There are 4,000 racist housing covenants in Pierce County. You can find them on a map | Opinion

University of Washington professor of history James Gregory knows the subject well. For roughly two decades, he’s been unearthing the ugly, racist underpinnings of racial disparities in wealth and homeownership seen to this day across Puget Sound.

For Gregory, it started in 2005, when he first began to dig into discriminatory housing covenants in Seattle and later King County.

At the time, Gregory had recently arrived from the University of California, Berkeley, and said he was inspired by what he considered to be an alarming lack of awareness about the area’s history, including the ways that “Seattle nice” Pacific Northwesterners had actively participated in things like segregation and redlining.

To date, Gregory and his team, which includes students, staff and roughly 800 volunteers, have uncovered a grim legacy: more than 30,000 outdated racially restrictive housing covenants in King County — with thousands of records yet to review.

They document specific subdivisions and parcels where some of the area’s early developers proactively sought to exclude people from housing on the basis of race, origin and religion — recording racist, derogatory language into the annals of housing deeds and decades of filings.

While a 1948 Supreme Court ruling made racially restrictive housing covenants unenforceable and the Fair Housing Act of 1964 made housing discrimination on the basis of race, religion or country of origin illegal, some of the dated records make it clear that the homes were originally intended for whites only.

Others specifically exclude entire populations of people when they were crafted, using the crude language of the time.

“I was just appalled by the willful ignorance,” Gregory told me by phone on Wednesday of his early motivations. “I would be teaching students and say something about the Civil Rights movement in Seattle or segregation in Seattle, and they would look at me with blank faces. They seemed to have the idea that segregation was only something that existed in Selma, or in the South.”

“I was inspired by my sense that people didn’t know, and needed to know,” he continued. “Race is still the biggest and most potent dividing line in our society.”

It’s why the work he’s doing today continues to matter, Gregory said.

Yes, we’re talking about dusty documents from another time, but there’s a reason why 68% of White families in Pierce County are homeowners today, compared to only 34% of Black families – and it’s not happenstance.

The same goes for the area’s recognized racial wealth gap, Gregory said.

Racial Restrictive Covenants Project

The legacy of the Puget Sound region’s buried housing history — and its lasting ramifications — is one reason why the state Legislature, in 2021, allocated funds to Gregory’s team and a similar team at Eastern Washington University to review long-forgotten covenants and deeds across the state.

This week, the UW’s Racial Restrictive Covenants Project, which Gregory leads, released its initial findings for five Puget Sound counties.

So far, the project has uncovered more than 4,000 racially restrictive housing covenants in Pierce County alone, stretching from Northeast Tacoma to Lakewood, and many places in between. In Thurston County, more than 1,800 have been identified.

The project includes online maps, as well as a decade-by-decade breakdown of homeownership trends by race and neighborhood demographic shifts.

Gregory said his team’s work will continue.

While research in Pierce County is nearly complete — and he doesn’t expect the number of identified restrictive housing covenants to fluctuate much in the coming months — the work in other counties is just beginning.

Racist housing covenants in Pierce County

In Tacoma and Pierce County, the UW’s Racial Restrictive Covenants Project’s work builds on a growing body of knowledge illuminating the many ways that racism and segregation have shaped our current communities.

In 2018, my former News Tribune colleague Kate Martin, in one of her final stories at the paper, reported on the city’s history of redlining, illustrating how racist lending practices and blatant discrimination contributed to neighborhood demographic trends and lasting disparities in home ownership and generational wealth. Even Harold Moss, who would go on to become Tacoma’s first Black mayor, wasn’t immune.

Racial Restrictive Covenants Project coordinator Sophia Dowling led the project’s Pierce County research, including tracing the origins of discriminatory housing covenants in the area all the way back to 1907 — one of the earliest known examples the team has found. Covering an eight-property subdivision near the town of Pacific, the entry is succinctly bigoted, simply reading: “This contract is transferable to anybody but a colored man, a Japanese or a Chinaman.”

Much like Gregory, Dowling underscored the continued harm of covenants like these.

“Racial restrictive covenants were prominent from the 1920s to the 50s, but the legacy hindered a lot of people from accumulating wealth long after. Real estate wealth is probably the largest way that people and families build generational wealth, and because so many people were systematically denied from building that wealth, they still have lower income rates, and there are still lower homeownership rates,” Dowling said.

“In the last 40 years, price escalations and the housing market have made it impossible for those who were denied, or previously shut out of the housing market to gain entry,” she continued. “So the legacy of these housing practices is still harming people today. It’s important to be doing this research, for possibly righting the wrongs.”

Gregory, even after having spent 17 years digging through old housing deeds, agrees — as adamantly as ever.

It’s still just as important for us to know the history of racism and discrimination that shaped our region, he said, and to recognize that it was the result of specific individuals and an entrenched system that perpetrated the damage.

“These were instruments of law. They were authorized by the state governments, county governments and city governments, and they were promoted by the federal government,” Gregory said of the thousands of discriminatory housing covenants he’s uncovered.

“Wealth is all about home ownership. And if you didn’t get to do it starting in the ‘40s, ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70, you’re way behind now.”

How racism kept black Tacomans from buying houses for decades