$25G APT. JUSTICE
Transgender woman’s housing bias award
A transgender woman humiliated and denied an apartment rental in Brooklyn anywhere near “people and children” was awarded $25,000 in her yearslong battle against a landlord and realty company.
In a recommendation issued Monday, Administrative Law Judge John Spooner ruled in favor of Giana Desir, who was represented by the city Human Rights Commission in a May 20, 2016, complaint against landlord Henry Walter and Empire State Realty and Management.
The ruling is a longawaited victory for Desir, who began her transition from male to female in 2013 — and went through an arduous and denigrating process of leaving one apartment and finding another.
During the early parts of her transitioning, her thenlandlord began to give her “weird” looks, Spooner wrote in his award recommendation Monday.
Two years later, the unnamed landlord told her he wouldn’t renew her lease when it expired in October 2015.
At the same time, Desir’s friend “Jazz,” who lived in a different building, told her apartments were available. Yet when she finally spoke in person to Walter, the landlord there, he balked, Spooner wrote.
Showing up at his office, he seemed “shocked and surprised” and asked, “‘Why didn’t you tell me you were transgender? Thank God, I had you come here at night. What would people have thought if they had seen you,’” he said, Spooner wrote of the humiliating exchange.
Walter then said he couldn’t possibly rent Desir an apartment “around people and children,” but could find her a place “in a basement somewhere with its own entrance” and not “around too many people.”
He also worried he’d be thought of as allowing a sexual encounter with Desir if he were to rent to her, and even suggested she stop the transitioning until she landed an apartment, telling her that she “’would look really crazy,’” Spooner wrote.
Desir ultimately found an apartment through welfare benefits, but said her sense of independence was shattered and that Walter’s comments were “devastating.”
And it wasn’t just him, she added. During the years she sought housing, Desir estimates she met with five landlords, Walter being the fifth, all of whom would say they had spaces available, and then tell her those spaces had just been rented when she met them in person and the landlords found out that she was transgender. Walter was “the last straw,” she told the Daily News on Monday.
“All these responses and these reactions are based in negative stereotypes about trans people … they put us under a huge umbrella of negativity, and then decide that’s enough to deny us common housing that any individual deserves,” Desir said. “When someone doesn’t have housing, that puts them in a very vulnerable, very difficult position.”
It “felt good to do something” she said, while adding she had no idea how long it would take to see a measure of justice.
“I didn’t realize how difficult it would be … emotions fade, memories fade, and it’s unfair the process and the length of the process you have to go through,” she said.
Spooner recommended a compensatory fine of $15,000 and a civil penalty of $10,000, and ”that respondents be ordered to undergo anti-discrimination training” in his decision.
“Based on the trial trial evidence, I find that respondents violated … [the city Human Rights Law] by discriminating against the complainant by denying her rental apartments because she is transgender,” Spooner wrote.
There was no immediate comment from the realty firm.