Apartheid, Park Slope-Style
                      by Neil deMause

This past spring, "Code 23" entered the Brooklyn lexicon, instantly
joining such other racist code words as "planned shrinkage" and "Contract
With America" in notoriety. Twenty-three was the code used by Park West
Realty on 7th Avenue to indicate apartments that should be shown only to
white prospective tenants. That little violation of the law won them a
$20,000 fine from the city human rights commission, a front-page exposŽ in
the Daily News, several large protests outside their offices, and finally
a closing and miraculous rebirth as Metropolitan Realty, which refuses to
say whether it's related to the original realtor, though Park West's old
owner maintains an office upstairs. 

It was as fine a moment of late-20th-century liberalism as you could want.
Outrage comes easy at blatant racism like that displayed by Park West and
the landlords they served, but the media furor directed at this one
realtor deflected attention from a larger issue: that of racial
discrimination on the whole by realtors and landlords in Park Slope and
other mostly white Brooklyn neighborhoods.

I've lived in the Slope for seven years, and by now I've almost come to
take reports of casual racism for granted. There was the woman
(light-skinned) of Puerto Rican descent who was asked by a landlord,
"That's a Spanish name, isn't it?"; the white woman shopping for an
apartment for herself and her boyfriend who was asked by a Carroll Gardens
landlord, "And your boyfriendÉdoes he look like you?"; the woman whose
Park Slope landlord wouldn't even let the Haitian New York Times delivery
person onto the property; the African-American woman who asks prospective
landlords "Is it okay that I'm Black?" before making appointments because
she's sick of being turned away when they see her face; and, last but not
least, my former landlady, who, seeing a Black prospective roommate
leaving our apartment, approached me to to ask if that was indeed a
"colored girl" and assert that she only wanted "nice people" in the
building. Little wonder that while Ann Van Zyl, the employee who blew the
whistle on Park West, reacted with shock at the landlord who waved his
hands and shouted "No, no, no!" at seeing the white Van Zyl and her
African-American client approach for a scheduled appointment, the
prospective tenant only told Van Zyl that she was used to such treatment.

It's a problem of endemic racism ("even in Park Slope," I could say, but
won't), but it's also a systemic problem in the business of real estate in
1995 New York--as Gary Goff of the Brooklyn Anti-Bias Network, who helped
organize the protests against Park West, readily agrees. "I grew up in the
South during the civil rights period," says Goff, "and there were many
people who owned businesses down there who would not have cared about
opening those businesses up to Black people." What stopped them, he says,
"was the political climate: It was not in their business interests to do
so. This is a little more subtle what we're talking about here--the
reprisals come down to losing money, as opposed to getting your motel
bombed, or something like that, but it still comes down finally to losing
money to make a political statement. And there's something wrong when
somebody has to go out of their way and make sacrifices to do the right
thing." 

The Park West case is a lesson in blame-passing: The realtor discriminated
against Blacks and Latinos because that's what its clients (the landlords)
wanted, and it couldn't afford to lose business, even if it meant breaking
the law. The landlords, for their part, would no doubt cry "property
values" (another memorable code word), explaining that it's not they who
are racist, but rather those other people who won't pay premium prices to
live in less than perfectly white neighborhoods.
This is the nature of racism in America today. As opposed to, say, South
Africa--where Van Zyl hails from, which may account for her less than
blasŽ response to the incident--here we officially denounce racial
classifications, but practice them routinely in our daily lives. Nowhere
is this more pronounced than in real estate. And since in America,
property is power, this racism trickles down to less need for overt racism
in all the other necessities of life: education, health care, sanitation,
voting rights.

"Real estate is more than just a passive thing," says Goff. "It manipulates
the markets. That's where the more specific meaning of redlining comes
from: creating neighborhoods so that they can create markets and change
them. And this can go either from creating an all-white neighborhood, to
changing it over and creating an all-Black neighborhood. And whichever way
things go in that case, the real estate interests--not just the agents but
the interests--always seem to come out ahead of the game."

Certainly, fines and public humiliation for outright discrimination help
tip the incentives slightly in the right direction. But make no mistake:
This is a problem way bigger than one brainless realtor who needed to
encode his racism in his computer system. Every white person living in a
nice apartment in a predominately white neighborhood, every middle-class
person who shops in a gentrified zone, every Black or Latino family who
can't find a good school for their kids is reaping the results of
apartheid, American-style. It's something to remember the next time some
politician starts lambasting affirmative action for establishing "racial
preferences." In the United States of America, some preferences are more
preferable than others.

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