Structures of Racism: The Use of Racist Covenants in Reno Real Estate

There has long been an awareness that structural racism in American economic, employment, housing, and educational systems has been long-lasting and difficult to remedy. But in the arena of racism in housing, scholars and public-facing digital humanities projects have emphasized “redlining,” the use of Federal Housing and Loan Corporation (HOLC) maps to deny Federal mortgage insurance from racially mixed or minority-majority neighborhoods. These maps are visually stunning and impactful, but they mask the fact that racial discrimination was as much or perhaps even more “bottom-up” as it was “top-down,” reifying discrimination by millions of local lenders, sellers, and landlords. In addition, the redlining maps do not cover the entire country, only its largest metropolises. There were none for Nevada. Nor do they show the racially restrictive covenants buried in hundreds of millions of warranty deeds across the country.

The Race and Reno Research Project (R3P) aims to research, interpret, and publicize the experiences of people of color in Northern Nevada, beginning with a project to map the use of racially restrictive covenants in property deeds in Reno. The work is being conducted by student researchers, overseen by two faculty members and with input of several other faculty members from various departments, including the libraries. This project employs deeds recently digitized by the Washoe County Recorder’s Office, as well as ArcGIS mapping software, research in historical archives, and oral history interviews. It focuses on racially restrictive covenants at the subdivision level, since private developers frequently used such measures from the early 1920s to the early 1960s, despite the fact that the Supreme Court ruled them unconstitutional in 1948. Subdivision records also make it possible to uncover racial covenants in swaths of Reno without going through thousands of individual deeds.

Studying racial discrimination in Washoe County’s housing market is of special relevance for several reasons. As a Western city built on tourism, Reno/Sparks is typical of urban development in the nation’s “Sun Belt,” where much of the nation’s development happened after World War II. Racial discrimination once gave Nevada the unfortunate sobriquet “The Mississippi of the West.” Reno/Sparks’ modest size—the combined metropolitan area had only 40,397 residents in the 1950 census—makes the area an ideal location to gain results relatively quickly. Furthermore, single-family residential zoning, which was invented in Berkeley in 1916 in part to racially restrict housing, also artificially depressed the value of centrally located neighborhoods that could have supported denser development while restricting access to housing along lines of race and class. It also led to sprawl and might be found to be a contributing factor to Reno’s housing crisis today. By studying not only the challenges that people of color faced in Reno’s twentieth century housing market, but also the strategies they used to make homes here despite such challenges, we can arrive at a better understanding of our nation’s recent past and its present.