law extending the statute of limitations for filing a discrimination complaint to the state Division of Human Rights to three years, up from the previous deadline of one year for most complaints. The law went into effect Feb. 15. The division, which enforces the state human rights law, is “doing more in terms of outreach and education, especially with the real estate industry,” said Maria Imperial, the division's commissioner.
A year ago, Hochul announced she would use $2.2 million from the state's general fund to conduct fair-housing testing in regions throughout the state, including on Long Island.
In real estate, “much of the discrimination … is not noticeable by the ordinary consumer,” said Fred Freiberg, co-founder of the Fair Housing Justice Center in Long Island City and a paid consultant for the Newsday investigation. “Testing allows you to be more proactive and go out and actually find patterns of discrimination in the community, so that you can eliminate them before someone has to be victimized.”
In 2022, New York Attorney General Letitia James announced settlements with three brokerages associated with agents who James said engaged in illegal housing discrimination uncovered by the Newsday probe.
The brokerages — Keller Williams Realty of Greater Nassau in Garden City, Keller Williams Realty Elite in Massapequa and Laffey Real Estate in Greenvale — said they would spend about $115,000 on fair housing testing and training efforts. They did not admit to the attorney general's claims of discrimination as part of the settlements.
In 2021, Hochul signed a package of nine laws that increased fines imposed on agents who engage in discrimination, required agents to standardize their procedures, increased the amount of anti-bias training agents must complete and imposed new real estate license fees to fund anti-bias testing programs.
Those fees are funding a new $3 million program launched in November by the attorney general, using undercover testers to determine whether real estate companies and agents treat customers differently depending on their race and other factors.
In one of the first reforms sparked by the Long Island Divided probe, New York enacted a law in 2020 giving the Department of State the explicit power to revoke real estate agents' licenses for violating the state Human Rights Law, which prohibits housing discrimination.
At the time of the Newsday investigation, the legal standard to revoke or suspend an agent’s license was that the agent “has been guilty of fraud or fraudulent practices, or for dishonest or misleading advertising, or has demonstrated untrustworthiness or incompetency.”
Those new laws help, and it’s good that the real estate industry is funding much of the new testing through license fees, NYU’s Faber said. But in order to truly protect homebuyers from discrimination, he said, real estate agents should be required by law to report demographic information about their clients, the same way mortgage lenders do. That would allow state and federal agencies and others to monitor whether the real estate industry is serving all clients equitably, he said.
“The government is never going to have enough resources to test everywhere, all the time,” Faber said. “The burden of proof needs to be shifted onto potential discriminators.”
New York State has penalized real estate professionals named in Newsday's Long Island Divided series on housing discrimination, disciplining agents for imposing unequal standards on homebuyers of different races and disparaging school districts and communities of color.
The New York Department of State, which regulates real estate agents, revoked three of the agents’ licenses, suspended the licenses of seven and fined five between $500 and $2,000, the most allowed under law, over the past four years.
The case outcomes show the state is taking a harder line in enforcing fair housing laws than it did before Newsday published its investigation in November 2019.
It's important to punish bad actors in some way.
— Jacob W. Faber, an associate professor of public service and sociology at New York University
“It's important to punish bad actors in some way,” said Jacob Faber, an associate professor of public service and sociology at New York University. “If you're steering Black homebuyers toward neighborhoods with lower rates of home equity accumulation, you are reducing the ability of those Black homebuyers to accumulate wealth.”
The Long Island Divided series, a three-year investigation into the region’s housing market, found evidence of widespread unequal and disparate treatment of would-be homebuyers of color. The investigation made use of paired testing, which matched undercover white, Black, Asian and Hispanic testers who posed as homebuyers to engage with real estate agents.
Newsday’s analysis of more than 400 pages of disciplinary rulings and other legal documents since the series showed:
• In the four years before Newsday’s investigation, from 2016 through 2019, the Department of State disciplined four agents statewide for fair housing violations, handing down fines of up to $1,000 — the statutory maximum at the time — in three cases and a reprimand in the fourth. By contrast, in the four years from 2020 through 2023, the department penalized more than 40 agents statewide, including those linked to Long Island Divided as well as agents accused of discrimination in unrelated cases. The more recent cases included tougher penalties, with six license revocations and 21 suspensions, a Newsday analysis shows.
• In the Long Island Divided cases, the state penalized agents who used different standards for clients of different races. Disparities such as requiring a minority tester to get preapproved for a mortgage but serving a white tester without preconditions resulted in penalties ranging from a $2,000 fine to license suspension or revocation, the Department of State’s most severe penalty.
• Some agents who spoke explicitly about racial or ethnic demographics — such as by advising a white tester to avoid a “mixed neighborhood” — faced discipline ranging from a six-month suspension to revocation, Newsday's analysis of the Long Island Divided cases shows.
• Judges disciplined certain agents who discussed the quality of school districts. Agents who expressed opinions — positive or negative — about school districts in Newsday's investigation were penalized in some cases, with administrative law judges writing that such comments can be a “proxy” for steering buyers based on race, even when agents do not openly discuss race. The penalties ranged from a $500 fine to a three-month suspension.
Laura Harding, of ERASE Racism, a civil rights organization based in Syosset. Credit: Howard Schnapp
“I'm very happy that action was taken,” said Laura Harding, president of ERASE Racism, a civil rights organization based in Syosset. "There was actual tangible action and not just kind of a smack on the wrist."
Newsday's investigation, published over two days in 2019, examined the treatment of homebuyers of different races across Long Island’s for-sale housing market. Testers recorded undercover video and audio of their interactions with real estate agents.
The investigation found Black testers faced disparate treatment when compared to white testers in 49% of the tests, Hispanics 39% and Asians 19%.
Two fair-housing experts assessed evidence gathered in Newsday’s tests and found the conduct of 36 agents to be problematic.
State officials used the results of Newsday’s tests to pursue discipline against many of the agents.
Of the 36 agents named in Long Island Divided, the Department of State has penalized 15. The state agency did not prosecute 10 agents and dropped its complaints against two agents. Administrative law judges dismissed charges against four agents. Five cases are pending.
The Department of State said in an emailed statement that all cases were “thoroughly considered by a team of attorneys before any determinations were made” about whether to pursue discipline.
The Department of State declined Newsday's request to interview New York Secretary of State Robert Rodriguez. The agency's investigation is ongoing, said Mercedes Padilla, a department spokeswoman.
The agency “will continue to work diligently to ensure each [case] is appropriately addressed and resolved,” the Department of State said.
The Long Island Board of Realtors, a 28,500-member trade group based in West Babylon, supports the state’s efforts to crack down on housing bias, said Doreen Spagnuolo, who was named chief executive officer of the group in 2023.
“I'm very happy that the Department of State took on those cases, investigated them and anyone who was found in violation of the law was sanctioned accordingly,” Spagnuolo said.
Since 2019, the nonprofit group has overhauled its anti-bias continuing education programs and formed partnerships with fair housing groups, she said.
Agents “just cannot be putting in their own opinions on what they think is good or isn't good,” she said, adding that their role is “imparting objective information.”
Six-month suspension
The state revoked the license of agent Himanshoo (Raj) Sanghvi, who was with Century 21 American Homes in Syosset at the time of the Newsday investigation. Regulators at first suspended Sanghvi's license for six months and fined him $500 for comments he made to a white Newsday tester.
Sanghvi said Huntington is a top school district, “But you don’t want to go there, it’s a mixed neighborhood … You have commercial, you have residential, you have white, you have Black, you have Latino, you have Indians, you have Chinese, you have Koreans …. It’s a mini, mini United Nations.”
Himanshoo (Raj) Sanghvi
Brokerage at Time of Test:Century 21 American Homes, Syosset
Current License Status:Not listed
Case Outcome:License revoked
Case Summary:Sanghvi offered his opinions about school districts to a white tester, the administrative law judge's ruling shows. In a meeting video recorded by the tester, the agent said Huntington is a top school district, "But you don’t want to go there; it’s a mixed neighborhood ... residents wise. You have commercial, you have residential, you have white, you have black, you have Latinos, you have Indians, you have Chinese, you have Koreans; everything. It’s a mini, mini United Nations.… [E]xcept Huntington, everything is nice." The administrative law judge wrote that Sanghvi’s comments were a “serious” but “single act” of discrimination, and he imposed a six-month suspension, along with a fine for discussing school districts in violation of industry ethical rules, and a reprimand for not fulfilling continuing education requirements. The Department of State's Division of Licensing Services appealed the ruling. On appeal, the state overturned the judge’s decision and revoked Sanghvi's license. Sanghvi's comments, "meant to steer a home buyer away from a neighborhood solely due to its racial composition, are egregious" and show "he is unfit to act as a real estate licensee," the appeals officer wrote. Sanghvi did not respond to requests for comment.
See what happened to other agents disciplined by the state.
A Department of State administrative law judge, Mathew Paulose Jr., wrote in 2021 that Sanghvi’s comments were a “serious” but “single act” of discrimination that should only result in suspension, not revocation, citing a 1996 case in which an agent’s license was suspended.
Both Sanghvi and the state agency’s Division of Licensing Services appealed.
In Sanghvi’s defense, his attorney maintained there was “no evidence of any unlawful steering or discrimination.”
But the division’s attorney argued Sanghvi’s license should be revoked, saying Paulose’s ruling referred to an “outdated” 1996 decision that “does not comport with modern notions and more recent decisions” from 2020 and later.
The official who heard the appeals, Special Deputy Secretary of State Daniel E. Shapiro, revoked Sanghvi’s license in 2022, writing that the agent’s comments were “egregious” and “demonstrate that he is unfit” to work as a real estate agent.
A license revocation would be a “deterrent” to others, Shapiro wrote.
Sanghvi did not respond to calls seeking comment.
‘Insufficient evidence’
In some of the cases that were dismissed, administrative law judges criticized investigators for relying too heavily on Newsday’s reporting and not doing enough investigating of their own, the rulings show.
News articles are considered hearsay according to previous administrative rulings, judges wrote. Hearsay is admissible, but a case can only rely entirely on hearsay if the evidence is “sufficiently relevant and probative” and not “seriously controverted,” the judges wrote.
One case that was dismissed involved Ann Pizaro, then a real estate agent at Signature Premier Properties in Syosset. Pizaro did not respond to requests for comment.
The state accused Pizaro of racial discrimination, citing Newsday reporting that showed Pizaro gave a white tester 18 listings in Plainview and Syosset, but none in Huntington, while giving a Hispanic tester more than 60 listings in Huntington, which has a large Hispanic school population, and seven listings in Plainview and Syosset.
Administrative Law Judge Aiesha L. Hudson dismissed the charges, writing that the state's investigation “provided insufficient evidence to establish the race of the testers,” in part because the investigator did not interview the testers, provide photos of them or determine when the photos that ran in Newsday were taken. Hudson wrote that the disparity in listings “may raise some suspicion,” but without more proof that Pizaro knew that one tester was Hispanic, the state could not prove “discriminatory intent.”
‘Buy your crack’
In one case, a real estate agent faced discipline for discussing schools, but not for making comments the state argued disparaged Wyandanch, a Suffolk County hamlet where more than 90% of residents are Black or Hispanic.
In 2017, two testers — one white, one Asian American — approached RE/MAX Beyond associate broker Joy Tuxson.
Joy Tuxson
Brokerage at Time of Test:RE/MAX Beyond, East Meadow
Current License Status:Associate broker, RE/MAX Integrity Leaders, Melville
Case Outcome:License suspended until completion of fair housing course.
Case Summary:Tuxson met with two fair housing testers — one white, one Asian American — seeking homes near Bethpage for up to $500,000. Tuxson told the white tester, “I’m not going to send you anything in Wyandanch unless you don’t want to start your car to buy your crack, unless you just want to walk up the street.” She also made comments regarding the Amityville school district to both testers. To the white tester, she said: “You look at the school, if the school is in session, you look at the bus, who gets off the bus ….” The administrative law judge dismissed the case, ruling that the comments about Amityville were not made to direct the buyer toward or away from the village and calling the comment about Wyandanch a “stray remark.” Tuxson testified the comments were meant "only to convey the importance of not just picking remodeled homes with pretty pictures but homes that align with your needs and preferences after doing your own research," the judge's ruling shows. The state appealed. The official who heard the appeal, special deputy secretary of state Daniel E. Shapiro, wrote that while Tuxson did not violate the fair housing law due to her "lack of ill intent," her "explicit references, made to both testers, regarding ethnicity and race in the context of school district research" were "inappropriate" and "troubling." The comments were not shown to be linked to an effort to steer the testers, but they "may be interpreted as providing a roadmap to a buyer who wishes to make a racially based purchase," he wrote. Shapiro suspended her license until she submitted proof that she had completed a fair housing course. She took the course the day she was notified about the suspension, June 9, 2022, her attorney, Christopher Cassar, said. Her license was reinstated the next day, according to the Department of State.
See what happened to other agents disciplined by the state.
Speaking to the white tester, Tuxson said, “I’m not going to send you anything in Wyandanch unless you don’t want to start your car to buy your crack, unless you just want to walk up the street.”
Tuxson also made comments about school districts to both testers.
After explaining that she couldn’t tell the white tester where to look for houses, Tuxson suggested ways the tester could look into the schools herself. “One of them is Amityville … I'm not allowed to tell you where to go and where not to go, but I tell you where to look, you know, and everything is online for the school district. You're going to see who graduates, how many kids, the ethnic breakdown, how many free lunches. You can get a good idea of the socioeconomic makeup of the neighborhood when you look at the school district.”
To the Asian tester, Tuxson recalled selling a house to her nephew and asking him, “Do you really want your future children going to Amityville school district?”
The National Association of Realtors advises agents to avoid expressing opinions about communities or schools, because it could be a violation of the Fair Housing Act of 1968 and the group’s Code of Ethics.
At a hearing before an administrative law judge, Tuxson said her statements were meant “only to convey the importance of not just picking remodeled homes with pretty pictures but homes that align with your needs and preferences after doing your own research,” hearing documents show.
The judge, Paulose, dismissed the case in 2021. Paulose wrote that the comment about Wyandanch referred to property value, not race.
He also ruled the comment about Amityville schools was a "stray remark" that was not meant to direct the buyer toward or away from Amityville. Paulose wrote that Tuxson’s “demeanor, her explanations, her consistency, and the videos in their entirety rebut” the allegations of discrimination.
A finding of discrimination requires “substantial evidence of discriminatory intent, i.e., more than surmise or conjecture …. And that in the end is all we have here,” Paulose wrote.
‘Look at the bus’
The state appealed the dismissal. Matthew Wolf, the state's attorney, wrote that “Given the racial makeup of the Wyandanch school district, it is highly probable that [Tuxson's] jest about buying crack was intended to serve as a warning about the neighborhood … [Tuxson's] statement was clearly intended to steer the white tester away from Wyandanch.”
The Wyandanch schools’ student population was 52% Black and 46% Hispanic in the 2015-16 school year, the state's attorney said.
In a written statement during the proceeding, Wolf wrote, Tuxson acknowledged that her remark could be “a negative comment on the makeup of the town.”
Guiding buyers to different areas based on their race would “reduce property values, diminish a municipality’s tax base, threaten the local government’s ability to provide services, and cause other harms,” the state’s attorney wrote.
The appeals official, Shapiro, special deputy secretary of state, wrote that the allegations that Tuxson steered the testers away from the Amityville school district were “not supported by substantial evidence,” and he found the state also failed to prove Tuxson used the word “crack” as a coded term to steer the testers away from Wyandanch. “Crack” was code for the Black community, the state alleged in hearing records.
Shapiro ruled that Tuxson erred by discussing schools, including her advice to the white tester to “look at the school, if the school is in session, you look at the bus, who gets off the bus….”
“Although not shown to have been uttered in connection with an effort to steer the testers to any specific community … on a racial basis, the comments may be interpreted as providing a road map to a buyer who wishes to make a racially based purchase,” Shapiro wrote.
Shapiro suspended Tuxson’s license until she completed a fair housing course.
Shapiro suspended Tuxson’s license until she completed a fair housing course. She was notified about the suspension on June 9, 2022, her attorney, Christopher Cassar, said in an email. She took a three-hour online fair housing course the same day, a course certificate shows. The state restored her license the next day. Tuxson is now an associate broker with RE/MAX Integrity Leaders in Melville.
In a written statement, Tuxson said, “In my 40-plus years as a broker, I have never been faced with a claim of discrimination, steering, or any other wrongdoing. In a hearing following Newsday’s 2019 publication, an Administrative Law Judge dismissed all claims of discrimination or steering against me raised in the article. Dismissal of those claims was upheld on appeal. It is disheartening that Newsday is attempting to try in the court of public opinion what has already been tried in a court of law, without concern for the harmful effects of its publications on my personal and professional life. As I have done once before, I look forward to putting this incident behind me and continuing to provide exemplary service to all clients across Long Island.”
Scott Chang, senior counsel at the National Fair Housing Alliance in Washington, D.C., said steering prospective buyers away from communities of color could be a violation of the Fair Housing Act. Chang reviewed some of the cases at Newsday's request.
Federal law “was designed to prohibit discrimination but also was designed to look at bigger-picture issues, deal with systemic discrimination and … segregation,” he said. “The steering of prospective buyers from communities of color restricts the choices of a person, by a violation of the regulation, and helps to contribute to the segregation of our neighborhoods.”
Chang called for more stringent punishments in housing bias cases. Penalties such as fines and temporary license suspensions, Chang said, are “insufficient to deter future violations by real estate agents both in New York and, to the extent that the real estate industry is looking at how these cases come out, across the country.”
Newsday has compiled a searchable database that shows what penalties New York State meted out based on evidence from the Long Island Divided probe.
Violating Human Rights Law
The state’s enforcement of fair housing laws has changed dramatically since Long Island Divided was published in 2019.
There’s “far more enforcement” of fair housing laws, and much more awareness among real estate agents of their obligations to serve all homebuyers and renters equally, said attorney Neil Garfinkel, who serves on the New York State Board of Real Estate, which helps set policy for the New York Department of State. Garfinkel also teaches state-mandated fair housing classes and is broker counsel to the Real Estate Board of New York, a trade group in Manhattan.
In November, Gov. Kathy Hochul signed a law extending the statute of limitations for filing a discrimination complaint to the state Division of Human Rights to three years, up from the previous deadline of one year for most complaints. The law went into effect Feb. 15. The division, which enforces the state human rights law, is “doing more in terms of outreach and education, especially with the real estate industry,” said Maria Imperial, the division's commissioner.
A year ago, Hochul announced she would use $2.2 million from the state's general fund to conduct fair-housing testing in regions throughout the state, including on Long Island.
Fred Freiberg is a national field coordinator and founder of the Fair Housing Justice Center in New York City. Credit: Newsday/Kendall Rodriguez
In real estate, “much of the discrimination … is not noticeable by the ordinary consumer,” said Fred Freiberg, co-founder of the Fair Housing Justice Center in Long Island City and a paid consultant for the Newsday investigation. “Testing allows you to be more proactive and go out and actually find patterns of discrimination in the community, so that you can eliminate them before someone has to be victimized.”
In 2022, New York Attorney General Letitia James announced settlements with three brokerages associated with agents who James said engaged in illegal housing discrimination uncovered by the Newsday probe.
The brokerages — Keller Williams Realty of Greater Nassau in Garden City, Keller Williams Realty Elite in Massapequa and Laffey Real Estate in Greenvale — said they would spend about $115,000 on fair housing testing and training efforts. They did not admit to the attorney general's claims of discrimination as part of the settlements.
In 2021, Hochul signed a package of nine laws that increased fines imposed on agents who engage in discrimination, required agents to standardize their procedures, increased the amount of anti-bias training agents must complete and imposed new real estate license fees to fund anti-bias testing programs.
Those fees are funding a new $3 million program launched in November by the attorney general, using undercover testers to determine whether real estate companies and agents treat customers differently depending on their race and other factors.
In one of the first reforms sparked by the Long Island Divided probe, New York enacted a law in 2020 giving the Department of State the explicit power to revoke real estate agents' licenses for violating the state Human Rights Law, which prohibits housing discrimination.
At the time of the Newsday investigation, the legal standard to revoke or suspend an agent’s license was that the agent “has been guilty of fraud or fraudulent practices, or for dishonest or misleading advertising, or has demonstrated untrustworthiness or incompetency.”
Those new laws help, and it’s good that the real estate industry is funding much of the new testing through license fees, NYU’s Faber said. But in order to truly protect homebuyers from discrimination, he said, real estate agents should be required by law to report demographic information about their clients, the same way mortgage lenders do. That would allow state and federal agencies and others to monitor whether the real estate industry is serving all clients equitably, he said.
“The government is never going to have enough resources to test everywhere, all the time,” Faber said. “The burden of proof needs to be shifted onto potential discriminators.”
Maura McDermott covers health care and other business news on Long Island.
