The deed is a document of ownership. It records dimensions and legal descriptions, easements and rights-of-way, the chain of hands through which a parcel of land has passed. Most buyers receive it at closing and file it away. Few read the older language buried inside — the clauses written not to protect property, but to control who could live on it.
Across Long Island, from the Gold Coast estates of Nassau County to the postwar subdivisions of Suffolk, racially restrictive covenants were written into residential deeds throughout the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. They were not aberrations. They were instruments of design — engineered to prevent Black Americans, Jewish families, and other groups from purchasing homes in communities that were, in the language of the era, being “protected.” They were struck down as unenforceable by the Supreme Court in 1948 in Shelley v. Kraemer (334 U.S. 1) and explicitly outlawed by the Fair Housing Act of 1968 (42 U.S.C. § 3604). They cannot be enforced. They remain, however, written in the record.
Understanding what covenants were, what legal weight they carry today — none — and what resources exist for reading a neighborhood’s layered legal history is part of knowing what you are truly buying. For first-time buyers in particular, this history deserves a direct accounting.
What Covenants Were, and How They Worked
A restrictive covenant is a binding condition attached to a deed that limits how the property may be used or by whom. Legitimate covenants still exist and still function: they prevent a homeowner from subdividing a lot without approval, restrict commercial activity in residential zones, or require architectural consistency in a planned community. Homeowners’ associations routinely employ them.
The racially restrictive variety operated through the same legal mechanism, but with a different purpose. Developers and neighborhood associations included language in deeds specifying that the property could not be “sold, leased, rented, or occupied” by anyone outside a defined group — typically white Christians of Northern European descent, with Jewish families and Black Americans most often and explicitly excluded. Some covenants named nationalities. Some simply named races. All of them had the same function: to make exclusion a matter of property law.
On Long Island, this practice was widespread and documented. Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law (2017, Liveright Publishing) traces how restrictive covenants, combined with Federal Housing Administration redlining policies, systematically prevented Black families from purchasing homes in the postwar suburbs that would define the American middle class for a generation. Long Island was not incidental to that story — it was one of its central chapters. Researchers at Hofstra University and Stony Brook University have both examined the mechanics of housing discrimination on Long Island, and their findings trace the covenants through deed records across Nassau and Suffolk Counties.
The practice was not fringe. It was mainstream, legally supported by the courts until 1948, and enthusiastically adopted by developers, civic associations, and local governments alike.
Shelley v. Kraemer and the Law as It Stands
In 1948, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in Shelley v. Kraemer that racially restrictive covenants, while legal as private agreements, could not be judicially enforced. The Court found that enforcement by state courts would constitute state action in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. Two decades later, the Fair Housing Act of 1968 made discrimination in the sale or rental of housing on the basis of race, color, national origin, religion, sex, familial status, or disability a federal civil rights violation.
What this means for a buyer today: if you encounter a racially restrictive covenant in the chain of title of a property you are considering — and on Long Island, in homes built before 1950, you may — that language is void. It carries no legal force. It cannot be enforced by any party. Its presence in a historical deed is a document of its era, not an instruction.
New York State reinforced this through the Restrictive Covenant Modification Act, which provides a mechanism for homeowners to formally discharge void discriminatory covenants from their deeds — replacing the language with a legal declaration of its unenforceability. It is a record-keeping remedy, not a legal necessity. But for buyers who want the document of ownership to reflect the law as it actually stands, the option exists.
This post is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. For questions specific to your title or deed history, consult a licensed New York real estate attorney.
What You May Encounter in a Title Search
A thorough title search traces a property’s ownership history — typically back forty to sixty years, sometimes further. The title examiner is looking for liens, easements, gaps in the chain of ownership, and unresolved claims against the property. They are not specifically looking for discriminatory covenants, and they are not required to flag them. But they may appear.
If your attorney or title company surfaces a restrictive covenant in the chain of title, the questions worth asking are:
Is this covenant currently enforceable? The answer, for any racially restrictive covenant, is no. A competent real estate attorney will confirm this immediately.
Does it affect the property in any practical way? In nearly all cases, historical discriminatory covenants impose no practical limitation on your ownership, use, or future sale of the property.
Do I want to formally discharge it from the record? Under New York’s Restrictive Covenant Modification Act, you may petition to have void discriminatory language formally struck from the deed. This is an elective process — a meaningful one for many buyers, and worth discussing with your attorney.
Does any other language in this covenant still function? Older deeds sometimes contain both discriminatory and non-discriminatory restrictions bundled together. A setback requirement or lot coverage restriction in the same document as a void racial covenant may still be legally operative. Parse them separately. Your attorney should.
The Covenant Mapping Movement
Several Long Island municipalities and academic institutions have undertaken covenant mapping projects in recent years — systematic efforts to identify which parcels of land carry discriminatory deed language in their historical record. These projects are part documentation, part reckoning. They are not punitive toward current owners; the law settled that question in 1948. They are, rather, an effort to make visible a pattern that shaped where Long Island families could and could not live for the better part of a century.
The Nassau County Human Rights Commission has published guidance on housing discrimination history and resources for current homeowners. Researchers affiliated with both Hofstra University and Stony Brook University have produced academic work tracing the geography of Long Island’s covenant system. If you are purchasing in a community where this history is documented, reading that scholarship — available through both institutions’ libraries and online research portals — provides context that no listing description will offer.
This is not a reason to avoid a neighborhood. It is a reason to understand one.
What Buyers Should Take From This
First-time buyers are often told to read the inspection report carefully, to understand the terms of their mortgage commitment, to budget for closing costs they didn’t anticipate. Those are all true. What is less often said: the deed itself is a historical document as much as a legal one. The land beneath a North Shore home has its own record — who owned it, what conditions were placed on it, and in some cases, who was legally prevented from buying it.
None of that history changes what a property is today. It does not diminish a house’s architecture, or the quality of its school district, or the view across the Sound from its back porch. But it is part of the full account of what a buyer is acquiring — and buyers who come to the table with that knowledge ask better questions, read their documents more carefully, and carry a clearer sense of the ground beneath them.
At Maison Pawli, I work with buyers across the North Shore — in communities with layered, complicated histories, in new construction where the legal record is thin and clean, and everywhere in between. The conversation about what you are buying has always been, for me, a wider one than the listing description allows. It includes the deed. It includes the history written into it. And it includes your right, as a buyer, to understand all of it before you sign.
Resources
- Shelley v. Kraemer, 334 U.S. 1 (1948) — Supreme Court opinion via Cornell LII
- Fair Housing Act of 1968, 42 U.S.C. § 3604 — Full text via Cornell LII
- Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America — Liveright Publishing, 2017
- New York State Division of Human Rights — dhr.ny.gov
- Nassau County Human Rights Commission — nassaucountyny.gov/agencies/HRC
- Stony Brook University — Center for the Study of Inequalities, Social Justice, and Policy — published research on Long Island housing segregation
- New York State Restrictive Covenant Modification Act — consult a licensed New York real estate attorney for guidance on the discharge petition process
Real estate markets change. This post reflects conditions as of April 2026. For current listings and market data, contact Pawli at Maison Pawli.
