Mapping Racist Covenants

Keywords: Urban Geography, Housing, Inequity, Racial Covenants
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

Housing injustice is a keystone issue underlying many of today’s challenges currently facing the United States. Across the decades, racist housing policies have actively disenfranchised people of color and other communities, making it difficult to secure fair housing and achieve opportunity. These policies, sanctioned by both the state and private actors, include exclusionary zoning, redlining, blockbusting, unfair lending practices, and restrictive racial covenants. Racist covenants, in particular, made it possible for real estate developers and homeowner associations to adopt racist covenants, conditions, and restrictions (CCRs) to prevent African American, Asian, and other racial/ethnic groups from living in certain neighborhoods. Although racist CCRs were ruled unenforceable by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1948, they continued to be enacted by private parties until the passage of the federal Fair Housing Act in 1968 (Bakelmun and Schoenfeld 2020). Standing on the shoulders of Mapping Prejudice and other similar projects exploring the geography of racial covenants, I tell the story of racist covenants across Tucson, Arizona neighborhoods and subdivisions, focusing on those enacted between 1912-1950. The Mapping Racist Covenants project helps situate how racist covenants, in particular, are part of a larger set of institutional housing restrictions that have, and continue to, affect communities of color.