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Questions by Administrator Zikmund and responses by Mapping Prejudice Project Director Kirsten Delegard regarding Racial Covenants 1. Have all properties in Mounds View had their property title/deeds checked? Multi -family, commercial, industrial? Our goal is complete eradication of racial covenants. No, we have not searched all properties in Mounds View. We have checked all property records provided from Ramsey County from 1900 through 1960. This was the period when racial covenants were most likely to be put in place. Racial covenants ran with the land, which means that they remained in place even as the use of different parcels shifted. But I would say that we rarely see covenants put into place on commercial properties. These racist deeds were a tool that was used to segregate residential neighborhoods. We are still working through some previously missing records from Ramsey County, so it's possible some more covenants in Mounds View will be uncovered. While our technical process is very capable, it is also possible for us to miss racial covenants due to poor image quality on the original records or OCR errors that miss racial terms. And finally, properties that did not exist until after 1960 would not have been included in the search. While racial covenants have been legally unenforceable and, in Minnesota, illegal to put in place since 1953, we have seen a few new covenants seemingly being added as late as 1962. Please note that it is not possible to completely eradicate racial covenants. While discharge is a symbolic action that can signal a property owners desire to renounce this history, and while on Torrens properties discharge will generally prevent future buyers from encountering racial language, the original record of a racial covenant will and should remain in historic property records. Discharge will also not eradicate the impacts of racial covenants, which are still very much with us today. When our collaborators in Just Deeds talk to folks about discharge, they emphasize that it's important to think about this act as the first step to acknowledge and address this history. Our hope is that this will open up more conversations about structural barriers for people who are not White and all the things that we need to do in the present day to dismantle those barriers. 2. Can you explain the concentration of covenants on our NW quadrant of the City given the North East quadrant represent our oldest homes (NW are second oldest). One would think there would be covenants there? The presence of racial covenants is closely tied to chronology. The earliest covenant that we've found in Minnesota was put into place in 1910. But the first big wave of covenants in the Twin Cities crests in 1925. After that, the real estate market starts to crash and really plummets with the start of the Great Depression. Home construction slows to a trickle in that decade. Then it booms after World War II, which is when you see the growth of suburbs like Mounds View and returning soldiers taking advantage of GI Bill loans and new construction. Non -white and particularly Black veterans often struggled to