Frequently Asked Questions

Racist housing policies actively disenfranchised people of color and other minoritized communities over the decades, and their legacies continue today. These policies, which include exclusionary zoning, redlining, blockbusting, unfair lending practices, racist housing covenants, and others, prevented African American, Asian, and other racial/ethnic groups from living in certain neighborhoods, creating fractured and racially segregated communities across the United States. Racist housing covenants, in particular, remain a largely underexplored form of institutional housing discrimination.

The MRC project tells the story of how racist covenants have, and continue to, make it difficult for communities of color to secure fair housing and achieve equal opportunity.

We outline and briefly explain three grounded examples that illustrate the ongoing effects of racist covenants and other forms of institutional housing discrimination.

1. Racial Wealth Gap

According to researchers at the U.S. Federal Reserve, the median wealth of White families was $188,200 in 2019, compared to $24,100 and $36,100 for Black and Hispanic families, respectively. This means that “the typical White family has eight times the wealth of the typical Black family and five times the wealth of the typical Hispanic family.” Significant differences in homeownership, otherwise referred to as the “homeownership gap,” is a major contributor to the racial wealth gap. In 2022, 75 percent of White families owned their own homes, compared to about 45 percent of Black families and 47 percent of Hispanic/Latino families. Housing discrimination, both in the past and present, remains an important contributing factor to the homeownership gap.

2. Racial Segregation

Discriminatory housing policies, and racist covenants in particular, were designed by real estate professionals and homeowner associations to prevent Black, Hispanic/Latino, Asian, and other minoritized communities from living in certain neighborhoods. These policies created racially segregated communities across the United States, producing negative outcomes and severe disparities for people of color. Today, where you live determines what community assets are available, directly affecting individual quality of life and opportunity. For example, access to good-paying jobs, highly-ranked public education, healthy air and water, quality medical care, and safe and affordable housing are unfortunately tied to your neighborhood. Therefore, it is important for researchers to better understand the link between racist covenants and inequity. Three recent studies illustrate the importance of this work. First, researchers at the University of Minnesota report that majority-White neighborhoods with racist covenants in Minneapolis-St. Paul have greater access to parks and green space, underscoring issues of environmental justice. Second, scholars at Brookings show that racist covenants and other forms of housing discrimination were central for extracting wealth from Black neighborhoods for decades. Third, researchers in Seattle have found a link between housing discrimination and unequal health outcomes.

3. Emotional Distress

Racist covenants are often difficult to remove from CCRs and are therefore common in real estate documents, even today. Individuals must sign off on the CCRs as part of the home purchase closing process, agreeing to the rules and restrictions for a given subdivision or neighborhood. Although racist CCRs are illegal and unenforceable, signing documents with racist CCRs can cause emotional distress, especially for people of color. A recent article in the Arizona Daily Star explains an all-too-common situation in today’s real estate closing process: individuals of color having to sign off on racist CCRs that historically excluded them from living in a given neighborhood.

Implemented in 1934 by the federal Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC), real estate developers, lenders, and appraisers “graded” certain neighborhoods according to housing quality, recent sales, and the race/ethnicity and socioeconomic status of neighborhoods (see Nelson et al. 2022). Redlined areas were considered “hazardous” and mortgages were difficult, often impossible, to secure in these areas. Despite the overt racism and classism, officials argued these grades were important for quantifying mortgage security risk.

By contrast, racist covenants were enacted in the early 20th century before redlining and explicitly barred people of color and other marginalized groups from living in certain neighborhoods. However, from the 1930s to the 1950s, racist covenants worked in tandem with predatory practices like redlining to exclude people of color from homeownership in certain neighborhoods. Kevin Fox Gotham (2000, p. 260) notes:

“From the 1930s to the end of the 1950s, the FHA’s underwriting manuals considered Blacks “adverse influences” on property values and the agency warned personnel to not
insure mortgages on homes unless they were in racially homogeneous white neighborhoods that were covered with a restrictive covenant.”

Together, redlining and racist covenants, along with other discriminatory housing practices, reinforced already existing segregation and denied equal opportunity to individuals of color and other minoritized communities. Unfortunately, these legacies live today.

Citations
Gotham, Kevin Fox. 2000. “Urban Space, Restrictive Covenants, and the Origins of Racial Residential Segregation in a U.S. City, 1900-50.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 24.3: 616-633.

Nelson, Robert K., LaDale Winling, Richard Marciano, and Nathan Connolly. 2022. “Mapping Inequality,” American Panorama, ed. Robert K. Nelson and Edward L. Ayers, accessed February 25, 2022. Available at: https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining/

In 1936, the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) deemed Tucson too small in population to warrant an appraisal.

While racist covenants are no longer enforceable following the federal Fair Housing Act of 1968, they remain on many home deeds, serving as a reminder of the discrimination that shaped Tucson’s current geography. Current housing policy should account for racist covenants as a direct cause of segregation and unequal opportunity in Tucson.

Equally important, the covenants cause real harm in the present. Reading racist language in a home deed may cause significant dignitary harm to people of color and other restricted groups. Having to read this language may be retraumatizing and discourage homebuyers from living in these neighborhoods.

No, racist covenants do not void all CCRs, according to Arizona state law. According to Carol Rose, Emerita Professor of the University of Arizona Law School, it would be exceedingly punitive to void other CCR elements, which cover a variety of property-related elements. These include building restrictions (e.g., fences), property maintenance, establishment of a Homeowners Association (HOA), and numerous other restrictions and requirements.

Some subdivisions in Tucson have amendment provisions, which allow neighborhoods to rescind racist provisions. The amendment process usually requires a supermajority of homeowners in the subdivision to agree to the amendment and the amendment then must be notarized.

Most Tucson subdivisions, however, have “perpetuity clauses” stipulating that the racist language is perpetual and not amendable. In many jurisdictions, the only way to bypass this issue is for state legislatures to pass legislation that make it easier for neighborhoods to rescind the racist language in their CCRs (e.g., Washington, California, Oregon, Minnesota, Connecticut, Maryland and Virginia)

In Tucson, in April 2023 the Tucson City Council unanimously agreed to send a letter to the Arizona legislature to make it easier to redact illegal and racist language from CCRs.