How Prevalent Were Racially Restrictive Covenants in 20th Century Philadelphia? A New Spatial Data Set Provides Answers

Larry Santucci

No 19-5, Consumer Finance Institute discussion papers from Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia

Abstract: One of the tools used by early 20th century developers, builders, and white homeowners to prevent African Americans from accessing parts of the residential real estate market was the racially restrictive covenant. In this paper, we present a newly constructed spatial data set of properties in the city of Philadelphia with deeds that contained a racially restrictive covenant at any time from 1920 to 1932. To date, we have reviewed hundreds of thousands of property deeds and identified nearly 4,000 instances in which a racial covenant had been included in the deed. The covenanted properties formed an invisible barrier to less densely populated areas sought after by white residents and around predominantly white neighborhoods throughout the city. We present the data in a series of geospatial maps and discuss plans for future enhancements to the data set.

Keywords: racially restrictive covenants; exclusionary zoning; segregation; race; property; Philadelphia (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J15 K11 K25 R12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 35 pages
Date: 2019-11-18
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his, nep-law and nep-ure
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.philadelphiafed.org/-/media/frbp/asset ... n-papers/dp19-05.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fip:fedpdp:19-05

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from

DOI: 10.21799/frbp.dp.2019.05

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Consumer Finance Institute discussion papers from Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Beth Paul ().