A caller was a woman looking to move with her boyfriend into a studio apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, advertised for $1,751 a month. The man who answered, the real estate broker on the listing, said he would be happy to show them the place.
The woman, however, had one last question: Would the landlord accept her federal housing voucher for tenants of lesser means, known as Section 8?
“If she accept what? Oh, no, she would not,” Harris Philip, an independent broker, told the woman, who was actually an undercover investigator for a watchdog group. “She just doesn’t. She wants well-qualified people.”
That exchange, secretly recorded by the group, Housing Rights Initiative, in February 2020 and shared with The Times, is part of a sweeping lawsuit filed on Monday in federal court in Manhattan that accuses 88 brokerage firms and landlords in New York City of discriminating against people with housing vouchers.
The lawsuit raises questions not only about widespread bias against voucher recipients but also about the blatant flouting by agents and property owners of both New York City and New York State laws that prohibit discrimination against people because of their source of income.