Long Island Divided

Newsday’s three-year-long investigation of housing discrimination and its impact on Long Island’s suburban towns and communities is local investigative journalism at its best. Long Island Divided marshals a team of reporters, state of the art news reporting, and considerable resources to illuminate the area’s history, practice, and impact of housing discrimination with evidence from paired field tests, policy history, and interviews. The story details the patterns and practices of racial discrimination through redlining and steering, highlighting in particular the everyday practices by realtors and the real estate industry—the knowing agents as well as the institutions and organizations that license and enable them. Through compelling documentary, data journalism, and hidden cameras, Long Island Divided is comprehensive and exhaustively detailed, showing the personal toll and collective impact on individuals and families subjected to housing discrimination. For its courage, commitment, and determination in shining a bright light on the legal, economic, historical, social, and moral consequence of inaction on this urgent and persistent problem, we applaud Long Island Divided as a Peabody Award winner.