McKay Cunningham and Sen. Melissa Wintrow:

By McKay Cunningham and Sen. Melissa Wintrow

Thanks to legislation (SB 1240) that passed the Idaho Legislature unanimously last session, as of July 1, Idaho homeowners can nullify racially restrictive language that may appear in their property deed or covenants, free of charge, at their county clerk’s office.

The language below was taken from the property covenant of a Boise resident but is very consistent with language throughout the state:

“No race of nationality other than members of the white race shall use or occupy any building on any lots except that this covenant shall not prevent occupancy by domestic servants of a different race or nationality domiciled with an owner or tenant.”

Even though the 1968 Fair Housing Act made these covenants illegal, they still remain on thousands of recorded documents and many people trying to purchase a home discover the language and wonder if they can live there. A Boise resident was confronted by this language and reached out to make a change which was the impetus for S1240. Student researchers at the College of Idaho are working on a website that will soon allow Idahoans to see whether their property has a racist covenant and nullify the language.

Racially restrictive covenants often worked in conjunction with redlining. Redlining was a federal policy that provided federal financial backing for homeownership in some neighborhoods, but not others. The federal government created colored maps indicating which areas should receive financial backing to spur homeownership and which areas should not. The red areas in these maps were deemed “hazardous” because people of color lived in those areas.

Taken together, these practices effectively boxed out people of color from homeownership in neighborhoods with higher property values. These practices are illegal today, but their impact remains very real because the connection between homeownership and wealth accumulation is critical. Homeownership is one of the few ways that any household, but particularly low or middle-income households, can accumulate wealth and pass that wealth to their children.

Today, the wealth gap that separates whites from communities of color reflects the continuing impact of these historical practices. The net worth of a typical white family, $188,200, is nearly eight times greater than that of a Black family at $24,100 and more than five times the wealth of a Latinx family at $36,100. The Survey of Consumer Finances shows that the average homeowner has household wealth of $255,000, while the average renter has household wealth of $6,300.

From approximately 1920 to 1970, both redlining and racially restrictive covenants were widely used tools to ensure housing disparities based on race. Developers and private landowners embedded racist covenants in property deeds, prohibiting all nonwhites from owning, renting, or occupying property – unless doing so as a domestic servant. Typically, these racist covenants “ran with the land,” a legal term that signifies perpetuity. In other words, the racially restrictive covenant was not tied to the original owner of the land; it continued to bind successive owners because it “ran with the land.”

This legislation shines a light on a lesson in American history omitted for decades, but it does not eliminate centuries of discrimination. It is a step towards acknowledging that our federal and state governments and private businesses legally incorporated racism into law and intentionally denied people of color access to wealth in our country because of their race. There was nothing they could do to access property and wealth in the same ways as white people. The notion of hard work paying off, alone, is merely an unreachable myth when it’s only offered to some and not all of the people.

We still have a long way to go in accounting for past racist practices, but in an otherwise divided and entrenched political landscape, Idaho Legislature’s unanimous vote to rebuke racially restrictive covenants is encouraging.

Sen. Melissa Wintrow, of Boise, sponsored HB 1240. McKay Cunningham, of Caldwell, Idaho, started the Redline Project at the College of Idaho, a research project mapping subdivisions containing thousands of properties with discriminatory race covenants.