Long Island is a collection of ghettos, primarily grouped by race and relative wealth.* The latter can’t be helped, as million dollar homes cost a million dollars, but the former is inexcusable and, not insignificantly, unlawful.

In one of the most concentrated investigations of discrimination by real estate agents in the half century since enactment of America’s landmark fair housing law, Newsday found evidence of widespread separate and unequal treatment of minority potential homebuyers and minority communities on Long Island.

The three-year probe strongly indicates that house hunting in one of the nation’s most segregated suburbs poses substantial risks of discrimination, with black buyers chancing disadvantages almost half the time they enlist brokers.

On the one hand, this is a curious study, given that the old model of a house buyer finding an agent to show them houses for sale has given way to online searches. It was once the norm that you found an agent, told them what you were looking for and they would pull listings and take you for showings.

That’s largely gone now, as websites like Zillow and Trulia have every house for sale, with pics and all the relevant details, and people do their own search, calling agents only after they’ve found something they want to see. In this scenario, the agent can’t steer a buyer to black or white neighborhoods, although they can still steer them away.

Nonetheless, the Newsday study showed, convincingly, that when buyers went to real estate agents, the steering problems persisted.

Newsday sent white investigators posing as buyers to meet with 93 real estate agents about 5,763 listings across Long Island. Then, they sent a second buyer — either black, Hispanic or Asian — to meet with the same agents. The practice is a gold-standard methodology known as “paired testing,” in which real estate agents are contacted by pairs of prospective clients with similar financial profiles.

Black testers were treated differently than white ones 49 percent of the time. Hispanic buyers encountered unequal treatment 39 percent of the time and Asian buyers 19 percent of the time.

And they name names, branding some agents with a huge “R” on their fevered brow.

Sometimes, in exchanges recorded by undercover cameras, agents would deter white buyers from house hunting in minority areas.

“Follow the school bus, see the moms that are hanging out on the corners,” Rosemarie Marando, a Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage agent, told one buyer.

In another case, Le-Ann Vicquery, then a Keller Williams Realty agent, extolled the virtues of the Long Island hamlet of Brentwood to a black buyer. But to a white buyer interested in Brentwood, Ms. Vicquery sent this text message: “You may want to look into recent gang killings in the Brentwood area online.”

That the two agents “outed” are women isn’t surprising, not because women are inclined to racism but because of the nature of real estate agents. There are generally two types, those for whom selling real estate is a full-time, serious occupation and dabblers. It’s an easy license to get, and if you can list and/or sell one house a year, you can make decent money with little effort. It’s a sweet way to supplement family income without breaking a sweat.

But if you don’t sell, you make nothing for your efforts, so you show houses you believe people are most likely to buy. If you piss off the neighbors, they don’t list their house with you, so you don’t bring buyers to homes that will end up making the neighbors hate you. This isn’t said as a justification, but an explanation. Agents indulge, if not promote, racial steering for the money.

Whether their view of how racial steering will impact sales or popularity is correct, who knows? It’s not that this is a defense to unlawful conduct. It’s not. But not every real estate agent is brilliant when steering buyers to their respective ghettos, so they may believe it even though it’s their racism rather than the marketplace’s racism. And even if it is the real estate market’s racism, it’s still unlawful. Pissed off neighbors do not constitute a defense to the law.

But the market is soft, and has been for more than a decade. Real estate isn’t a big money maker these days, as young people aren’t buying homes to create generational wealth and stability, so the agents who rely on real estate for their livelihoods are working harder, doing whatever they can to make a buck, and taking no risks of missing opportunity, even if that means breaking the law. Agents will deny this, and it’s not every agent, but the study shows what it shows.

The days of racial steering to keep people in the ghettos of their own kind are not gone. But we already have a law that forbids this, the Fair Housing Act, and it’s not doing its job. What more can be done?

But Newsday found that the state has not conducted any additional paired testing after that initial round of 88 tests. The Newsday investigation makes clear that the state needs to get up off the couch.

The paired testing Newsday relied upon is expensive, but necessary. The Department of Housing and Urban Development conducts a national test every decade, which reliably finds evidence of discrimination. The most recent results were published in 2012.

Taxpayers need not foot the bill. By licensing real estate agents, New York is conferring a valuable privilege. That license also comes with obligations and, evidently, a need for more supervision. The conclusion is straightforward: New York should impose a fee on real estate agents to fund a vigorous program of paired testing, and agents who are found to be discriminating against clients should face severe penalties.

As real estate agents suck wind in a market that no longer has much use for their services, and where not enough sales happen to support them as an occupation, why not make the job less viable, more expensive and potentially ruinous? For those agents serving the lower-priced housing market, this would be the end of the road. Real estate agents would no longer steer because there would be no more agents serving that community. Was that the goal? But wait, there’s more.

Yet the persistence of discrimination suggests the need for still stronger correctives.

In Australia and the United Kingdom, home buyers rarely hire their own real estate agents. Instead, the agent selling a home handles the whole process. This is significantly cheaper for buyers and sellers, and it limits the opportunity for discrimination, since buyers decide which houses to visit on their own.

The key difference is that buyers in those countries pay agents directly, whereas in the United States, the trade associations that control real estate listings require sellers to agree to pay the buyer’s agent as a condition of listing a home.

The division between seller’s agent and buyer’s agent has been filtering through real estate for the past decade, but the buyer’s agent still gets paid half the commission for a sale. No sale, no money. Would it help buyers to have to pay real estate agents up front for their services? If they fail to find a house to buy, they’re out the money but have the comfort of believing their agent acted solely in their best interests. Except they have no new home and empty pockets.

Consumer advocates have long attacked this “buyer broker rule” as a key reason agents still are able to command such high fees. That is reason enough for New York to end the practice. But reducing the reliance of buyers on real estate agents — or at least shifting the relationship so the agent is paid by the buyer — could also make a meaningful difference in reducing the practices uncovered by Newsday.

These words are, obviously, strung together in a paragraph, but make no logical sense. One of the most persistent problems with trying to eradicate intractable racism is that we see its consequences but manufacture some word-salad rationalization for why it happens and, accordingly, how to fix it.

This produces “solutions” that are at best meaningless and at worst deeply counterproductive, as it just creates another burden, this time financial, on the people you’re trying to help. Don’t ask me what the answer is. Intractable societal problems are intractable for a reason, and effective answers don’t come easily. But Menckian answers do, and they’re being pushed with reckless abandon. Remember the syllogism:

Something must be done.
This is something.
This must be done.

The original problem persists, but we’ve managed to make things even worse.

*This is a gross oversimplification, but suffices for the purpose of this post. In the rich ‘hoods, nobody cares much about race, as the barrier to entry is money. If you can afford it, wealth transcends skin color or ethnicity. It’s an interesting distinction.