Buying a home in much of Los Angeles County came along with restrictions on who could buy or live in a home based on race. That is, until it was outlawed. But the discriminatory and racist language is still in
records and agreements that are passed on to new buyers.
Now, L.A. County is beginning a long process of finding and redacting this racist language from the housing records it keeps.
“We have over 130 million property records that we maintain in perpetuity,” said Dean Logan, Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk of Los Angeles County. “That 130 million documents actually equates to 460 million pages of text.”
A new state law requires counties create a plan to identify and redact the language from “restrictive covenants.” Also known as CCR’s, these are private contracts between a seller and buyer that can include many restrictions. Until it was outlawed, one restriction was the race of the owners or tenants.
“The racial restrictions in these restrictive covenants were sandwiched between things that seemed very innocuous,” said Laura Redford, visiting assistant professor at Brigham Young University who conducted doctoral research on racially restrictive covenants in L.A. County.