About six weeks after she moved into her Dutch Colonial in Beekman, New York, Alyse Archer-Coité’s excitement shifted to hesitation. Her anxiety peaked when she started reaching out to contractors to start home renovating discussions. “I felt like they would come to the house with an expectation, and then I would open the door,” she recalls. Archer-Coité didn’t want word to get out that the ivy-covered brick home on the hill of a predominantly white and middle class neighborhood was owned and occupied by a single Black woman—she would often wait for cars to pass before getting the mail. “I had a fear that I was going to end up with a burning cross in my yard.”
Fifty-five years after passing the 1968 Fair Housing Act—a law preventing discriminatory practices around renting, buying, selling, or financing a home in the face of redlining—racism continues to pervade the house buying experience.
