Housing Justice Forum to address racially restrictive covenants in Thurston County

The property records of over 1,700 homes across Thurston County still contain clauses prohibiting them from being sold to racial minorities.

Though the mandates are now illegal, the Thurston County Auditor’s Office wants homeowners to know they can have racially restrictive policies removed from their official documents for free.

The Auditor’s Office will host a Housing Justice Forum this Saturday to discuss the impact of racially restrictive covenants in Washington property records and the process homeowners can undergo to have them deleted.

The panel will feature Thurston County Auditor Mary Hall; Sophie Belz, a researcher with the University of Washington’s Racial Restrictive Covenants project; and Dr. Thelma Jackson of the New Life Baptist Church community engagement ministry. The event will take place at 1 p.m. Saturday, May 31, at The Atrium, 3000 Pacific Ave. SE.

“Citizens could modify their records for many years, but we found that no one was really taking advantage of it, which is why we launched this program,” Hall said.

The Housing Justice Forum plans to offer Restrictive Covenant Modification Forms at the event, so community members can remove discriminatory language from their property records on the spot. While the modification form is available for free anytime, a notary will be present to notarize new forms on site this Saturday.

Over five years have passed since the county launched free modification services for homeowners whose property deeds instructed segregation by race or religion, but only 53 out of over 1,700 eligible homeowners have completed the process, according to county records.

“These no-cost modifications were available the beginning of 2019, but it wasn’t well publicized, so it really wasn’t until 2021 that we began our outreach effort. So we’re just continuing that effort,” Hall said.

The push to identify and remove racially restrictive covenants began through the Racial Restrictive Covenant project at the University of Washington.

While racial restrictions on Thurston County developments began in 1926, the practice was most prominent after World War II, when operations at Joint Base Lewis-McChord brought an influx of non-white communities to the area. These restrictions barred racial and religious minorities from owning homes in certain neighborhoods until 1969 when housing discrimination was outlawed by the Fair Housing Act of 1968.

“1,700 racial restrictions were imposed mostly in the historic district of Olympia,” said researcher Sophie Belz.

While the county acts to reconcile and revise discriminatory housing laws through restrictive covenant modification, Hall said the history of restrictive covenants will still be documented.

“We’re not whitewashing them,” she said. “They will be a historical record.”