SUBURBS

So, why do the metro area’s communities look the way they do? e answer isn’t completely clear, but two map experts have delved into local property records, uncovering data that could help start to answer that question.

ey’re trying to discover what many have either forgotten or swept under the rug about parts of the metro area — or simply never knew.

ey’re digging in at the neighborhood level, looking for words in property documents — called “racially restrictive covenants” — that excluded people from housing by race. ey’re looking to discern the legacies that still echo in communities today.

Christopher iry, a map librarian at Colorado School of Mines in Golden, is one of the diggers. Discovering the covenants in Je erson County shocked him.

“ at blew me away that this rural county at the time would have them,” iry said. “As I tell people, ‘Yeah, the suburbs of Birmingham, Alabama, sure. But Je erson County? Come on.’” iry has examined about 1,000 Je erson County documents and found nearly 200 had some kind of race-based stipulation. He looked at documents from the 1860s to 1950, though most of them were from the 1910s to 1950.

‘Only persons of the Caucasian race’ iry, a longtime resident of Golden, took inspiration from the “Mapping Prejudice” project, an effort at the University of Minnesota to identify and map racial covenants.

He jumped into his work after the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police o cer. e mapping is a tedious task of sifting through mostly mundane, uncontroversial rules, like how many feet a house must sit away from the road or bans on billboards in front of homes.

Speci cally, he has pored over “plats,” or plans for new neighborhoods. e plat for one neighborhood — Cole Village, located along Colfax Avenue near Kipling Street in what’s now Lakewood — had this to say:

“Only persons of the Caucasian race shall use or occupy any building or any lot. is covenant shall not prevent use or occupancy by domestic servants of a di erent race.” e document was registered with the county in 1945. at type of racebased language is now unenforceable but remains on o cial plats, property deeds and other documents, according to iry.

It wasn’t just developers who pushed such language, iry said.

Local elected and appointed ofcials of the government of Je erson County signed the documents, iry added.

He singled out some other examples: iry has used his ndings to make a map of the parts of Je erson County where race-based rules were baked into the original plans of the housing developments. iry is wary that he may have missed pieces. ough the map is a work in progress, it already has him wondering how the covenants still in uence lives today.

• “Ownership in this subdivision shall be restricted to members of the Caucasian race,” says a planning document for Sunshine Park in Golden at Sunshine and High parkways, dated 1944.

• “Stipulate that no lot at any time shall be occupied or owned by any person or persons not of the Caucasian races. However, this provision shall not prohibit the employment of persons of other races by the occupants,” says the plan for Green Acres along 6th Avenue in what’s now Lakewood, dated 1939.

• “No (area) shall at any time be occupied or owned by any person or persons of other than the Caucasian race, however, this shall not prohibit the employment of persons of other races on the premises by the occupants,” says the plan for Happy Valley Acres in the Golden area at South Golden Road and Orion Street, dated 1939.

• “ e said (land) shall (be) used for no other purpose than for the building and maintaining thereon and the occupancy thereof of private residences by Caucasians, and the erection of necessary outbuildings,” says a planning document for part of the Indian Hills area, dated 1923.

Many are concentrated in what are now the Wheat Ridge and Lakewood areas, with a handful dotting the Golden and Arvada region. Others sit in the Evergreen and Indian Hills areas.

It’s not yet a complete picture.

Beyond that, what can be done to right past wrongs.

His work has made one measurable impact. It has inspired the work of another mapper, Craig Haggit, a map librarian at Denver Public Library.

Haggit, who is looking into where racist restrictions lurked in the paperwork for housing in Denver, also wants to shed light on “the way forward” for communities.

“I feel like we can’t know where we’re going until we know where we’ve been and how we got there,” Haggit said. “Otherwise, you’re just (in) the dark.”

It could take years to look through all the documents. But so far, Haggit’s work has revealed racial restrictions in Denver that targeted people in “a mix” of ways.

“Sometimes, it’s excluding ‘Negro’ or ‘Asian’ or ‘Mongoloid’ or whatever terms they used. And sometimes it just says only White people” can live in a certain house, Haggit said.

His team at rst zeroed in on the 1930s because the Ku Klux Klan was so active in the 1920s in the metro area. Since he’s in the early stages of the research, Haggit is unsure which neighborhoods were home to large concentrations of racially restricted housing. ough he doesn’t know yet, Haggit expects that the neighborhoods that were not redlined — the ones deemed higher class — would have the restrictive deeds because they were trying to keep certain people out. e map re ected the view that people of certain backgrounds negatively a ected the values of homes.

One clue could be redlining, a term that refers to marking areas red on color-coded federal maps in the 1930s, re ecting the practice of restricting access to home loans in certain areas, partly based on race. at disparity stood in the way of homeownership for majority-Black areas and other groups in urban cities.

In Denver, redlining zeroed in on predominantly Black neighborhoods, but it also covered neighborhoods where other ethnic or religious groups were present, according to the Denver redline map as displayed by the “Mapping Inequality” project from the University of Richmond and other university teams.

Denver’s redlined areas at the time included some western parts of the city and areas that surrounded downtown. But the map also redlined a small part of Aurora along Colfax Avenue — and parts of west and central Englewood. (A sliver of Je erson County in the Edgewater area landed on the map too, though it was rated slightly higher in yellow.)

In Englewood, for example, an “encroachment of Negroes” in an area near what appear to be railroad tracks was listed under “detrimental in uences” in comments that accompany the map.

And for the Five Points area near downtown Denver, comments mention “Negroes, Mexicans and a transient class of workers.”

Just to the east, comments called the neighborhoods “a better Negro section of Denver” and “one of the best colored districts in the United States.”

“Were it not for the heavy colored population much of it could be rated” higher, the comments say, appearing to use the term “colored” to refer to residents who were not White.

E ects linger ‘to this day’ ough the picture isn’t entirely clear yet, what experts already know suggests that policies that deepened racial disparities in uenced the makeup of today’s suburbs.

One driver of suburban growth that was especially visible was the American GI Bill — or the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944 — that provided World War II veterans funding for college tuition and low- interest mortgages. But not everyone reaped the same rewards because of the covenants that the mappers at the local libraries are looking into, along with unequal access to GI Bill bene ts for White veterans compared with Black veterans. e disparities played into how largely White the demographics in the suburbs turned out to be, said Christy Rogers, a teaching assistant professor in the program for environmental design at the University of Colorado Boulder.

“ at has consequences for intergenerational wealth,” Rogers said.

In other words, though the descendants of White military veterans saw their homes rise in value over the decades, essentially becoming investments, many Black families encountered barriers and that had a ripple e ect as they could not pass down as much wealth to their children and grandchildren.

Rogers, who is White, knows this rsthand.

“My dad got the GI Bill, and he went to college and bought a house,” Rogers said. “So, our family could draw on our home value to send me to college.” e prevailing attitudes of racism at the time still may have made Black families feel unwelcome in certain neighborhoods, iry said. ere is evidence that the researchers are onto something. In Minnesota, researchers looking into Minneapolis and its suburbs discovered a “bonus value” persists today among White homeowners who bene ted from restrictive covenants.

It took decades for federal lawmakers to ban the practice of racially restrictive covenants. ey were banned in the months after the “long, hot summer” of 1967 — through the Fair Housing Act of 1968, which bars discrimination in the sale, rental and nancing of housing based on race, color, national origin, religion or sex. e act also prohibited redlining.

What’s left today is a puzzle in places like Je erson County, made even harder to discern after booming growth since the mid-1900s. It is di cult to tell how much past covenants shaped the suburbs, said iry, the Colorado School of Mines librarian.

“With that said, you cannot discard the fact that these covenants did exist,” iry said.

“We document that houses that were covenanted have on average 3.4% higher present-day house values compared to houses that were not covenanted,” according to a 2021 University of Minnesota study entitled, “Long Shadow of Racial Discrimination: Evidence from Housing Racial Covenants.” “We also nd that census blocks with a larger share of covenanted lots have smaller Black population and lower Black homeownership rates.” e study also noted, “the racial