If Joanna Chin hadn’t paused to look closely at the outdated document of covenants and restrictions for the Lafayette house her family was interested in buying, she never would have known that, years ago, neither her husband nor her daughter would have been able to live on the property with her.
Joanna is white, and her husband is of Chinese descent. They also have a biracial 1-year-old daughter. According to a covenant created decades ago for the property, “no persons of any race other than the Caucasian race” were once allowed to occupy the property. The covenant also said nonwhite residents were allowed only as servants or employees.
“It was like a slap in the face,” said Joanna, who decided against buying the house. “Even though it isn’t legal today, these things have a lasting impact. It just felt like a dog whistle telling us, and families like ours, that we probably wouldn’t feel welcome in that neighborhood.”
Racial covenants were common in the U.S. during the 1930s and 1940s, embedded in property deeds as a way to keep nonwhite people from purchasing or occupying land. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that racial covenants were unenforceable in 1948. But covenants across the country remained commonplace, including through social enforcement, until 1968 when the Fair Housing Act explicitly made them illegal.
These days, the obsolete covenants are a rare sight in the Bay Area. But people still find them in their housing documents. And for the minority buyers and their families, the language is a painful reminder of this region’s ugly history.
So, if racial covenants truly are relics of the past, in the same way those “Whites only” signs that used to hang above public restrooms in the South have been for decades, why are home buyers in the Bay Area still finding them?
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