The Albany Times Union reported this week that New York Governor Kathy Hochul vetoed 48 bills, but she signed 37, including a housing bias bill, which “codifies the disparate impact standard in the human rights law; provides that in cases of alleged housing discrimination, an unlawful discriminatory practice may be established by a practice’s discriminatory effect.”
As the TU put it, “a new law requires sellers to remove any discriminatory restrictive covenants from property deeds before a sale. Such covenants are already unenforceable but remain in certain paperwork as harmful remnants of past segregation policies that contributed to racial ownership gaps, proponents said.”
This NPR piece from 2021 notes that Racial covenants, a relic of the past, are still on the books across the country. “Although the Supreme Court ruled the covenants unenforceable in 1948 and although the passage of the 1968 Fair Housing Act outlawed them, the hurtful, offensive language still exists — an ugly reminder of the country’s racist past.”
See pieces from Mapping Prejudice, a 2024 news piece from Spokane, and a recent NPR segment from Milwaukee. Also, one can read Racial Covenants and Segregation, Yesterday and Today by Richard R.W. Brooks and Carol M. Rose from 2010, from New York University School of Law.
For instance
“(15) That neither said lots nor portions thereof or interest therein shall ever be leased, sold, devised, conveyed to or inherited or be otherwise acquired by or become property of any person other than of the Caucasian Race.
“(16) That neither said lot nor any portion thereof shall ever be lived upon or occupied by any person other than of the Caucasian strictly in the capacity of servants or employees actually engaged in the service of such occupant, or in the care of said premises for such occupant, such circumstances shall not constitute a violation of this condition.”
The difficulty of removing a covenant on a house-by-house basis varies from state to state. A 2021 PBS report from San Diego suggests it’s reasonably doable in California.
Times Union: “Similar actions in Virginia, Florida, and other states helped build momentum in New York [for the legislation]. In December 2020, a group in Monroe County removed racial covenants from the deeds of hundreds of homes in the town of Brighton that prohibited the sale of properties to non-white buyers. The bill previously passed the state Assembly in 2021 and 2023 but stalled in the Senate.”
The topic resonates with me in part because my parents had difficulty even renting in my hometown of Binghamton, NY. My mother was more light-skinned than my father, and landlords feared renting to a “mixed-race” couple. They ended up living in a building at 5 Gaines Street that was owned by my maternal grandmother.
