Speaker Adams opposing effective fair housing enforcement?

Feb. 25, 2025 — It was a good week for City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams. Leaders of two big New York City are privately urging the Speaker to run for Mayor. So is State Attorney General Tish James. And the Speaker herself has been reaching out colleagues and “at least one other mayoral candidate” to “take the temperature about the possibility.”

But how would the Speaker– a relative unknown except to those who follow City politics closely – govern? Her track record on a critical civil rights issue provides a worrisome clue.

The problem: our local Human Rights Law – perhaps the strongest in the country – has a gaping practical loophole. Even though all types of housing are covered, the universal practice in the coop industry is to maintain secrecy in the coop application process; to refuse to tell a family that has been turned down the reasons for rejection.

It’s not an academic issue. As an article in The Real Deal entitled “Not our kind”: How discrimination persists in New York co-ops explained, there is “a consensus that while boards have evolved, discrimination persists in many of the city’s co-op buildings, which cling to opaque systems of power and control.”

The secrecy imposed in the coop housing sector – one which, according to a recent estimate, accounts for more than 400,000 housing units in the city – creates an environment where those inclined to discriminate feel comfortable doing so, knowing that they are unlikely to be caught.

The secrecy makes it hard to assess whether discrimination has occurred. In the small number of fair-housing lawsuits that are brought, the secrecy allows discrimination-defense lawyers to invent false reasons after the fact.

The industry’s secrecy policy is especially pernicious because a common fair-housing enforcement tool is uniquely unavailable in the coop context. Normally, with rentals, home sales, or real estate brokers, a fair housing organization (like the Fair Housing Justice Center in New York) is able to dispatch “testers” to see if they are being treated differently based on race or another suspected discriminatory basis. But with coops, the coop board – the decision maker – does not even begin to get involved until after a contract has been signed between the current owner and the prospective buyer, the prospective buyer has applied for and gotten a commitment from a financial institution to lend money for the transaction, a credit report has been run, and an extensive application – including both business and personal references has been submitted. There simply is no way – financially or logistically or legally – to set up testing in those circumstances.

The coop disclosure bill (“Intro 407”) would require coops to provide rejected applicants promptly, in writing, and with specificity, the reasons for the coop’s action.

Intro 407 is sponsored by 29 Council Members (a majority plus three) and is supported by a who’s who of national and local civil rights and allied organizations, including the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, the National Fair Housing Alliance, the Community Service Society of New York, Lambda Legal, the Fair Housing Justice Center, the Asian American Defense Fund, and LatinoJustice PRLDEF.

Polling shows that coop disclosure has overwhelming support among New Yorkers, not only citywide (68-15), but in every borough, among every racial group, income group, political group; among both owners and renters. Over the course of many years, though, the coop industry has successfully blocked coop disclosure legislation on behalf of coop boards, a small group deeply committed to maintaining their shield from accountability. (And it is coop boards specifically, not coop owners more generally, that are against disclosure. It has been known for a long time that most coop owners, like other New Yorkers, support disclosure. Way back in 2006, a poll of coop owners living in private coops in Manhattan south of 96th Street who were not themselves board members found that these coop owners supported disclosure by a margin of more than two-to-one.)

So how has the industry managed to protect its secrecy for so long? Its campaign of disinformation has been effective with the constituency that counted: a succession of City Council Speakers, starting with Chris Quinn, who were all too happy to do the industry’s bidding.

The Adams Speakership seemed to offer more hope. She is the first Speaker ever to have had fair housing on her agenda. She properly boasts passage of a fair-housing framework for development (although she couldn’t bring mandatory provisions to the finish line) as well as enactment of the “City of Yes” (although, here, too, the most exclusionary neighborhoods were ultimately largely let slide). The Speaker is a supporter of broader and more equitable home ownership; coop disclosure should be right up her alley.

Thus far, unfortunately, she has acted like Speakers before her. She has single-handedly blocked even a hearing on the bill (the Council has always functioned, or not, under firm Speaker control). She has done so in the face of the Civil Rights Coalition for Transparency & Accountability having written to her back in August, seeking her support and noting that, “It is long past time that transparency, accountability, and effective fair housing enforcement come to the coop apartment sector.”

The Speaker’s office failed to hold a meeting with the Coalition until November, when a very nice group of legislative staffers – none of whom had any authority to discuss the bill’s status, let alone decide anything – met with me and another Coalition representative. Our request for follow-up has now been ignored for another three months. We have never had the opportunity to meet with or speak to the Speaker herself. Why?

Is it to protect four members of the Manhattan City Council delegation – Gale Brewer, Keith Powers, Julie Menin, and Carlina Rivera – who do not want it known that they have taken the deeply anti-progressive position of spurning the needs of fair housing enforcement, instead preferring the status quo of unaccountability and unwarranted privilege? (See box concerning their hypocrisy, below.)

Does the Speaker have staffing problems that caused this matter fall through the cracks? Has she, like others, has been led astray by the industry’s campaign of misinformation?

I can’t answer those questions, but I do know that bottling up an important civil rights bill is not the way to govern.

And I do know it’s crazy that you get more information when you’re turned down for a department-store credit card (under the Fair Credit Reporting Act) than you do when you’re turned down for a home that the current owner has agreed to sell to you, and for which a bank has agreed to provide you a loan. I would like to think that the Speaker is a leader with the flexibility to change course and do the right thing.

How she responds here – an easy one on the merits if there ever was one – will tell us a lot about what kind of Mayor she would be.