Racial Covenants

Racial covenants implicate the entire private housing market as a system, beyond select neighborhoods. Real estate companies that applied covenants were leaders in the industry and used their power to shape housing access and values. Banks made higher returns from mortgages on homes with covenants and elevated property values. Landlords charged higher rents on tenants locked out of restricted neighborhoods. More than a legal barrier to integration, racial covenants are a window into how real estate capital – the companies and banks that buy and sell land to capture value in the market – treats housing in general. Covenants in Syracuse helped create a market that uses unceded Onondaga Nation land, links property value to whiteness and anti-Black racism, and tries to contain or suppress radical and anti-imperialist organizing. Because covenants arose when the US real estate market formed in the early 1900s, they help us understand the roots of housing segregation and why it persists in different forms. ¹

Property Archives

This project searched many non-digitized records by hand at the Onondaga County Clerk’s office. People from Syracuse actively participated and engaged with the archive. Our goal was to politicize archives and create community in a space that controls records that affect the community. Community members reflected on why these records even exist: Why does the government meticulously document land and property transactions since the 1790s? It may be useful for capitalists to know who owns which land where – to buy, sell, speculate, or hold vacant as an investment asset. Also, a chain of title – the list of land’s past and current owner(s) – can make private property in land seem natural and promote the myth of equality to own property under the law. While the state uses the archive of land records to secure capital and private property, this project repurposes the archive to reveal processes and histories of racism in real estate. ²

Using QGIS

The map on this website uses QGIS (Quantum Geographic Information System), a free, open-source mapping software. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) has had US military applications and worked to dispossess Indigenous and colonized peoples. GIS can influence a project given the technology’s history and other uses. Meanwhile, social science researchers can simply document suffering without exposing the racial capitalist system that creates poverty by design. By using QGIS, this project is replicable for people with no university affiliation or desire to use corporate, proprietary technology. Connecting covenants to slavery, imperialism, and radical movements helps locate white suburbs in the global history of capitalist violence as well as highlight alternative ways of building communities. ³

Political Program

This website has learned from Syracuse activists – Syracuse Tenants United, #NotAgainSU – who have used direct action to disrupt racist housing inequality. This website also follows after groups across the US that map covenants in their own cities – Mapping Prejudice, the National Covenant Coalition – and the Black History Preservation Project in Syracuse, which records oral histories with former 15^th Ward residents.

Sharing information on restrictive covenants is not inherently progressive, and banks, landlords, developers, or government agencies could use history, selectively, to rehabilitate their image while carrying out similar practices in new forms. Instead, this project aligns with demands whose goal is the de-commodification of housing – enshrine housing as a public good, not private commodity that developers and landlords buy, sell, or rent on the market for profit:

• tenant unions to collectively bargain with landlords and sustain rent strikes
• rent control, which uses the state to rein in landlord and real estate profits
• fully funded public housing as a public good
• repatriated land to Indigenous nations
• structural reparations for trans-Atlantic slavery
• support for anti-colonial, national liberation movements overseas and an end to US sanctions.⁴

Footnotes