The latest issue of the National Association of Realtors’ (NAR) Realtor Magazine features an article describing the organization’s support for legislation addressing discriminatory restrictive covenants in real estate documents. The piece takes an honest look at the group’s history, showing that it took some time for realtors to come around to support fair housing provisions.
It seems that the NAR has a history of acclimating to the environment of the time. The article reflects on a time when members of the trade group supported the use of discriminatory restrictive covenants to enable property owners to sell to whom they would like. The group was able to find documentation sent to members from the 1920’s that reported on the Corrigan v. Buckley case which affirmed the constitutionality of racially restrictive covenants.
When the 1948 Shelley v. Kraemer case was decided, making discriminatory restrictive covenants unenforceable, the NAR membership still stood in favor of keeping these covenants. The article’s authors even found a proposal from a local chapter seeking a constitutional amendment to restore the enforceability of these clauses. While there didn’t appear to be much progress in nullifying the Kraemer ruling, the NAR still helped to defeat and advocated against fair housing legislation.
The organization continued with this messaging all the way through and four years past the passage of the 1968 Fair Housing Act, when they finally passed a policy telling members to respect the law as it stood.
Today, as laws are being passed across the country allowing for homeowners to repudiate covenants or requiring land records offices to find and redact them, the NAR is supporting many of these fair housing actions. From the article:
“There’s a movement today to pass state laws that enable governments and property owners to disavow discriminatory language without whitewashing history. In addition to supporting such laws, NAR is supporting federal and state efforts to document and address the continuing effects of restrictive covenants.”
The organization has since gotten involved with advocating for specific pieces of legislation like Oklahoma’s House Bill 2288, which allows both current homeowners and home buyers to file a declaration that a “discriminatory restrictive covenant is illegal and unenforceable and should be removed.”
The NAR is also supporting the work of the Uniform Law Commission. This is a non-partisan group that provides templates for states to base legislation on, so the same work doesn’t have to be duplicated. One such project is a uniform law for dealing with unlawful restrictions in land records. This legislation is anticipated to be introduced in a number of states next year.
Regardless of what individual states and even individual recorders of deeds decide to do with these vestiges of the past, it seems everyone is on board with coming to a solution quickly and efficiently. For those counties where discriminatory restrictive covenants need to be redacted for a modification program, or even just identified, Extract offers an automated software (or service) that can handle the millions of pages of records that have likely accumulated over the years.
About the Author: Chris Mack
Chris is a Marketing Manager at Extract with experience in product development, data analysis, and both traditional and digital marketing. Chris received his bachelor’s degree in English from Bucknell University and has an MBA from the University of Notre Dame. A passionate marketer, Chris strives to make complex ideas more accessible to those around him in a compelling way.