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County Clerk-Recorder’s Office Starts Mapping Prejudice in Property Records

The Contra Costa County seal

(Image courtesy of Contra Costa County via Bay City News)

By Tony Hicks
Bay City News

The Contra Costa County Clerk-Recorder’s office is about to start looking for official prejudice in county property records.

The county announced Wednesday the launch of its initiative “Mapping Prejudice in Contra Costa County,” a community-driven initiative to identify and map racially restrictive covenants, clauses inserted into local property records to keep people who weren’t white from owning or occupying property.

The county is embarking on the project in partnership with the Mapping Prejudice project, a research team based in the University of Minnesota that has worked with communities across the country on mapping since 2016.

The project will engage residents to identify and transcribe information necessary to put these now-illegal restrictions on a modern map.

The Contra Costa County project is a response to California Assembly Bill 1466 from 2021 mandating that county recorders develop a plan to identify and redact racially discriminatory covenants from all property records across the state.

The county said in a statement that the initiative will take a community-centered, educational approach to its goal. The clerk-recorder’s office has initially reviewed 9 million records, with thousands of them flagged for potentially restrictive language.

Racially based covenants were once commonly inserted into property deeds to exclude minority groups from owning or occupying certain properties or living in certain communities.

Although outlawed by the Fair Housing Act of 1968, the covenants remain embedded in some property records, promoting inequality and segregation today.

“Mapping Prejudice in Contra Costa County is about more than finding discriminatory language in old documents — it’s about community education and engagement,” county Clerk-Recorder and Registrar of Voters Kristin Connelly said in the statement.

“By confronting this hidden history, we can better understand its lasting impact on our neighborhoods. I have heard from residents who are bothered by this language in the official records for their homes and want it removed. There is a real learning opportunity for all our communities about this historical existence of these illegal covenants here in Contra Costa,” Connelly said.

Officials will train volunteers, who will access a digital portal to examine historical property records flagged by the research team at the University of Minnesota. For more information on Mapping Prejudice in Contra Costa County and to volunteer, go www.contracostavote.gov or email Volunteers@cr.cccounty.us.

For more background on the Mapping Prejudice project at the University of Minnesota, visit mappingprejudice.umn.edu or email mapprejudice@umn.edu.

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