The county is the first in the state to begin such a wide-sweeping effort to address racially restrictive covenants.
Racially restrictive covenants will soon be removed from millions of real estate documents in Sonoma County.Sonoma County's recorder's office has confirmed that millions of its real estate documents contain racial covenants meant to restrict people of color from owning property, and the county is now taking steps to rectify this., a racist practice dating back to the 1930s that prevented anyone who wasn't white from living or purchasing property in certain neighborhoods.
Proto said that the recorder's office is searching for an outside vendor to identify keywords and phrases in documents that may indicate the presence of racially restrictive covenants so that those covenants can be redacted. Some keywords include “Caucasian,” “African,” “Asiatic” and “Mongolian,” she said.
“Racial covenants were even more specific than that and were written into the deeds of specific properties and sometimes entire developments to prevent the sale of those properties to certain groups,” said Holden Weisman, senior director for economic equity at the Greenlining Institute, an Oakland-based nonprofit that focuses on racial and economic equity in the Bay Area.
“One big distinction that I’ll draw between them is that these covenants are generally found in what we would see as higher-opportunity, higher-income, more white areas now, because those were the areas that worked trying to exclude communities of color and other groups from entering those communities,” Weisman said.
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