Erasing old racial covenants is a start, but it’s not enough

In the kitchen of the dormroomsize apartment my parents rented for a large part of my childhood, they used a refrigerator with the doors removed as a way to store extra pots and pans. Most of what they owned wouldn’t fit into the apartment’s tiny oven below the sink, or onto the stove top with its four tiny electric burners.

We lived in lowincome housing, yet that isn’t what my parents called it, at least not in front of me or my brothers. Home was just home. My parents knew just how damaging the act of “othering” can be when applied to people of color, young or old. They wanted to keep us from feeling as though we were less than the people we lived around.

Our nation has a history of othering minorities, especially when it comes to real estate. The relics of these past discriminatory practices are still around today in no longerenforceable racial covenants. The documents, decades ago, kept people not “entirely that of the Caucasian race” from owning property. Removing the racist language from current property deeds is a cumbersome process for local homeowners, as I wrote about last month, and now state officials are stepping in to help.

This year, California Assembly members Kevin McCarty, DSacramento; Autumn Burke, DLos Angeles; David Chiu, DSan Francisco; and state Sen. Scott Wiener, DSan Francisco will introduce legislation that removes racial covenants from deeds whenever the property is transferred or sold.

“Eliminating these housing covenants is a moral right and an important step in bringing racial justice to Californians,” McCarty said in a statement on Monday, Aug. 3.

What state officials are doing is similar to what Black and brown parents like mine spent lifetimes trying to accomplish: keeping their families from feeling like outsiders in a place where they’re supposed to feel at home. But what happens when the othering comes from the White House?

“I am happy to inform all of the people living their Suburban Lifestyle Dream that you will no longer be bothered or financially hurt by having low income housing built in your neighborhood,” President Trump wrote July 29 on Twitter.

Trump’s tweet was in reference to the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Rule, which was how the Obama administration updated the 1968 civil rights legislation, the Fair Housing Act. Through it, local governments receiving federal funds for housing and development had to account for biased practices and also create a plan to fix them. The Trump administration announced in June that it was replacing the Obamaera rule with its own called Preserving Community and Neighborhood Choice.

The “Suburban Lifestyle Dream” Trump mentioned focuses on communities across the country predominantly occupied by white people. Lowincome housing benefits marginalized communities, which are often people of color. To elevate the former over the latter represents a modern racial covenant: Black and brown people aren’t welcome in white neighborhoods.

What makes the administration’s stance more problematic is the rapid rate of gentrification in regions like the Bay Area. Racial covenants are illegal, but within gentrification they have become implied.

Neighborhoods with fourletter acronyms, and skyhigh rents — think San Francisco’s NoPa area, or even Oakland’s relatively newly minted NOBE, which stands for

North OaklandBerkeleyEmeryville — are considered destinations. And if it isn’t acronyms used for “up and coming” areas, then it’s language reflecting direction. Uptown Oakland is still technically a new name for a section of Oakland’s downtown, and as new developments rise along the skyline, so do the rents.

We’re seeing this marketing in a region where, according to a recent study by San Francisco nonprofit Tipping Point Community and UC Berkeley, 1 in 4 Black people and 1 in 5 Latinos were living in poverty before the pandemic. Couple that with a 2018 study by Zillow that showed Black people could afford only 5% of listings in San Francisco and Oakland, while white people could afford 53%.

It’s clear these new neighborhood names aren’t meant to entice people of color. In some ways, they’re a flag for high costs, meaning little population diversity, and thus people of color should look somewhere else for a place to live.

A dangerous game is being played in the region’s housing markets, and it’s happening in lockstep with the country’s current rush to address systemic racism.

Even after parents like mine spent decades working so their families could feel as though they belong in this country, and with California officials looking to further those efforts with forthcoming racial covenant legislation, we still have a long way to go. The erasure of racial covenants from the past is important, but we also have to be aware if they’re taking new forms in the present.