Spokane-based Vista Title & Escrow has created a formal path for homebuyers to amend discriminatory language attached to the history of their home, free of charge through a new restrictive-covenant modification.

The modification gives purchasers an official course of action to declare any illegal restrictive covenants discovered on a home's title report in Spokane County as void, says Anthony Carollo, CEO of Vista Title.

The title service also will be available for homeowners in Stevens County through Stevens County Title & Escrow, in Colville, Washington, which is owned by Vista Title, he says.

Latrice Williams, owner of Spokane-based real estate brokerage Vision Properties, says she's pleased that Vista Title is offering the new modification service. 

 "I'm proud of them for taking on this huge task, and I hope Vista won't be the only company to take heed," she says.

Residential developers popularized the use of racially restrictive covenants early in the 20th century as part of a property title's covenants, conditions, and restrictions, explains Carollo. Generally, restrictive covenants are commonly found in real estate transactions as a way to prevent, limit, or restrict a specific action of the homeowner, such as limiting the number of tenants or restricting the use of certain exterior paint colors.

An example of the language used in a typical protective covenant created in 1947 in the Glenrose community, on Spokane's South Hill, states that, "No structure shall be erected, altered, placed, or permitted to remain upon any portion of these said residential lots other than one detached single-family dwelling, a private garage, and other out-buildings, which may be incidental to the use of the land."

Racial restrictive covenants go a step further to exclude specific races from owning or occupying homes or limiting homeownership to one specific race.

The Glenrose subdivision's covenants go on to state, "No persons of any race other than the white race shall use or occupy any building upon these premises, except that this covenant shall not prevent occupancy by domestic servants of a different race domiciled with an owner or tenant."

Carollo and Williams say these racial restrictive covenants are found all over Spokane County, including in the Comstock neighborhood on the South Hill, the Audubon neighborhood in northwest Spokane, and the Chester residential community in Spokane Valley.

In 1948, a U.S. Supreme Court ruling declared that racial restrictions as unenforceable. Twenty years later, the federal Fair Housing Act banned discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, or national origin. In 1969, racially restrictive covenants in Washington state were made illegal and void.

Even though such covenants have been obsolete for decades, Vista's restrictive-covenant modification is an important service to provide today, Williams says. 

"It's part of our history, and we need to take a historical marker on what happened, but there's no reason to have this racist language on the title," says Williams, who isn't affiliated with Vista Title. "People have the right to remove these."

Williams learned about discriminatory housing practices in Spokane neighborhoods from her uncle Tommy Fletcher, who moved to Spokane from Arkansas in the 1950s to work on the construction of Interstate 90. 

Her uncle's story is documented in a 2014 interview on the Spokane Historical website, which is part of a public history project at Eastern Washington University. In his interview, Fletcher described how he faced housing discrimination and experienced racial tension after settling in Spokane's East Central neighborhood.

Despite the unfair treatment Fletcher received, Williams says her uncle remained pragmatic about his circumstances in that, while he knew his treatment wasn't OK, he would rather focus on the positive changes the city was making.

In 2020, as protests advocating for racial equality made headlines across the nation, Williams says she was inspired to research Spokane's history of discrimination.

"I just started walking around the East Central neighborhood, and you can see the differences in the size and style of homes," she says, adding that she discovered the reason for the differences was due to discrimination and redlining, which is typically defined as a discriminatory practice of denying services, such as loans or insurance, to residents in certain areas based on race.

In response to her discovery of the history of discrimination here, Williams says she makes a point to show homes to people of color in communities they previously weren't welcomed in.

"Spokane has always been a marker for a lot of process changes being made," Williams says.

In 2018, Washington state revised its previous law to give property owners the right to declare affirmatively the restrictive covenants as void by filing a restrictive-covenant modification.

Carollo says he was inspired to find a solution for homebuyers to take advantage of the change after attending an annual meeting of the Washington Land Title Association about a year ago. 

"Somebody in the group mentioned a small number of these (modifications) have been recorded around the state," Carollo says.

At the time, 105 modifications had been filed formally in Washington state, of those, 95 modifications were recorded for properties from only one neighborhood in Tacoma, Washington, Carollo says.

One person was credited with helping 95 other residents identify the illegal racial restrictions attached to their properties and helped them legally file for a title modification, he says.

Five years after the 2018 change in Washington state law, the number of filed modifications seemed low, Carollo recalls.

"Do people not care? Do they not know about the law? Do they not know what to do?" Carollo recalls wondering at the meeting. "I've just been wrestling with that for the past year. Why don't people take advantage of the law that allows them to make a declaratory statement that these illegal covenants are now void as to this piece of real estate?"

He says the low number of filings came down to many homebuyers who have never read the restrictive covenants, or if they became aware of the illegal restrictions attached to their property, the homeowners likely didn't know what to do about it, and many were also unaware of the 2018 law.

"I realized as I was thinking about all of that, that we have experts on staff that see the racial restrictions," he says. "We don't even have to do anything, we can just program the system. When we find it, we tag it, it prints, we present it at the signing for the buyer and all they have to do is sign and we can record it at no charge."

"It was this light bulb moment (that) we can fix it one transaction at a time, and we can just take care of it as part of the closing," Carollo adds. "We're already preparing all the documents for the sale transaction, and it seems that the seller isn't necessarily motivated to fix it on their way out the door. But if the buyer wants it fixed on their way in, that's an easy thing to do."

Carollo says he doesn't expect the availability of the new modification to impact business.

"I'm not thinking about it that way," he says. "Our values as a company are care, clarity, and cultivation, and this idea of fixing the record just fits within our values. It shows the community that we care and it shows our staff we care about this."

By providing the modification, Carollo explains that buyers who opt to file a title modification are providing clarity "that never again will their property be restricted from somebody with different skin. If it brings another order, great. If not, that's fine too."