St. Paul announces program to help homeowners discharge racial covenants

St. Paul leaders announced Monday that they're launching an effort to help homeowners discharge the racial covenants that are included in their property deeds.

The covenants, which state that the homeowner is prohibited from reselling the home to a person of color, were included in the deeds of many homes built in the Twin Cities from 1910 into the 1950s. Minnesota barred the creation of new racial covenants in 1953 and made them illegal in 1962, and federal law outlawed covenants in 1968.

Deeds are a legal document and so the racist covenants cannot be deleted, but for several years there has been a movement in the metro area led by a group called Just Deeds to enable homeowners to file a document repudiating covenants in their deeds.

At a news conference Monday at Mitchell Hamline School of Law, Mayor Melvin Carter announced the effort in St. Paul to discharge the covenants.

"Words can create generational harm and they have, forever, in our community and across our country," Carter said. "This is about addressing those harms and righting those wrongs."

The St. Paul City Council approved a plan in 2021, led by the city attorney's office, to encourage residents to discharge the racial covenants, according to City Attorney Lyndsey Olson. A local organization called Mapping Prejudice, which found 8,233 covenants in Minneapolis, has discovered 2,492 in St. Paul so far.

St. Paul now has a website up and running where residents can go to learn if they have a racial covenant. Residents will also find a document they can fill out to discharge the covenant. Minneapolis has a website for discharging covenants at minneapolismn.gov/justdeeds, with additional information at JustDeedsProject@minneapolismn.gov/.

Lawyers in the St. Paul City Attorney's Office will help individuals discharge the covenants at no cost. They will be aided by law students at Mitchell Hamline, according to Anthony Niedwiecki, the school's president and dean.

"We see the roots of this damage that these racist clauses created in urban housing issues, urban violence that we face today," Olson said. "Clearing these covenants is not an attempt to erase our history. … The work is an opportunity to raise awareness of how our past affects our present, and to work together for anti-racism in this present moment."

Mapping Prejudice, which is based at the University of Minnesota Libraries, first documented racial covenants in Minneapolis and then extended it to Hennepin County. That work is largely completed, said Kirsten Delegard, project director at Mapping Prejudice. It then began researching St. Paul and Ramsey County.

Delegard said volunteers have started to review deed records in Dakota County and are working with the recorder offices in Anoka, Washington, Scott and Carver counties to obtain their records.

The work to discharge covenants was accelerated by Just Deeds, a coalition of numerous metro-area cities and the city of Rochester, along with the Minnesota Association of City Attorneys, the Minneapolis Area Association of Realtors, and Edina Realty Title.

"Discharging a covenant can be a very powerful act of resistance and repair," said Maria Cisneros, city attorney for Golden Valley and a leader of the Just Deeds project. "It's a tangible first step that any individual can take to place themselves in this history and to reclaim this space as an equitable and welcoming space, and to step into the power that each of us individually has to remedy the legacy of racially restrictive covenants."

Leaders of Minneapolis Area Realtors attended Monday's news conference, but not representatives of the St. Paul Area Association of Realtors (SPAAR). The organization pulled out as a Just Deeds partner in 2021, saying disagreed with some things without giving details.

The St. Paul association would have attended the news conference Monday but didn't know it was happening, said communications director Jennifer Kovacich.

"SPAAR supports the work of Just Deeds," she said. "We are doing other work to focus on the solution for homeownership in St. Paul."

Kovacich said that when Just Deeds was launched, "SPAAR did not have a chance to review and put in some of the language that reflected SPAAR's members' voices."

Jamar Hardy, incoming president of the Minneapolis Realtors group, said afterwards that one of his "biggest focuses" will be to get SPAAR back into the Just Deeds project.