The working people of Los Angeles are people who do not believe in much until they see it. Here is a recovered Deed Restriction from Los Feliz, circa 1926, reading, on Paragraph 11:
“This property…subject to the following conditions…That said property or any part thereof shall not, nor shall any interest therein at any time, be rented, leased, sold, devised or conveyed to or inherited by, or be otherwise acquired by or become the property of or be occupied by any person whose blood is not of the Caucasian Race, but persons not of the Caucasian Race may be kept thereon by such a Caucasian occupant strictly in the capacity of servants of such occupant.”
The image is taken from Cal State University Northridge’s LA: On Film and On Record series.
Since 1926, the Los Feliz neighborhood has grown in diversity, but according to a study of the 90027 zip code, in which Los Feliz is situated, as recently as 2018, 59% of the neighborhood remains white. Latino and Asian residents make up 21% and 13% of the neighborhood’s population, while Black residents make up only 3% of the population. The data make Los Feliz one of the more segregated neighborhoods with respect to the city of L.A.’s current demographics.
To learn more about deed restrictions and housing in Los Angeles, you can now RSVP for Making Our Neighborhood: Redlining, Gentrification, and Housing in East Hollywood, our panel series with This Side of Hoover, via EVENTBRITE.
J.T.
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[…] U.S. Supreme Court decision in Shelley vs Kraemer (1948), in which that court outlawed racial deed restrictions as unconstitutional (emphasis […]
[…] In effect, over the three decades that Los Angeles transformed from its sleepy rancho days to one of the 10 most populous cities by 1910, counties and states across the U.S., including in the north and south, were transforming the right to access within city limits to serve white supremacy. It was only a matter of time before these issues intersected with the city, and did they ever. As Mike Davis noted about East Hollywood’s neighbors one mile north towards Griffith Park: “The first Homeowner’s Associations in Los Angeles, beginning with the Los Feli[z] Improvement Association in 1916, were the children of deed restrictions in a new kind of planned subdivision…” By “subdivision,” Davis means divided plots of land which by and large belonged to white people, quite a few of whom had every intention to keep things as such. […]
[…] neighborhood to the north of East Hollywood–stated in their clauses that only members of the “Caucasian Race” were allowed to own property in the area, Black residents there and in East Hollywood face the […]