Heart and Home Column by Josh Ishimatsu
Image Source: iStock
I know there’s a lot going on in the world right now and that there’s been an avalanche of current events and breaking news that demand our attention. So, in the flood of news, you might have missed the story from late last year about the Stanford researchers who used AI to review Santa Clara County property records in order to document the history of racially restrictive covenants in our region. In the midst of all the pressing insanity crowding into our bandwidth right now, I want to highlight the findings of these researchers and step back to take the opportunity to talk about the legacy of racism in the place where we live and invite us – as caring people who value justice – to think about our responsibility to address this legacy.
What are Racially Restrictive Covenants?
In terms of property law, a covenant is a private agreement – typically between a property owner and another party (often a lender, but doesn’t have to be a lender) – that applies to a property. Covenants are recorded on title and are applicable to future owners of the property. In master-planned communities, for example, covenants are used to maintain the unified look or feel of the community. People who buy a home in a master-planned community might be restricted by covenants (a private agreement, not a government regulation) to only paint their house certain colors or keep their trees under a specified height or not leave their garage door open for more than an hour at a time.
Racially restrictive covenants restrict the sale or lease of a property on the basis of race. This is an overly antiseptic and technical definition. I’ve read a few of these documents in title searches when buying older properties way back when I was still an affordable housing developer. Even though racially restrictive covenants are no longer legally enforceable and the State of California directed local jurisdictions in 2021 to begin removing them, many still remain on title. Reading them, the racism/white supremacy language is deep and foul and explicit, stuff like “this property is to be used for the benefit of whites only” and words like “Mongoloid” and “Negroid” thrown around. It’s the kind of stuff that we don’t imagine having happened in our modern, progressive Bay Area.
The Sheer Scale
In Santa Clara County, most racially restrictive covenants were recorded during the 1920s or 1930s. The 1948 Supreme Court decision, Shelley vs. Kramer, held that racially restrictive covenants were unconstitutional and, post-Shelley vs. Kramer, there were very few new racially restrictive covenants recorded in Santa Clara County. But, by the time Shelley vs. Kramer was decided, approximately 1-in-4 residential properties in the County were subject to racially restrictive covenants, according to the Stanford researchers.
Looking at the map of which properties have racially restrictive covenants, the clusters of covenants trace the pattern of development from the 1920s to the 1950s. The parts of the maps where there are fewer properties with restrictive covenants (e.g., Cupertino, West San Jose, South San Jose, large parts of Campbell, Santa Clara, and Sunnyvale) were largely not yet subdivided and developed in the late 1940s and early 1950s – i.e., during the time of peak usage of racially restrictive covenants, large parts of the County were still orchards, farms, and agriculturally-related industrial uses (e.g., canneries). Much of the County was unincorporated when racially restrictive covenants were in peak usage – e.g., Campbell was incorporated in 1952, Cupertino was incorporated in 1955, southern and western chunks of San Jose had not yet been annexed. So, while not recorded on every property in every jurisdiction, racially restrictive covenants were concentrated in the developed areas of the County (see the heavy concentration of dots in and around Palo Alto, for e.g.), enough that they helped define the exclusionary character of what were then the more urbanized/sub-urbanized parts of the County.
The Larger Context
Racially restrictive covenants were only one of the tools in the early- to mid-twentieth century racist housing toolbox. Redlining was also active during the same period. Single family zoning, which started in Berkeley in 1916, was firmly taking root [side note: for those of us who aren’t familiar with the explicitly racist history of single family zoning, a quote from a 1920s issue of California Real Estate magazine, which lauded the new Berkeley policy “as protection against invasion of Negroes and Asiatics.”]. The Federal Housing Administration, largely responsible for subsidizing the financing of the post-WWII suburbanization of America, was propagating underwriting guidelines that included language such as “incompatible racial groups should not be permitted to live in the same communities.” Individual discrimination was rampant (for e.g., within my extended family people have personal stories from this time period about sellers refusing to sell to them explicitly because they were not white). During the first half of the last century, Santa Clara County was 85%+ white and there were a lot of public policies and private actions to keep it that way.
Why This Matters Now
In national politics, there’s been an appeal to make America great again. It’s an appeal rooted in a mythological version of 1950s America where men were men, women were women, and the races knew their place. But racially restrictive covenants are a reminder that this version of America was decidedly not great. The racism of the time was ugly, raw, and explicit. And the impacts go far beyond the words and the feelings. In a housing context, the post WWII suburbanization of America unlocked a tremendous amount of wealth and made it accessible to millions of (white) working-class Americans. It created the American middle class as we currently conceive it. But, explicitly and intentionally, this newly created generational wealth was only for whites only and our country’s still widening racial wealth gap is a shameful legacy of this era.
Focusing more locally, the current landscape of our Valley – the problematic infrastructure of sprawl – was defined and initiated during this period of our history. And our current housing and municipal finance crises are deeply rooted in the past’s geographic logic of racial exclusion. Our decades long failure to build enough housing and our politics of the primacy of single family homeowners – these are all direct descendants of the same set of values and vision of the world that gave us racially restrictive covenants. In our current political dynamic, people have learned not to say certain words and many of us have forgotten/never knew where certain policies and practices have come from. So, it is vital that we continue to remember our past and that we act intentionally and directly to redress it. If not, we will keep (unconsciously, even) digging ourselves deeper into our current crises.