Have a racist housing covenant in Pierce County? Here’s how to fix it — and why you should

If they haven’t discovered it already, thousands of Pierce County property owners are likely to soon be confronted with a reality that few, if any, are expecting.

Seventy-five years after the U.S. Supreme Court deemed them unenforceable, and nearly 60 years after the Fair Housing Act made housing discrimination illegal, the news — courtesy of work done by a team of researchers at the University of Washington — has the potential to be jarring.

The deeds and records attached to their homes — likely unbeknownst to them — contain a grim reminder of the past: a restrictive housing covenant that once barred the sale of the property to people of certain races, ethnicities or religions.

Today, the long-buried covenants have no legal weight. But the racist and derogatory language they contain provides a stark reflection of where our country once stood, and an origin story for so many of the racial housing and wealth disparities that continue to plague us.

As I wrote last month, the UW’s Racial Restrictive Covenants Project recently announced that researchers so far have identified more than 4,000 restrictive housing covenants in Pierce County, stretching from Northeast Tacoma to Lakewood, and many places in between. The Racial Restrictive Covenants Project’s work is part of a statewide effort, funded by the Legislature in 2021, designed to identify the toxic covenants and, ultimately, help update the books.

For many Pierce County property owners confronted with the news, the question will be obvious: What do I do now? Whether they find out via online maps UW researchers have made available or through a yet-to-be-determined notification process that could occur in the coming months, the existence of a restrictive covenant, unearthed by a team of academics, promises to throw many homeowners for a loop.

Here’s what’s certain: Addressing the old restrictive covenants is more than an exercise in paperwork.

While getting rid of the covenants requires action from property owners that can be tedious and time-consuming, continuing to ignore the existence of the documents amounts to turning a blind eye to decades of discrimination — and the toll it continues to take.

“I see it as righting a wrong. It is making a public statement that these discriminatory actions took place in the past, and … we don’t do this anymore,” Pierce County Auditor Linda Farmer told The News Tribune this week.

“This is a way for us to say, ‘We won’t tolerate this kind of action.’”

Modifying a restrictive covenant

Addressing restrictive housing covenants is a problem that Casey Kaul, Pierce County’s recording and licensing manager, has been helping local residents navigate for the last four years.

In 2018, the Legislature passed a bill championed by former University Place state Rep. Christine Kilduff creating a way for property owners to take matters into their own hands.

The good news? Since that time — when Kaul and her colleagues at the Pierce County Auditor’s Office utilized the legislation to help residents of Tacoma’s West Slope to modify more than 90 restrictive covenants — there’s been a clearly defined process that any property owner can utilize to legally strike the documents from the current record.

Locally, it starts when a property owner fills out a restrictive covenant modification form, available online through Pierce County’s website.

Filing a modification form doesn’t completely erase the outdated documents, Kaul said, but it does ensure that they won’t be included in future filings — while also providing notice in the land title that the covenant is void and unenforceable. Unlike other filings, there’s no fee attached.

Still, that doesn’t mean the process is simple. Kaul told me applicants must independently locate the exact legal description of their property and often other difficult-to-find information, which can require assistance from a title company. Filing the form also requires a notarized signature.

In the past, the Pierce County Auditor’s Office has held workshops for local residents and concerned community groups, walking them through the process. But there’s only so much county employees can do, Kaul said.

By law, the Auditor’s Office is not allowed to fill out the form on behalf of property owners or help them locate the legal description of their property, she noted.

“It can take some digging,” Kaul said.

Beyond filing a covenant modification form with the Pierce County Auditor’s Office, there’s another, newer and less known way for local property owners to help contend with the racist mistakes of the past, Kaul said.

The same 2021 legislation that funded the work of the UW’s Racial Restrictive Covenants Project also created a way for Washington property owners to legally remove racist and restrictive covenants from the historical record of property ownership transfers, she noted.

“It creates a process that allows for someone to petition the Superior Court to have that document with that discriminatory language stricken from the record, and then transferred over to the Secretary of State’s office — the state archives — for permanent retention there,” Kaul said.

Because the process is still being developed and the UW’s research isn’t finished, the court process for removing restrictive housing covenants from property deeds has yet to be utilized, Kaul said.

Preparing for an influx

To date, according to Farmer and Kaul, the Pierce County Auditor’s recording team has filed a total of 96 restrictive covenant modifications since the new law took effect in 2019.

Of those, 93 were in Tacoma’s Narrowmoor neighborhood, a subdivision in the city’s West End that dates back to 1944, developed with what, at the time, were enforceable racial restrictions in place.

As former News Tribune reporter Kate Martin wrote in 2018, the development’s covenant stated, in part: “No part or parcel of land … shall be rented or leased to or used or occupied, in whole or in part, by any person of the African or Asiatic descent, nor by any person not of the white or Caucasian race, other than domestic servants domiciled with an owner or tenant and living in their home.”

In 2019, Pierce County’s recording team was recognized by Thomson Reuters for its Narrowmoor work.

In the coming months and years, Farmer — who was elected Auditor in 2022 — knows her office will likely face a wave of new applicants looking to record restrictive covenant modifications. She says they’re preparing for the influx, and hoping things go smoothly.

While it’s unclear exactly to what extent property owners will be notified — at least beyond online maps that have been created — UW professor James Gregory, who leads the school’s Racial Restrictive Housing Covenant Project, told The News Tribune in February that his team was nearing the completion of its work in Pierce County.

Additional notification efforts will rely, in large part, on money, Gregory said this week.

“The law under which we are authorized and funded … mentions the task of notification but does not define it. We have not yet undertaken any form of notification beyond the maps that we are now showing for Pierce and some other counties. Our funding ends in June, and without additional funds we will not be able to complete the task of identifying restricted properties and will have no capacity to do anything else,” Gregory said. “If the proviso is renewed our first responsibility is research. Then we will address the challenge of notification.”

According to Kaul, whatever happens, Pierce County’s recording team will be ready.

Contending with droves of property owners suddenly seeking to modify restrictive covenants has the potential to stretch the office thin, she acknowledged. But whether it’s one person or thousands, she believes in the work — and the impact it will have.

“Obviously, one restrictive covenant is too many,” Kaul said.

“We’ll be committed to making it as easy as possible for people who want to record this document.”