Discriminatory restrictive covenants in land records have become a bit of a hot-button issue lately. While prohibiting someone to purchase a property has been illegal since the 1948 Shelley vs. Kraemer ruling, their language has persisted throughout the decades to remain in land records today. It wasn’t until recently that states and individuals started looking for ways to remove the language. California led the way a couple years ago with requirements for all of their counties to come up with a redaction plan for the language.
Last year, a proposal came through Massachusetts and this year, Kansas is on the list. Officials from Roeland Park, KS have drafted two bills to make it easier for the residents to have discriminatory language removed from local housing covenants. What’s unique about the case in Kansas is that Homeowners Associations actually do have the power to remove discriminatory covenants, but in a city like Roeland Park, there are no longer any active HOAs, so there’s no mechanism to change the language.
The proposed bills, introduced in Kansas’ state house and senate, would change state law to allow individual cities, “to redact the discriminatory language from either the plat or a set of covenants and restrictions recorded with the plat.” The Senate bill is moving quickly, with a hearing scheduled for later this week.
One of the representatives who introduced a bill says that he doesn’t expect much in terms of opposition, but from our experience there are many who would rather make no edits to these records to give an accurate historical representation. Since the provisions aren’t enforceable, continued efforts to remove discriminatory restrictive covenants will require states and counties to come to their own evaluation of whether maintaining history is worth potential harm to residents.
The one thing your office won’t have to worry about when working with these covenants is how to identify and redact them. Extract is already working with California counties to automatically identify all of the places these discriminatory covenants exist and redact them. We know that land records come in all shapes and sizes which is why our software is designed to work with unstructured documents. Using advanced optical character recognition and machine learning, our software understands how to identify information in documents accurately and instantaneously.
If discriminatory restrictive covenants are on your radar and you’d like to work with a proven vendor, please reach out and we’d be happy to show you a demonstration of our software.
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.