Illegal racist covenants linger in Fresno County property records. ‘It’s a disgrace’

Fresno County Assessor-Recorder Paul Dictos doesn’t know just how many deeds or other property documents filed with the county over the decades include now-illegal restrictions against would-be buyers or tenants based on race, ethnicity, gender, or other demographic characteristics.

But documents with such provisions, known as racially restrictive covenants or RRCs, may potentially number in the tens of thousands in Fresno County. And while such restrictions are not legally enforceable, they persist as a reminder of bigotry and discrimination that fueled policies of segregation — and were not limited to the Jim Crow-era Deep South.

“It’s a disgrace,” Dictos said.

Assembly Bill 1466, a state law signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom in September 2021, requires county recorders throughout California to develop a plan to actively identify and redact any unlawfully discriminatory covenants in property records, and provides for county boards of supervisors to authorize the collection of a $2 fee for recording deeds and other property documents to help pay for the program.

So far, however, Fresno County has yet to undertake any redactions. Dictos said he will ask the Fresno County Board of Supervisors at their March 14 meeting to approve his implementation plan and authorize the $2 fee to provide money for his office to take on the potentially massive task of finding and fixing the records.

“It’s going to take a lot of time,” Dictos told The Fresno Bee. “The question is, how many do you have to do and how long will it take?”

In many cases, the now-unlawful provisions are blatant and unambiguous in their language. In one document that Dictos retrieved for a home built in Reedley in 1952, a deed restriction reads: “This property is sold on condition that it is not resold to or occupied by the following races: Armenian, Mexican, Japanese, Korean, Syrian, Negros, Filipinos or Chinese.”

“Between 1920 and 1948, many Fresno County RRCs prohibited homeowners from selling or renting the property to members of a specific race, color, ethnic or religious background,” Dictos said in a written statement. “Even though the United States Supreme Court in Shelley v. Kramer held that state enforcement of RRCs violated the Fourteenth Amendment, RRCs have been filed in Fresno County as late as the 1950s.”

The discrimination also carried through to the practice of “redlining,” in which residents of color in areas designated for particular racial, ethnic or religious minorities were refused bank loans for property purchases.

Lingering reminders of racism

The Supreme Court’s 1948 opinion in Shelley v. Kramer was a landmark case in which the court found in part that states, by allowing racial restrictions on property transfers, had “denied petitioners the equal protection of the laws and that, therefore, the action of the state courts cannot stand.”

In some instances, however, covenants in numerous Fresno County property deeds continued to include such provisions and language that the conditions would also apply to any new buyers of the property, with automatic extensions in 10-year increments to as recently as 1978 and beyond.

Richard Aaron, an attorney with the law firm of Fennemore Dowling Aaron in Fresno, is the son of an Armenian immigrant father, but admits he was naive about the reality of racism in Fresno.

That changed after he began his law career in 1979, after returning from college in Los Angeles and law school in San Francisco. He was stunned and appalled when he began coming across numerous RRCs as he worked on some real estate transactions.

“I saw these deeds that said things like, ‘no Negroes, no Mexicans, no Chinese, no Armenians and so on,” Aaron told The Fresno Bee. “There are large parts of Fresno that have these deed restrictions. As a young man, I couldn’t imagine people believing such things. But when I saw the magnitude of it, I was shocked.”

It’s well past time, he added, for such “clearly illegal” provisions to be deleted from property records. “I was angry when I read that stuff, and it was horrible,” Aaron said. “These serve no purpose but to remind us of a time when large parts of Fresno were controlled by people who who didn’t want to sell to people who didn’t look like them.”

In a January 2022 article in the California Real Property Law Journal, Sacramento real estate attorney Lexi Purich Howard wrote that there is a debate over the necessity for redacting the offensive provisions.

“Since RRCs are no longer legally effective or enforceable, some may say that the resources to remove or redact RRCs from the public record could be better used to advance other goals,” she wrote, “and not all agree that RRCs should be redacted and removed rather than preserved as a reminder of past discriminatory practices”

What happens now?

The ball is apparently in Dictos’ court to get things moving on launching a process for redacting existing discriminatory records and for refusing to record future deeds or other property documents that contain illegal restrictions.

The state law, AB 1466, placed a July 1, 2022 deadline for county assessors to develop their implementation plans. Dictos said his office has developed a plan, but told The Bee that “we did not see eye to eye” with the county’s legal counsel on some of the details. Dictos’ implementation plan, including the $2 fee for documents, will come to the Fresno County Board of Supervisors for a first reading on March 14. Final approval will come at a subsequent board meeting.

“If the Assessor-Recorder wanted the proposed fee (earlier), he simply needed to bring that forward to the Board of Supervisors for approval,” Sonja Dosti, a spokesperson for the county, told The Bee. “In the meantime, nothing is preventing the Assessor-Recorder from moving ahead with the process. The office is in fact taking preliminary steps already.”

The law also requires the county counsel’s office to review restrictive covenants identified by the recorder’s office prior to redaction. “None have been submitted for review as of yet,” Dosti said.

Dictos, however, said that without board approval of the redaction plan, his office cannot undertake the process.

Counties throughout California are in various stages of readiness to put the law into effect. Dosti noted that some counties, like Fresno, are still working to develop or start implementing their processes; others have already begun to redact covenants under the new law.