Racist restrictions on old home acts throughout Washington will receive increased scrutiny!
Marlene Smick recalls sitting on her parents’ truck’s back seat in 1958 when the family saw an open house sign on Seward Park. Smick’s father, a Japanese-American second generation who had been incarcerated during the Second World War, rushed through the window to ask about the property.
“The man, a builder, said, ‘I welcome you to look, but I’m sorry that I can’t sell to you,’” Smick said. Smick said. “It was only whites.”Sale in qatar | properties for Sale — property hunter
There are still clear memories of housing discrimination and segregation for many families in the region and the state. In some cases, racism remains a public record.
Racial covenants prevented people from living in certain neighborhoods of certain races, nationalities and religions until housing discrimination was banned in the 1960s. In decades, the language has not been legally enforceable but remains in old property records.
Researchers at the University of Washington had previously examined these covenants and found language for approximately 20,000 properties in King County. But they think many more could still be on the books, UW history professor James Gregory said, who led the investigation.
This month, a bill passed by UW and Eastern Washington University is aimed at seeking more agreements and notifying property owners when their homes are impacted. For two years every university will receive $125,000 a year to finance research. UW researchers are working through records in the counties of King, Pierce and Snohomish. In 20 districts east of the Cascades, EWU will search.
“The majority of the people don’t know that the documents contain such a language,” said Rep. Javier Valdez, a Democratic representative of Northeast Seattle, who sponsored the bill supported by Realtor lobbyists. “They want to do something about it once they become aware of it.”
Smick said the language is painful, even though it’s no longer compulsory.
“That has been a real hurt in our history and so I think it just ought to be removed so we don’t need to remember,” she said.
The new law resumes the project of revealing and raising awareness of the racist language in a region that may think itself exempt from the kind of segregation that was common in South America, but where discrimination against housing was prevalent. The effort also raises questions as to whether political leaders and the immobilizing industry should do more to address the lasting effects of housing discrimination far beyond the Pact.
According to UW research, racial constraints were common across Seattle outside the Central District and the International District of Chinatown and effectively range from Jefferson Park to Western Seatle, Capitol Hill and Sand Point, plus Bellevue, Mercer Island, Auburn, Burien and other suburbs. At least a dozen neighborhoods, researchers found, excluded Jewish people.
Immobilizers were also unwilling to show colorful people homes in mainly white neighborhoods on a regular basis.
Larry Gossett’s father hoped in the mid-1950s to purchase a home in West Seattle near his post. The first one told him he’d be “run out of business” for selling to the Black Family in West Seattle, Gossett, a Civil Rights activist and former Council Member said. Two Realtors made it clear that he was not welcomed. The other showed Gossett’s dad three homes, all located in the central area.
Across the country, this type of discrimination in housing has resulted in continuing wealth and housing gaps.
Despite federal protection, discrimination in rental, home sales and assessments of house values remains documented.
Homes in predominantly white areas have appreciated in color communities faster than comparable homes. A recent Redfin analysis has found that the average home in a predominantly Black Quarter is $46,000 lower than a comparable home in a White Quarter with similar amenities. (The analysis did not include Seattle, according to Redfin, because of the lack of data, mainly on Black neighborhoods.)
Following the assassination of George Floyd by a police officer and mass demonstrations in Minneapolis, local real estate agents began to discuss the industry’s racism. But the wealth and homeownership gap of Seattle persists.
In the metro area of Seattle, Zillow estimates that homes of Black people are valued 16% lower than white homes on the basis of a comparison of home values and race by neighborhood census data.
Rocky Flowers, a banker bain agent for Coldwell in Seattle, has found racist covenant language on occasion during a review of title reports and has found that most of its white customers are not aware of the use of covenants in Seattle.
“It’s a punch,” Flowers said, who is black, “but that’s also a reminder.” Flowers said he tries to use the language to educate customers and friends with a “teaching tool.”
“I don’t personally think they ought to be pulled out,” said Flowers about the covenants. “They are obviously not enforceable, but it’s a reminder to people buying and gentrifying neighborhoods — especially in Seattle. It reminds them of the history of why you can buy a house, why your family has an equity and why you can lend them $100,000 or $50,000, why your family has generational wealth and can gentrify these districts.”
The agreements were a segregating instrument throughout the northwest of the Pacific that kept African Americans, Asians, Jews and other people from the entire Seattle area together with social pressure and acts of violence, Gregory said. Gregory said.
“The idea that in places like Seattle segregation was mild is really wrong,” he said.
Gossett told me that he learned about his family’s experience in the 1960s when he studied at Washington University, when he realized that most of his colleagues had no idea that Seattle was a secluded town.
“The covenants allowed Whites to see themselves as more civilized in the north and northwest because they were not so obviously racist,” Gossett said. But the papers “were as effective” to separate the city, he said.
