Despite being ruled unenforceable by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1948, racially restrictive covenants - legal clauses that barred individuals of certain racial backgrounds from purchasing or occupying homes - still persist in property records across Santa Clara County. Now a new interactive map predicts where in Santa Clara County these racially restrictive covenants are most likely to still exist in property records.
A recent study (PDF) conducted by researchers from Stanford University and Princeton University, in partnership with the County of Santa Clara, has revealed that by 1950, an estimated one in four properties in the county was subject to these discriminatory covenants. Although these covenants are no longer legally enforceable, they remain embedded in millions of property deeds.
Potential homebuyers in Santa Clara County are still often confronted with these historical documents during the purchasing process, where they must sign papers acknowledging the existence of outdated racial restrictions, even though they are constitutionally void. This can be a jarring experience for buyers, a stark reminder of the deep-rooted history of racial discrimination in housing.
With over 24 million property deed documents in Santa Clara County alone, the scale of the problem is immense. Identifying and removing these covenants manually is a huge task, which is why the researchers developed an innovative artificial intelligence tool to detect and flag racially restrictive covenants. The AI system, which has already saved thousands of hours of manual labor, offers a new pathway to identify and ultimately remove these discriminatory clauses from property records.
An interactive map has been released as a result of the study to illustrate where clusters of racially restrictive covenants still persist in housing records. The study was able "to identify which developers and individuals were instrumental in (the) proliferation" of racial covenants. The map shows the locations of these developments using scaled circles, with the size of the circles showing the number of racially restrictive covenants in each development.
The study’s findings have highlighted not only the prevalence of these covenants but also their geographic clustering across the county. Many neighborhoods were deliberately designed to exclude non-white residents, particularly during the housing boom of the early 20th century. Today, this legacy continues to affect how historical records are handled, and the process of identifying and redacting these covenants is both urgent and complex.
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