AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |
Back to Blog
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. Original copies can also be accessed by a public records request, according to the text of the bill. Yankee said redacted records will still be identified by a cover page noting a covenant has been removed. “This is going to make it so much harder to know the extent of racial covenants in California,” Menendian said. The University of Washington found more than 20,000 properties in the Seattle area with racial covenants, the Seattle Times reported in 2019. “We want to know right away to take immediate action.”īut 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. “We hope to have some kind of ‘report this document’ button,” Yankee said. The agency also aims to allow residents to alert officials to racist language through its public records portal. 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. 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. “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. Ramesh Rao, a real estate agent in the South Bay, said the new rules shouldn’t be difficult to accommodate. ![]() 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. 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. In 2000, California set up a process for homeowners to strike racist language from property records. “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.” “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. 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.” In the Bay Area, restrictive covenants remain on the books in neighborhoods from the Oakland Hills to Redwood City and beyond. 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. ![]() “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. Supreme Court in 1948, racial justice advocates say removing the racist language is necessary to confront the region’s painful history of discrimination. While the covenants were deemed unenforceable by the U.S. 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. 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.
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |