New state law requires purge of property records' ‘racial covenants’

Under a new state law, counties must now work to purge their property records of decades-old racist language that once banned people of color from buying homes in neighborhoods across California.

Starting July 1, the law also requires real estate agents and services to notify homebuyers if any such bans — called racially restrictive covenants — are known to be tied to a property and to help redact the unlawful rules.

While the covenants were deemed unenforceable by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1948, racial justice advocates say removing the racist language is necessary to confront the region's painful history of discrimination.

“This law brings awareness to the fact that the covenants are not only our legacy but that their remnants are still in practice,” said Tomiquia Moss, founder of the Bay Area advocacy group All Home, which pushed for the bill’s passage last year.

In the first half of the 20th century, it was common practice for developers and homeowners’ associations throughout the country to include covenants in deeds and other property records to bar specific races and groups of people from moving into certain homes. In the Bay Area, restrictive covenants remain on the books in neighborhoods from the Oakland Hills to Redwood City and beyond.

Some property records include language such as "no person of any race other than the Caucasian or white race" may use or occupy the property, with the exception of "domestic servants of a different race domiciled with an owner or tenant."

Other covenants from that era specifically prohibit residents of "African, Mongolian or Japanese" descent.

Restrictive covenants — along with discriminatory zoning laws and other practices — contributed to the lasting wealth gap between Whites and people of color, experts say. As minority families were excluded from the housing market, they were often prevented from moving to areas with more resources and from building equity in their homes, a stepping stone to wealth that can be passed down over generations.

“Racial residential segregation in the Bay Area is not natural or simply a matter of individual preferences and actions,” states a 2019 report by UC Berkeley’s Othering and Belonging Institute. “Today's patterns are partially the result of a wide range of coordinated tactics used to perpetuate racial exclusion prior to the enactment of state and federal fair housing legislation.”

In 2000, California set up a process for homeowners to strike racist language from property records. The state’s new law, Assembly Bill 1466, now allows anyone, even those who don’t own or live in properties with racial covenants, to file a form requesting county officials redact the language.

The law also requires real estate agents, title companies and escrow services to alert a homebuyer if they’re aware restrictive covenants are attached to a property.

Ramesh Rao, a real estate agent in the South Bay, said the new rules shouldn’t be difficult to accommodate.

"We already give a number of advisories to sellers and buyers in any transaction, and we'll be adding one more advisory to that effect," Rao said.

To comply with the law, county recorder’s offices across the Bay Area are setting up programs to identify and redact covenants from their millions of property records dating back to the 1800s.

Matt Yankee, chief of the Alameda County Clerk-Recorder's Office, said his staff plans to use special software to help digitize, review and remove racial covenants from the majority of recorded county property records within five years, and manually go through the remaining older documents that can’t be read by a computer. The agency also aims to allow residents to alert officials to racist language through its public records portal.

“We hope to have some kind of ‘report this document’ button,” Yankee said. “We want to know right away to take immediate action.”

But Stephen Menendian, a researcher with the Othering and Belonging Institute, worries that redacting the language from property records could hinder efforts to study and map restrictive covenants in the state. The University of Washington found more than 20,000 properties in the Seattle area with racial covenants, the Seattle Times reported in 2019.

“This is going to make it so much harder to know the extent of racial covenants in California,” Menendian said.

Moss, with the advocacy group All Home, said she wants officials and Realtors associations to do more to inform the public about the new law, as well as work to prevent any ongoing fair housing violations such as potential discrimination in home appraisals or mortgage lending.

“This is saying we know it happened, we know it’s still happening,” Moss said, “and we're doing something about it.”