Fairer Play: Counties Will Adopt AI to Delete Racial Deed Restrictions

Ever read through your deed and find a stink bomb like this?

“The said premises shall not be sold to, owned, used or occupied by any person or persons other than those of the Caucasian race.”

That’s a deed restriction placed on hundreds of Haverford Township, Pennsylvania titles in the 1920s, found by investigators at The Philadelphia Inquirer. The township is on the Philadelphia Main Line, which became an “old-money” stronghold along the railroad from the city westward.

In the Haverford Township of today, only 3% of the households are African-American. (The township, the Inquirer points out, has hired a consultant firm to guide the area toward racial inclusion.)

Another deed, from Palo Alto, California, reads: “The property shall not be used or occupied by any person of African, Japanese, Chinese or Mongolian descent, except for in the capacity as a servant to a White person.”

These are called racial covenants, or race-based deed restrictions. Earlier buyers agreed to the language in order to hold valid title to their homes. The exclusionary wording still exists in thousands of deeds across the United States.

New AI Projects Tackle Race-Based Deed Restrictions

Now, imagine you really did find racially offensive language in your deed. What could you do about it?

Until just the past few years, you could do nothing at all about it. Traditionally, deeds have been permanent legal instruments. Modifying them was against state law and customary practice. Don’t worry, you’d be told. These clauses are no longer enforceable!

Times are changing in front of our eyes. One at a time, states are recognizing that there’s lingering harm in that kind of language. And they are tackling harmful deed restrictions. In Missouri and elsewhere, there are workshops you can attend, teaching the new art of deleting prejudice from the title records.

But the task can overwhelm county office staffs with limited resources. To do it on a community level often entails looking through thousands of paper deeds. (Yes, digitizing deeds just recently became a thing, too.) And even in counties that have digitized their records, the task of redacting unconstitutional language is immense.

This is why counties and cities want to recruit AI to the job.  

Santa Clara County, California now has an artificial intelligence tool created at Stanford University. It’s capable of finding and deleting race-based language in deeds by the thousands.

If you wonder why it’s needed, consider this. California recently enacted a law that says all of its counties must (a) inspect their deeds and (b) delete race-based exclusions from their records.

Counties in California have tens of millions of property documents. So, advanced technology is indispensable.

We reported on another piece of AI progress earlier this year. It’s a collaboration between West-coast real estate firm John L. Scott and Amazon Web Services (AWS). Once it’s up and running, it should let deed holders look up and strike out race-based deed restrictions. The name of the project is Driving Change.It’s meant as a user-friendly tool for ordinary homeowners who live in counties that have digitized deeds.

Testing began in King County, Washington. But any updates on when the tool will be available have yet to come out. Optical character recognition has to be applied to the older deeds, then scaled. So the project is massive. Reporting in the tech magazine ZDNet earlier this year said Driving Change should debut in early 2025.

How Students Lead

Stanford’s Regulation, Evaluation and Governance Lab (RegLab) set up its clinic to help Santa Clara County grapple with its unconstitutional deeds.

The researchers trained artificial intelligence software to automate an otherwise labor-intensive process. It would have taken many years to do this by hand.

The task at issue: go through more than 5 million total deeds. Seek and find instances of exclusionary language.

The AI tool examined the county’s deeds dated 1902 to 1980, and identified about 7,500 race-based restrictions on ordinary people’s homes.

The system is also able to strike this language from the deeds.

About the success of the team in helping California follow its own law, computer science grad student Mirac Suzgun said:

We believe this is a compelling illustration of an academic-government collaboration to make this kind of legislative mandate much easier to achieve and to shine a light on historical patterns of housing discrimination.

Uncivil Society

In 1927, something bizarre went down in Germantown, part of West Philadelphia. Scores of deed holders met and drafted a deed restriction to keep certain people — renters as well as buyers — out of the neighborhood. The Germantown deed holders wanted to keep local property forever off-limits to households other than the “Caucasian race.” Back then, this particular move was not considered bizarre. It was considered an advertising point.

What’s bizarre is the way they’d enforce the restriction. Those in violation, said the deed language, could be evicted by the locals “by force of arms.”

So when people ask what’s preventing the saving of generational wealth for minority households, this is a pretty stark clue. In many areas of the country, by the force of state laws that upheld deed covenants, they were never allowed to get started. And they were terrorized out of trying. 

And it wasn’t just local and state law that did this. And it was much more than a bunch of homeowners’ associations copying blanket exclusions onto all their housing units. The U.S. Department of Commerce actually worked, in the 1920s, with the National Association of Real Estate Boards to concoct a model race restriction. And they urged real estate professionals to use it. Once we know that, it’s not exactly surprising that the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia has identified about 4,000 properties with race-based deed restrictions, forced in the 1920s and 30s.

In 1948, a case brought to the U.S. Supreme Court declared that such covenants offend the Constitution. Nevertheless, the practice continued into the 1950s. Once a racially exclusive deed was in the books, no one could do anything about the language.

But times change. So can deeds.