- Sunday, May 19, 2024
By: Pramod Kumar
HOMEOWNERS in the US can now erase racial covenants from their property documents as some states in the US have made the procedure easier, according to a report in The New York Times.
A racial covenant is a clause that barred anyone “other than the White or Caucasian race” from owning the home.
For much of the 20th century, it was a common practice to insert such restrictions into deeds. The covenants targeted people who were Asian, Latino, and Jewish, but especially those who were Black.
It was used across the US, and though they are now illegal, the ugly language remains in countless property records. In Seattle and Boston, Los Angeles and Long Island and beyond, racism doesn’t just hit close to home — it can be part of it, The New York Times report added.
Homeowners may not even know that their deed includes a covenant as it can be easily missed in the slew of paperwork that comes with buying a home.
According to the report, a number of states are enacting laws enabling homeowners to reject and more easily eliminate racial covenants.
Within the past three years, at least eight states have passed laws aimed at making it easier — though not necessarily easy — for homeowners to remove racial covenants from deeds.
Another half dozen, including New York and California, have bills pending, the newspaper report added.
In the last 20 years, Black homeownership has declined in New York City and nationally, with potential buyers hindered by gentrification and questionable lending policies.
Deeds for homes built before 1968 commonly included clauses prohibiting Black ownership. The clauses are now illegal, and more homeowners want to erase the ugly language from their property records — and state legislatures are helping them, The Times report said.
Kevin McCarty, a state assemblyman for Sacramento, has co-authored a bill that would make it “universally free and seamless” for Californians to remove racial covenants from the deeds to their homes.
McCarty, who is half-Black, found a covenant in the deed when he bought his first house.
Mapping Prejudice, a firm trying to expose structural racism, had to create a search tool to comb through 10 million images of public documents from Hennepin County in Minnesota. It found 30,000 “suspects,” which were uploaded to a crowdsourcing platform so community members could help identify covenants, Kirsten Delegard, project director, Mapping Prejudice told the newspaper.
Increasingly, homeowners want to renounce their racial covenants. Last year, Just Deeds, a coalition of real estate and title professionals, attorneys, community members, and city staff who are providing pro bono help with discharging covenants, launched in the Minneapolis area.
But when Just Deeds became active within the city of Minneapolis, it got more than 700 applications in the first week, Maria Cisneros, a founder of the coalition and city attorney for the suburb of Golden Valley, told The Times.
Projects like Just Deeds and Mapping Prejudice say they aim not to just change records, but minds, the report added.
