Racist Covenants: Remembering or reliving Jim Crow LA?

Assemblyman Hector De La Torre doesn't want to live with housing covenants that endorsed segregation.

LA TIMES reports that "though the decades-old contracts are illegal, their rules are still attached to some deeds. State legislator Hector De La Torre has introduced a bill that would clear them from public records."

Surely, here's a story that every thinking, breathing Angeleno needs to grapple with.

Los Angeles had its own Jim Crow "restrictive covenants" since the 1920s that forced buyers to comply with explicitly offensive racist rules. In 1948, the Supreme Court ruled them unconstitutional. Yet these discriminatory rules remain in print and part of the public record in property purchase agreements in tens of thousands covenants across the state.

Our own Mar Vista community has community associations with such racist covenants.

De La Torre wants to "wipe the stain" by expunging them from public records. Others say they're already illegal and their removal is costly. Here are the pros and cons as delineated in the bill's analysis.

Here's one simple solution to remove the relevant clauses in a retrictive covenant. And here's another for $350!

And here's SB 1148 (Burton, Ch. 589) passed by CA legislature in 1999:

DISCRIMINATORY COVENANTS: Prohibits a common interest development document from containing any restrictive covenant that discriminates in housing based on race, color, religion, sex, familial status, marital status, disability, national origin, or ancestry; requires homeowner associations to amend governing documents to delete discriminatory restrictions; requires persons who disseminate declarations of common interest developments to mark the document, advising that discriminatory restrictions are void; and specifies that, as of January 1, 2001, housing discrimination under the Fair Employment and Housing Act includes the existence of a restrictive covenant; in addition, permits an owner to require the county recorder to remove any blatant racial restrictive covenant contained in any recorded document associated with the property.

What do you think?