[csusbpeace] Racist deeds in Sonoma County and elsewhere are still on the books. A new state law seeks to get rid of them
- From: "raccoon" <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> ("bigraccoon1")
- To: "CSUSBPEACE@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <CSUSBPEACE@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 30 Aug 2022 07:24:46 -0700
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Racist deeds in Sonoma County and elsewhere are still on the books. A new
state law seeks to get rid of them
Eve Lindi was surprised to find the original deed from 1945 for her new home
in Santa Rosa includes restrictions on anyone “African, Japanese, Chinese nor
of any Mongolian descent” from owning or occupying the home. Photo taken
Thursday, August 11, 2022. (John Burgess/The Press Democrat)
Black residents made up about 3,700 of the county’s voting-aged population in
1957, though only a handful of families — three in Santa Rosa, one in
Petaluma and one in Healdsburg — were known to own homes in Sonoma County,
the report said.
The report included specific instances of housing discrimination, including a
time when a Black woman named Mary Cleveland inquired about finding a home in
Santa Rosa’s Montgomery Village and was told by a real estate company that
while there were several homes available, they were located in a “very
exclusive neighborhood where there were no minorities living and where there
would not be.”
In another case, a county committee on housing, called Housing for Everyone,
discovered a man was advertising lots in a tract on Petaluma Hill Road near
Cotati as “restricted” in a San Francisco newspaper in 1959.
The report also highlighted instances of apparent discrimination in
employment and education in Sonoma County, noting that there was a
considerable number of Black children enrolled in schools where neighborhoods
have “been hospitable” to their families, among them the Roseland, South Park
and Bellevue neighborhoods.
“Through the reading of this report, the interrelationships between the
various problems of discrimination begin to become obvious,” the report said.
Stephen Menendian, the assistant director of UC Berkeley’s Othering &
Belonging Institute, said there’s a lot more that’s still not known about
racial covenants.
Unlike redlining, a practice used by the federal government, as well as
lenders, to restrict investment in neighborhoods based on demographics on a
map, racial covenants remain buried in home deeds. And the process to root
them out takes a considerable amount of time and money, said Menendian, who
is also the institute’s director of research.
It’s only within the past few years that researchers have been able to use
geocoding technology to boot up large-scale projects related to racial
covenants, he added.
One such project came from the University of Minnesota.
Called “Mapping Prejudice,” it enlisted the help of more than 6,087
volunteers to comb through and transcribe more than 80,000 deeds, resulting
in the creation of an interactive map <https://mappingprejudice.umn.edu/> of
racial covenants in Minnesota. So far, 26,000 racial covenants have been
located by the team over the course of 33,000 hours.
Using that data, researchers found that Minneapolis properties with racial
covenants were worth, on average, 4% to 15% more compared to properties which
were not covenanted.
Menendian would have liked the California bill to include funding for such
mapping projects.
“For 98% of the country, that (research) hasn’t been done yet,” he said.
“That’s my main critique of this bill.”
A relic of legalized racism
Menendian also believes the law will make such research more expensive and
time consuming because of the amount of paperwork that will have to be
rerecorded and redacted in order to remove the covenants. This amounts to
more documents to sort through for researchers, he said.
“I think it centers on white guilt. It makes no sense because these covenants
are already unenforceable,” he said of the law. “The discomfort of having
(covenants) there doesn’t outweigh the ability of future scholars to compile
this data.”
Cassidy Blackwell, who works in strategic communications at Airbnb, said she
had mixed emotions after finding a restrictive covenant in the Forestville
home she bought with her husband in 2020.
“For me, facing this document and facing this language was really traumatic
as a Black woman,” Blackwell said. “As a first-time homeowner, it forced me
into a moment of recognizing trauma.”
The couple found the covenant as they were going through the closing
paperwork for a home on Green Valley Road, where they no longer live. Shocked
by what she read, she said she began researching the practice to better
understand its impact.
On one hand, she felt empowered that she, a Black woman, and her husband,
(her fiance at the time) who is Jewish, were in a position to defy the
restriction that once prevented families like hers from living on that land.
But there also was the reality that she’d just come face-to-face with a
bitter relic from the time of legalized racism in America.
“For me, facing this document and facing this language was really traumatic
as a Black woman,” Blackwell said. “As a first-time homeowner, it forced me
into a moment of recognizing trauma.”
In Sonoma County, officials plan
<https://sonomacounty.ca.gov/administrative-support-and-fiscal-services/clerk-recorder-assessor-registrar-of-voters/clerk-recorder/recorder-services/restrictive-covenant-modification>
to rely on an outside company that specializes in character recognition
software to search for covenant language in an estimated 24.2 million
typewritten images that contain property deed information, said Deva Proto,
Sonoma County’s clerk, recorder, assessor and registrar of voters.
Handwritten documents will likely need to undergo a manual review unless the
county can identify software with the capability of scanning and searching
for specific text in handwritten files, Proto said. A county plan for
following the requirements of the new law estimates there are roughly 121,000
of those images from 1899 or earlier.
A request for proposals seeking a vendor for the project is pending, Proto
said.
The County Recorders Association of California is required to submit status
reports on the progress of each county’s covenant program to the state by
Jan. 1 and again two years later. A $2 recording fee authorized by the bill
will help pay for the extra work required by the state law.
“It will be an extensive amount of work, so that fee will help pay for vendor
costs, for staff time, and for county counsel fees,” Proto said.
While the worthiness of the law is debated, its impact on the real estate
industry is already visible.
At First American Title in Petaluma, the state mandate has resulted in
notices to clients that explain their right to remove the discriminatory
language from deeds, said Marcus Ginnaty, a spokesman for the company. The
company was the one that Lindi, the Santa Rosa homeowner, said helped her in
the final steps of the purchase of her home.
No such form existed before the lead up to AB 1466, Ginnaty said.
Lindi said she appreciated the notice, one that spurred questions about how
such covenants have shaped her own neighborhood, and the property values of
the homes within it, through the active exclusion of others.
“These kinds of things are just buried in our history,” Lindi said. “They’re
embedded, and how much of this goes by without notice or question? It feels
like a lot to root out.”
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