St. Paul wants to rid property deeds of racist clauses

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Minnesota’s capital city is trying to rid property deeds of the racist clauses that have long affected homebuying.

According to the St. Paul Pioneer Press, real estate agents, city officials and housing experts agree that restrictions preventing people who aren’t white from purchasing specific properties have contributed significantly to St. Paul’s continued segregation and have hampered the quest for home ownership and the creation of generational wealth for residents of color.

On Monday, St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter, St. Paul City Attorney Lyndsey Olson, Golden Valley City Attorney Maria Cisneros and other area representatives were on hand as St. Paul joined Just Deeds, a growing coalition of cities committed to highlighting racial covenants in property deeds.

St. Paul is collaborating with the Center for the Study of Black Life and the Law at Mitchell Hamline School of Law to enlist volunteers, including law students and legal experts, to assist homeowners in adding affidavits to their deeds formally denouncing the racist language.

Anthony Niedwiecki, Mitchell Hamline’s president and dean, told reporters the law school “is proud to be part of this important effort that will also give our students real-world experience in working to correct historic injustices.”

The federal Fair Housing Act of 1968 and a Minnesota statute from the 1950s nullified racial covenants. Before that, the U.S. Supreme Court declared in 1948 that discriminatory covenants were unconstitutional under the 14th Amendment‘s “equal protection” clause.

However, evidence suggests that the practice persisted even after the nation’s top court took a position.

As a homebuyer in 2015, Cisneros was surprised to see language on her housing deed that previously would have prohibited her husband, a Venezuelan immigrant, from buying their new home or residing in it other than as a servant.

She questioned how many other houses in the metro area had the same racial restrictions on their deeds, eventually learning of thousands in Hennepin and Ramsey Counties.

The Just Deeds alliance, which Cisneros assists with running on her own time, has collaborated closely with an initiative called Mapping Prejudice, which originated from the University of Minnesota’s library system. It mapped the locations of deeds containing racial covenants. Volunteer researchers and historians have helped uncover about 30,000 racial covenants on property records in just Ramsey and Hennepin Counties.

Jackie Berry is the chair of the Minneapolis-area Association of Realtors diversity committee and teaches a course titled “Racism in Real Estate.” She believes real estate agents must help repair some of the historical harm done by segregation. 

“The difference is that defensiveness — ‘That wasn’t me!'” said Berry, the Pioneer Press reported. “Our own national association wouldn’t allow us to integrate neighborhoods. There could be repercussions for that.”

According to Cisneros, the effects of segregated housing remain today. The Mapping Prejudice data provides an insightful look at where many communities invested the most in law enforcement, education and other services. Black families make up only 25 percent of the Twin Cities’ homeownership, compared to 78 percent of white families.

Carter underlined that contrary to some widespread misconceptions about the causes of segregation, redlining — or the restriction of Blacks and other people of color from purchasing homes — was a product of business and government, not of divine intervention.

Nonetheless, Olson said Monday she wants people to be aware of their efforts.

“We want landowners to go to the internet,” she said, according to the Pioneer Press, “to see your article, to say do I have a covenant on my property? What can I do?” 

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