covenants

Watching the one Black family in the entire house’s history spend two minutes telling their son how to interact with the police comes off as perfunctory, particularly since the movie never deals with the history of restrictive covenants which, no doubt, would have prohibited Black families from even owning the house we’re seeing in the 1940s.

The study calls Los Angeles “a pioneer” in the early 20th century in creating single-family home-only districts that, when combined with racially restrictive covenants, mortgage redlining and other policies, ensured that white residents often had sole access to good housing.

Legacies of redlining and racially restrictive covenants mean that low-income and nonwhite residents are disproportionately concentrated in these areas, which tend to have higher risk exposure to flooding, storm damage and large wildfires; more oil and gas wells; and less tree cover to mitigate extreme heat.

Researchers found that 40,000 Black people living in Los Angeles were confined in Central Alameda, South Park and Watts in 1930 due to zoning practices, restrictive covenants and redlining policies that kept them from moving into new neighborhoods.

“In 1970, while the Valley had a total population of nearly one million people, there were only about 18,000 Black people. These areas were older sections of the Valley where restrictive covenants were not in place or not enforced.”