Minneapolis seeks more homeowners for program to scrub racial covenants

Jolynn Choy signed up for a voluntary program to strike her Minneapolis home's decades-old racial covenant, she said, because it's personally important given her Asian lineage. Two other willing participants in the Just Deeds Project, Mindy Travers and Nathan Morales, opted in out of a desire to reject a racist stain on their neighborhood's history.

So far, they are the exception. After an initial burst of interest when the program to scrub outdated racial restrictions from home deeds launched in March 2021, city staff said new applications have slowed to a trickle.

To date, 733 racist covenants have been discharged, out of more than 8,000 that were placed on homes across the city between 1910 and 1955, used as a way to maintain white-designated neighborhoods. City officials are trying to find ways to stir up stronger participation.

"I think homeowners need to consider what leaving that racial covenant on their homes, what message that now sends about their values, to the community, to potential new homeowners in their neighborhood," Assistant City Attorney Amy Schutt said.

It has been illegal to enforce racial covenants since at least 1968, but many of the restrictions remain in property records. Choy, who is half-Asian, called them "these stains that haunt people knowing that these things apply to you."

Participants work with the City Attorney's Office staff to officially disavow the discriminatory restrictions at the county level, with no charge to the resident. The initial news release described it as helping owners "reclaim their homes as equitable spaces." There are 14 Minnesota cities that participate in the program.

The discharge process doesn't technically eliminate the covenant, but it adds language to the deed rejecting it.

Minneapolis has helped 456 property owners discharge covenants through Just Deeds so far, according to a city spokesperson. Another 277 properties had been discharged before the program's creation.

Now that fewer people have been coming to the city with applications, staff are spending more time reaching out to homeowners who have yet to apply, Schutt said.

The covenant on her family's home in the Kenny neighborhood of southwest Minneapolis brought back difficult memories for Choy regarding another defunct law that would have impacted her family. Choy's father moved to Tennessee from Hong Kong in the 1970s for college and would later marry a white woman.

In 1967, a U.S. Supreme Court verdict overruled Tennessee's law against interracial marriage, but the state never officially removed it. Choy, 40, said the law felt like the country forbidding her own existence and that it reflected the disapproval interracial couples often faced.

"The U.S. has this long history of allowing Asian men, and especially Chinese men, to immigrate to the country, but also that you can't intermarry," Choy said.

While Just Deeds doesn't fix the city's longstanding segregation and effects of redlining, Choy said she appreciates the city dedicating resources to it.

"The fact that the city I live in has this program with taxpayer funds dedicated just to removing racial covenants, that felt important to me," she said.

Morales, a 43-year-old who lives with his wife and kids in the Longfellow neighborhood, said he hopes removing the covenants will help eliminate stereotypes that people have about different parts of town.

"The impact of these covenants is something that is clear as you look at the socioeconomic layout of the city," he said. "It is the foundation of how Minneapolis looks at itself."

One trend was that Black people were prohibited from owning houses in all of the neighborhoods with covenants, Schutt said. The program also serves to educate people more about these racial disparities and how they continue today.

The project was made possible by the University of Minnesota's Mapping Prejudice team, which in 2016 began working to find, map and visualize all the covenants in the Twin Cities. There were 24,119 found in Hennepin County and nearly 4,000 in Ramsey County.

A 2019 Star Tribune analysis found Minnesota's homeownership gap between white and Black households was the third-widest in the nation.

In interviews, homeowners urged residents to also take steps to more directly combat racial inequality in the city, such as supporting small businesses owned by people of color and pushing for schools of equal quality across neighborhoods.

"For something that's a little bit more tangible, I would say support BIPOC-owned businesses, make sure that your neighbors have the ability to stay in your neighborhood and make your neighborhood better," Morales said.

The specific restrictions of each covenant varied in terms of which groups it targeted and other rules. Choy's, for instance, said nonwhite people could occupy the house only if they were live-in staff for a white owner.

Others homeowners said it specified that Jewish people weren't allowed to own a property. Bob Friedman, a semi-retired handyman, said he was motivated to discharge his covenant by recalling anti-Semitic signs his family encountered right after moving to the Twin Cities from Chicago decades ago.

"We were out looking for homes, and along the Highway 100 road construction in Edina my father saw a large billboard sign that said in large letters, 'No Jews or dogs allowed,'" said Friedman, who now lives in the Standish neighborhood of south Minneapolis.

The city has had more than 1,800 applicants for Just Deeds. Some owned properties that ended up not having a covenant. In a few cases, the applicant turned out not to own the property, a city spokesperson said.

Homeowners can apply for Minneapolis' Just Deeds Project by filling out a form online at www2.minneapolismn.gov/government/departments/attorney/just-deeds and emailing it to JustDeedsProject@minneapolismn.gov.