California Resident helps erase Racist Language in property Deeds
Published on December 22, 2024
by Annalise Freimarck
Los Gatos resident Gordon Yamate remembers overhearing a conversation between his parents when he was in third grade. They had decided to move back to the West Valley from San Jose, but didn’t feel comfortable returning to his mother’s hometown of Los Gatos. The rejection by developers was subtle but clear — Asian American families needed to look elsewhere.
The family moved to Saratoga where the Asian American community was welcomed.
Yamate believes racially restrictive covenants — language in property deeds — have something to do with his family’s decision. That was in the 1960s, but the same language explicitly stating a home should not be sold to people of color still exists on thousands of deeds in Santa Clara County today.
The discriminatory language isn’t legal and hasn’t been enforceable since 1948. Yet by 1950, nearly one in four homes countywide included deeds with the language, according to Stanford University data.
Racially restrictive covenants, language in a home’s property deed that explicitly states the house may not be sold to people of color, are archived in large tomes like this one from 1928 at the Santa Clara County Clerk-Recorder’s Office. Photo by Annalise Freimarck.
Yamate, chair of the Los Gatos Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Commission, is working in Los Gatos to redact the harmful language and inform his community about its past alongside the county. Los Gatos has about 130 covenants, according to Stanford, and there could be more. There are hundreds in the county’s unincorporated hills bordering the town.
Yamate said his family’s past, which includes his mother’s time in a Wyoming Japanese American internment camp, led him to investigate the covenants, along with finding racist language in his Los Angeles home’s deed.
“This is how we got here,” he told San José Spotlight. “This is how we became one of the most segregated communities in Northern California.”
A widespread problem
The Santa Clara County Clerk-Recorder’s Office began looking into the problem and redacting language in 2022 after Assembly Bill 1466 was signed into law. The bill required counties statewide to begin programs identifying and redacting the language from property documents.
The county has gone through about 25% of the roughly 24 million property deeds in collaboration with Stanford RegLab researchers who trained artificial intelligence to recognize the language.
Faiz Surani, a research fellow at Stanford University’s RegLab, helped make an AI language tool that can recognize discriminatory language in property deeds across Santa Clara County. Photo by Annalise Freimarck.
The university’s modern solution to a decades-old problem is a first among nationwide efforts, RegLab Research Fellow Faiz Surani said. Stanford released data in October analyzing about 5.2 million pages of property deeds from 1865 to 1980. The data revealed 10 developers were responsible for nearly one-third of the racist language in deeds.
Surani’s apartment was once one of the properties subject to these covenants, with the clause that it “shall never be occupied by any person not of the Caucasian race.”
“This is not something that’s in a book. This is the way things were, and to a great extent, still are,” Surani told San José Spotlight.
The county aims to finish processing the documents by 2027. It will archive original deeds, but redact the language online and elsewhere.
Contact Annalise Freimarck at annalise@sanjosespotlight.com or follow @annalise_ellen on X, formerly known as Twitter.