You might have the cash/But you cannot cash in your face/We don’t want your kind living in here.
— Stevie Wonder, “Cash in Your Face,” 1980.
Years ago, when I was working as a reporter for the Times Herald-Record in Middletown, N.Y., I was looking for an apartment in the city of Newburgh, just 60 miles north of New York City.
A friend of mine, a white woman, was dating a state legislator whose father owned some apartment buildings in the east end of the city. She passed my name along and told me to give the owner a call.
He sounded pleasant on the phone. After some small talk about the newspaper business, he told me about the neighborhood and some details about the place. I had come highly recommended, he said.
“Come take a look at the place,” he said, “and we can sign the lease.”
The father was out when I arrived, so instead I got the son. Judging from the look on his face, my friend hadn’t told him everything about me.
The legislator excused himself and made a phone call. Three minutes later the father arrived, nowhere near as friendly as he had been the day before.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Another woman rented the unit this morning.”
Look, I know you came a long way, but you made it just too late/So we had to give it to somebody else/Well I talked to you on the phone less than 15 minutes ago/And you told me that it was cool
I thought about that song — and the building owner — last week after a Black couple filed a lawsuit against a real estate brokerage alleging they were discriminated against while looking for an apartment in Queens.
Lisa Renee Olaso and her fiancé, Cyril Christopher, said a broker from Douglas Elliman was scheduled to show them an apartment in Flushing in June. They were moving from Delaware because Olaso had gotten a new job as a manager with Delta Air Lines.
According to the lawsuit, it was their first meeting with the realtor, who after spotting them from a distance, fired off a text: “ugh they are black.”
The text, intended for the property owner, went to Olaso, she said.
Courtesy of Lisa Olaso
Lisa Renee Olaso says she was accidentally included on a racist text message sent by a realtor. (Courtesy of Lisa Olaso)
“We started to get back in our car, and the agent ran over, and she was like, ‘What are you guys doing?’” Olaso said at a news conference. “And I said, ‘Well, look at your phone.’ And when she looked at her phone, she started to explain that there were previous Black tenants in the neighborhood and they had caused a lot of trouble. And I said, ‘Well, what does that have to do with us?’”
Well I can’t take the time out to check your credit card/’Cause the computer just broke down today/Well I’ll stop by here tomorrow to complete our interview/But I know what you’re gonna say/I know what your bottom line is.
According to the lawsuit, the incident happened on June 20, the day after Juneteenth.
A Douglas Elliman representative denounced the text in a statement.
“Douglas Elliman has a zero-tolerance policy for discrimination of any kind, and the agent is no longer with the company,” the statement said.
Olaso said the broker apologized, but that they are still trying to heal from the incident.
“It doesn’t change the pain,” she said. “It doesn’t take away the pain that you caused us that day.”
Olaso and Christopher, a surgical technician, have since found a home in Commack on Long Island, according to the lawsuit,
After I finally found an apartment back then, I heard that my friend and the legislator had a big argument over how I was treated.
They stayed together, and he got reelected.