Supervisor Justin Cummings poses for a portrait in his office on Friday, Sept. 19, 2025. He is working with the county’s recorder office to remove racist language from housing deeds. (Amaya Edwards —Santa Cruz Local/CatchLight Local)

Editor’s note: This story first appeared on our Instagram page @thesantacruzlocal on Oct. 1. Follow for similar content.

SANTA CRUZ >> For decades, many property deeds in Santa Cruz County contained racist language restricting ownership to white people. Now, county staff are sifting through more than a century’s worth of documents to remove the language and learn where, when and how these restrictions shaped home ownership.

The effort is in response to a 2021 state bill that requires counties to search for and redact racial covenants in deeds that prohibit certain races and ethnicities from owning or renting a home or business.

In 1948, the U.S. Supreme Court said that the covenants were unenforceable, but they weren’t made illegal until the 1968 Fair Housing Act. Many deeds still include the racist language, including sentences that say someone cannot buy, rent or live in a house if they are not white.

“Some of the terms are really offensive,” said County Assessor-Recorder Sheri Thomas, and it’s “shocking to see those in a public record.”

It’s not yet clear how widespread the deed covenants were, or where they were concentrated locally, Thomas said. The few that Thomas has seen are in Scotts Valley, Aptos and near Twin Lakes State Beach, she said.

County Supervisor Justin Cummings has requested county staff to report back to the board of supervisors about the racial covenants it finds, and to ensure that the redacted deeds leave the racist language available for review, “versus just completely deleting it and then removing it from history,” he said.

While Cummings doesn’t believe racial covenants are to blame for the city’s housing affordability crisis, they may still have shaped the local housing market. Deeds that ban Black buyers “would be reflective of how we don’t see African Americans in home ownership in Santa Cruz abundantly,” he said.

Even without explicit racial restrictions, people of color are concentrated within different areas within the county –the Beach Flats neighborhood, which has a high risk of flooding, has the highest concentration of Latino residents, he said.

Although removing racist language may not materially change present-day patterns of racial inequality in housing access, it’s still a valuable effort, Thomas said, “so we can look and see how past practices have influenced what we have today, so that we don’t repeat mistakes.”

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