STEVEN AND MAYA’S FAIR HOUSING STORY
(This story is also available in Spanish and Chinese.)
Newly married and eager to build a future together, Steven and Maya (not their real names), a young Black couple living in Staten Island, began searching for a larger apartment — a home with enough space to start a family and lay down roots.
They began looking online for 2-bedroom apartments in and around their current Staten Island neighborhood—areas they liked and felt comfortable in. They messaged with brokers to arrange visits, with Maya handling any phone interactions.
“That comes from years of experience being a black man, where my voice and my appearance may frighten other people, not through any fault of my own,” Steven says. “I know how this works. I have my accent; you can hear it more than hers. If they hear her, it will make it much more approachable. She gets the good response up front.”
The couple viewed multiple apartments over the span of several weeks. They arrived on time, came prepared, and followed up promptly. But after a few visits, they began to notice a pattern.
“They would tell us we qualified, our credit score is perfect, our income combined is great,” says Maya. We would set up the appointment and go together to visit, but once they saw us face to face everything changed.”
Emails suddenly went unanswered. Follow-up calls were ignored. Multiple times, brokers claimed that the units had been rented, despite still appearing online.
One broker – who had initially shown strong interest in renting to them – eventually made it plain.
Eager to get qualified applicants into the unit but unavailable to show them the apartment in person, the broker invited Steven and Maya to view it on their own.
With three bedrooms – more than enough room to raise a family – the apartment was exactly what they had been looking for. “We were like, OK, this is something we want. We can see ourselves in there.” They quickly rushed to submit the required paperwork, urged on by the brokers’ responsiveness and overall encouragement.
The broker then asked them to send pictures of their IDs. For the first time, the broker saw that they were Black.
Suddenly, the communication that had previously been so quick and responsive stopped. No confirmation, no response. Eventually they did get through to the broker, only to be told their application had been rejected.
At first he offered a nonsensical excuse about them supposedly living in Brooklyn, which was untrue and completely irrelevant. But when Steven and Maya decided to push further they were met with a shocking confession:
“He said he was going to be straight with us – that the owner just didn’t want to rent to Black people.”
The couple was stunned. To hear such blatant racism voiced so openly was shocking.
Steven and Maya feared that nobody would believe them. They hadn’t recorded the conversation or documented any proof. They contacted the Fair Housing Justice Center (FHJC), not expecting much but feeling a sense of duty to share their experience.
The FHJC launched an investigation and eventually joined with Steven and Maya to file a lawsuit against the brokers, the property owners, and the brokerage for racial discrimination. The suit is now pending in the Eastern District of New York.
In 2025, in one of the most diverse cities in the world, Maya and Steven were denied a fair shot at housing because of the color of their skin. This practice is not just immoral—it’s illegal. Yet, as their experience shows, racial bias in housing remains pervasive.
Maya and Steven have since found a home and are now raising the child they fought so hard to secure housing for. Still, they remain committed to seeing their case through to the end. “I want to know that I did something to prevent this from happening to someone else,” says Maya. “Knowing that this is something that our child too could face because of their skin color” has only strengthened their resolve. They never wanted a fight—they simply wanted a fair chance at housing.
This newsletter is part of the FHJC’s My Fair Housing Story outreach initiative. To read the other stories in the series as they are published, click HERE or visit bit.ly/FHJCmfhs.
The mission of the FHJC, a nonprofit civil rights organization, is to eliminate housing discrimination, promote policies and programs that foster open, accessible, and inclusive communities, and strengthen enforcement of fair housing laws in the New York City region.