Introduction

If the deeds in your neighborhood are encumbered by racial covenants and you’re ready to take action to revoke them, this “how to” guide may prove helpful.

In our case, the conversation was started by two news articles on the history of racist deed restrictions and redlining in Monroe County, one in the CITY Newspaper and the other in the Democrat & Chronicle.  Both articles featured Meadowbrook as an example of neighborhoods that excluded minorities through deed restrictions.

A neighbor first shared the City Newspaper article on the Meadowbrook Facebook Page asking “What would it mean to work as a neighborhood toward undoing our sad legacy?” Many neighbors joined the Facebook conversation and community organizers took steps as described below.

Establishing the committee

Organizers reached out to neighbors that had shown an interest on Facebook. We used an interest-gathering form created using Google Forms to simplify this phase. Once this process was started, neighbors recommended neighbors — “Do you know…?” — and a group of passionate, skilled, hard-working neighbors quickly came together and formed CORD.  Our committee grew as word spread, with neighbors offering their time and talent.

We organized an initial Zoom call to set goals / parameters for ourselves:

• Determine the role of the neighborhood association in this initiative.
• Scope: Decide whether to limit our work to revoking racist deed language or extend to further anti-racist activities such as updating neighborhood website history page, planning educational activities, and further actions to encourage a more inclusive neighborhood.
• Set timeline and priorities. 
• Find a time for a weekly Zoom call, the organizer sends out an invitation and distributes draft agenda day prior.

During our first meetings, we agreed that revoking the racist deed restriction would be our first order of business, but we agreed to pursue several education initiatives once that work was done. We saw the need to form subcommittees to help us divide the work, with responsibilities as follows:

• Legal:
  Do the research, write the deed amendment, support signature drive, file the amendment with the County Clerk’s Office.
• Signature Drive:
  Coordinate with legal and communications teams, create a record of all legal homeowners, coordinate signature events and volunteer notaries, create signature documents, keep track of who has and has not signed — spreadsheets!

• Communications:
  Formulate our message, use social media, neighborhood website, letter and phone drives to spread the word and keep neighbors updated on progress.
• Education:
  Educate neighbors on history of and impact from deed restrictions and redlining. Work with the local school district / educators to help young people understand this piece of our history.
• Fundraising:
  Determine costs — short term (recording costs) vs long term (education efforts). Devise a strategy for raising the money needed.

Some detail on each of these areas follows.

Legal

The Meadowbrook Neighborhood was able to revoke the discriminatory deed restriction based upon the terms of the original restrictions that were recorded in the Monroe County Clerk’s Office in 1929. Accordingly, this “how to” section will be beneficial to another neighborhood where the deed restrictions themselves provide a specific process by which they may be revoked or amended.

First, please know that the “restriction” won’t be found on the face of any one property owner’s deed. Rather, the deed restriction will likely be found in a document, oftentimes entitled a “Declaration of Restrictions” or “Declaration of Easements, Covenants and Restrictions.” Therefore, the first step in the process is to locate a copy of any such Declaration.

Such a Declaration will be found in an individual property owner’s Abstract of Title. An “Abstract of Title” is a document that contains an ownership history of a particular property, as well as any liens, restrictions or encumbrances affecting title to a particular property. Some homeowners may have their Abstract of Title located amongst their important documents at home, but the Abstract of Title is more often stored by the local abstracting company that prepared it. It has become common practice in the Rochester area in recent years to have Abstracts of Title stored by abstracting companies, so as to avoid the future expense of re-creating a lost Abstract of Title. Individual homeowners can contact the attorney who represented them when they closed on the purchase of their property to find out where their abstract is being stored.

Once the text of any Declaration of Restrictions is located, the document must be reviewed to determine if the document itself provides for the process by which any of the restrictions may be amended or revoked. The Declaration of Restrictions for the Meadowbrook neighborhood provided that any of the restrictions contained therein could be revoked by an instrument, duly acknowledged by three-fourths of property owners within the subdivision, and recorded in the Monroe County Clerk’s Office.

The next step in our process was to identify the universe of properties whose owners could sign the amendment for recording in the Monroe County Clerk’s Office. This was necessary to ascertain the number of signatures needed to meet the three-fourths threshold. The original Meadowbrook subdivision map was filed in the 1920’s and had been amended several times to provide for larger lots than originally provided under the original subdivision map. The Monroe County Clerk’s Office maintains all filed subdivision maps for public review. The Town of Brighton building department maintains copies of subdivision maps and amendments thereto and may also be a resource for determining which properties are part of a particular subdivision.

In Meadowbrook, we needed to ascertain whether Danbury Circle North and Danbury Circle South were subject to the original Meadowbrook Certificate of Restrictions. According to records at the Building Department for the Town of Brighton, Danbury Circle North and South were developed in the 1950’s as three separate subdivisions. We reviewed Abstracts of Title for properties on Danbury Circle North and South in each of the three subdivisions. Each had its own certificate of restrictions, separate and apart from the 1929 Certificate of Restrictions that affected the rest of the Meadowbrook neighborhood.

Once the universe of properties was determined, we drafted an amendment with “Wherefore” clauses that set out the history of the Meadowbrook subdivision, the 1929 Certificate of Restrictions, and the neighborhood’s desire to revoke the racially discriminatory restriction contained therein. Not only was the discriminatory restriction revoked and repudiated by the amendment, but inclusive language was incorporated to mirror the non-discrimination provisions applicable to current housing law in New York State and in the Town of Brighton.

Once we had collected the necessary number of signatures, we worked with Crossroads Abstract to assist with the filing of the Amendment in the Monroe County Clerk’s Office.

Please note that this guide applies to Certificates of Restrictions that enumerate the process by which such restrictions can be amended in the document itself. For certificates of restrictions that do not enumerate such a process, legal counsel will need to be consulted to determine the process by which such a certificate can be amended.

Signature Drive

Our deed restrictions themselves identify the process by which those restrictions may be modified, by creating “…an instrument duly acknowledged and recorded in Monroe County Clerk’s Office, signed by the owner of three-fourths of the lots of said tract…”. As our lawyer worked out the details of the amendment itself, we worked out a process for gathering the needed signatures.

Identifying Owners of the Houses in the Neighborhood
We created a spreadsheet to list the House Numbers, Streets and Owner(s)’s names. We stored this on a shared Google drive so that each committee member had access.

It was critical to identify the legal owner(s) of each property, so that we could get the proper signature(s) on the deed amendment. Owners can be found by entering each street address in the Monroe County Tax Property Site. If a house was recently sold, we checked the Monroe County Clerk’s site to find the new owners.

Where there were two owners shown on the deed, we listed them in separate columns to facilitate the mail merge that would produce the signature pages:

Creating the Signature Pages
Our lawyer furnished two documents early on: the deed amendment and a sample signature page. This separation helped us simplify the signature-gathering process, since we only needed to prepare and manage a single page for each household.

With the sample signature page in hand and the spreadsheet containing a list of House Numbers, Streets and Owner(s)’s names, we used mail merge to create and print a personalized signature page for each household. We used MS-Word to convert the sample signature page into a master document, which then drew personalization data from an Excel spreadsheet. While the specifics vary by your version of MS-Office and operating system, the general process is described here:
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/use-mail-merge-to-personalize-letters-d7686bb1-3077-4af3-926b-8c825e9505a3

If you don’t own MS-Office, LibreOffice is a free alternative that includes mail merge as well:
https://help.libreoffice.org/latest/en-US/text/swriter/guide/form_letters_main.html

Identifying the Neighborhood Notaries
In one of the communications, we asked for any notaries that could volunteer to help with this initiative. Six notaries volunteered to help.

Gathering the Signatures
We scheduled four different signing events: 2 hours each; 3 weekend days, 1 weekday evening. We had three notaries at each event to help with the signings and insure minimal waiting time. We had all of the unsigned forms in a binder and moved them to another binder once they were signed. We got the bulk of the signatures needed through these events, but we found it necessary to follow up with more people to get to the required percentage. To get the last batch of signatures needed, we scheduled the notaries to make house-calls. (All of this occurred outdoors and masked during the year of COVID.)

We kept track of who had signed in the Property Owners spreadsheet, to monitor the percentage signed and to know who to contact when communicating the signing events. As we found households who didn’t want to sign, we marked them so we knew not to contact them in the future.

Communication

Communication of our goals and our concrete steps was essential to both galvanizing support and coordinating the signature-gathering process. We developed a communication plan that used multiple channels including email, direct mail, phone calls, texts, and our shared social media page. We’ve included a repository of sample communications, in case it helps to make your communication strategy simpler. You can find it here, including our communication plan as well as phone/text campaign scripts.

As we had conversations around the neighborhood, at signature events, and on our phone drive, we developed FAQs around the most common concerns and questions: these included questions about whether this was simply a  symbolic gesture given that deed restrictions are no longer enforceable anyway; whether it would cost a lot; whether individuals could amend their own deeds and more.

In addition to the direct communication, we developed three new pages for our neighborhood website:

• an FAQ page that explains the CORD initiative in simple question-and-answer form
• a page that describes the CORD initiative in greater detail
• a page that explains how racial covenants worked in tandem with redlining to entrench segregated housing patterns and inequality in wealth accumulation in ways that persist to this day

Communications Sample Kit

We hope that providing a “sample kit” of the CORD communications we used throughout Meadowbrook’s campaign, we will make it easier for other neighborhoods to pursue similar goals. Please click this link to download a .zip file that contains sample communication plan, talking points, Facebook posts, flyers, reminder emails, progress reports, and more:
CORD_Communications_Sample_Kit.zip

The intent in providing our neighborhood history, the story of our CORD initiative, and the how-to guide, including the communications kit, is to provide the groundwork for other neighborhoods across Rochester and the United States to take this first step in addressing racial covenants in land deeds and their long lasting impact throughout the country.

The information in this site is further intended solely for the non-commercial use of the user who accepts full responsibility for its use. While we have taken every precaution to insure that the content of this site is both current and accurate, errors can occur.

The information in this site is general in nature and should not be considered legal, consulting or any other professional advice.

Planning Your Communication

It is our hope that having a neighborhood after which to model your own initiative, you can prepare your plan further in advance. To help the communication stream and calendaring, plan out at least four signature drives, at different times of day, and vary between weekend and weekdays.  From the established dates of events, create your communication plan. The sequencing we established was:

1. Two or three days before each event:
   1. Email the neighborhood (taking advantage of a mature email list managed by the Meadowbrook Neighborhood Association). Make sure the subject line drives open rates. Include a clear call to action, clear directions, and contact for questions. This email went to the neighborhood members who had not yet signed, and excluded those who had signed as well as those who had clearly communicated they were not in support of the initiative. For a recommendation on an email platform, see below.
   2. Post to neighborhood Facebook or other social app. We created Facebook events as well as posts to the private neighborhood group.
   3. Phone/Text campaign:
      We enlisted neighborhood volunteers to call and text neighbors based on the owners list. The communication committee created pre-written scripts with the FAQs and time & date of the next event, to call those who had not yet signed. (More on this below).
2. Day of event:
   1. Social Media
      Post to social media and get the committee to like, comment and tag others in the post to remind the community.
   2. Sidewalk Chalk
      Get neighborhood kids to chalk up the neighborhood. Using sidewalk chalk, kids can write on corners, in the street, and in driveways– time, day of the week, and what street. This worked for the summer and fall seasons. Inclement weather may prohibit this opportunity to get neighborhood kids involved.
3. Day after each event:
   1. Email Progress Report/Follow-up on the event: This email included an update on how many total owners had signed, percent of goal met, and the details for the upcoming events. In the case we did not have an established next event, we still sent an update immediately to report on progress. These follow-up emails went to the entire neighborhood mailing list.
   2. Social Media: Post a short celebratory post, including pictures where possible. If using an html email platform, link to full progress report update from social media post. Include date and time of next event if known.
4. Reaching goal!
   1. Email update with thank you to everyone involved and the neighbors for showing up. Any details about what might be next for the neighborhood in forming a more equitable and inclusive neighborhood. This email was sent to the entire neighborhood mailing list.
   2. Social Media post with the same.

The pace of communications is quick. If possible, we would recommend writing the majority of the communications ahead of time, knowing what your sequencing of communications will be, so that when it’s time to get communications out, your work is to fill in the blanks and make small edits. Using the sequence above, your neighborhood could be prepared for four signature events, and prior to the fourth event, prepare communications as if you will meet the goal, as well as if you will need a follow-up event.

Direct Mail and Flyers

While we did not make heavy use of direct mail due to timing, if you have the budget, volunteer time, and timeline to do so, we would recommend using mail more frequently. For our initiative, the first direct mail piece sent was to start the campaign. We sent direct mail to the households not subscribed to the neighborhood association’s email list, and a few others who were known to not be active in email or social media. Mid-campaign, we used direct mail to drop off a notice about the next event, and included handwritten notes on the mass produced notice. We chose to deliver the mail by hand so that we could both have conversations with neighbors and answer any questions, and also to save postage and time.

Our phone tree volunteers also wrote personal notes to some of the neighbors on their lists, where it was hard to get a call through.

If we were to do this again, we would recommend more use of direct mail. Mass emails often get sent to SPAM folders or Promotions tabs, and calls often get sent to voicemail. Mail gets opened. 

Calling/Texting Campaign

In the early stages of planning for this initiative, we sent a survey to our neighbors via the Facebook page and also at our first signature gathering event, asking if they were interested in signing and if they wanted to volunteer in various capacities. One option for volunteering was to make calls to neighbors. Using the list of calling campaign volunteers, one person on the committee organized the group, affirming their interest in making calls, the number of calls they were comfortable making, and providing both a how-to guide/script as well as a list of owners who had not signed yet. While lists were provided to each volunteer with a place for note-taking, we would provide more substantial direction on what information callers should collect, including:

• wrong number (WN), 
• voicemail left (VM),
• willing to participate and plans to show up at a signing event (Y and indicate which event),
• willing to participate and needs further assistance (Y with notes as to specific needs, e.g. future event availability, home visit required, one homeowner out of town, etc.),
• unwilling to participate (N, include details about neighbors concerns and mark line in red to alert no additional contact).

And we would encourage more detailed note taking as all information gathered will help the committee determine how to best track down remaining willing participants.  If your neighborhood has a directory that includes both landlines and cell phones, we recommend including both and indicating which is which. The volunteers that texted rather than called had greater success of response.

List creation and clarity is of utmost importance in this part of the campaign. It would be our recommendation that one volunteer on the neighborhood committee be only responsible for creating the lists, maintaining the lists and coordination of the volunteers. We were running our campaign at the end of a presidential election cycle, and therefore were competing with political calls and texts as well. We imagine that response rates may be affected by the election cycle, and would increase outside of such a high call traffic time.

Email Platform Recommendation

If you do not already have a mailing list for your neighborhood, we cannot recommend MailChimp highly enough, for the following reasons:

• MailChimp makes it easy to build your list, with convenient import support as well as support for embedding a subscription form on your neighborhood’s website.
• MailChimp makes list maintenance easy. MailChimp automatically removes bouncing addresses from the list, and subscribers can update their own email addresses as required.
• MailChimp makes sending messages to the list easy and reliable, with useful and attractive templates and a record of high deliverability.
• MailChimp is free to use for low-volume applications like a neighborhood list.

Fundraising

Our lawyer told us to expect the Monroe County Clerk’s office to charge a recording fee of approximately $1,500 — $5 for the amendment plus $5 each for the 288 homeowner signature pages. We established a PayPal link and asked the neighbors to donate what they could ($5, $10, $15, $25). We created QR codes for the PayPal payment link and made them available during the signature gathering events. During each event we had a “donation jar” for cash or check donations. We explained that any funds collected in excess of the recording costs would be used to fund future CORD Initiative activities. An anonymous donor offered a matching gift to encourage donations, and we raised enough to cover our estimated costs.

The Meadowbrook Neighborhood Association (MNA) facilitated the small donation fundraising by allowing us to use the association’s PayPal account and bank account. The treasurer kept a separate record of all CORD donations. We felt it important not to spend any MNA funds raised through annual dues as CORD was not on the horizon when neighbors paid their dues. The MNA will write the check to Monroe County.

We are also speaking with ESL Federal Credit Union, as there is a historic link between Meadowbrook and what was Eastman Savings and Loan — both were established by Eastman Kodak, and ES&L facilitated home purchases based on restrictive practices. We are currently seeking funding for education initiatives.  Several banks in Monroe County have been engaging in this conversation, addressing their role in redlining practices.

Closing the Loop

Once the amendment has been filed with the County Clerk, we plan on printing it and delivering a copy to each house that signed. The new amendment can also be found on the neighborhood website. Once it is filed with the County Clerk’s Office, we will send the link to the neighborhood.

Education

We see this deed amendment as the beginning of our work, not the end. Removing the “whites only” sign does not automatically lead to transformation. We are working to hold a neighborhood meeting to address next steps. We aim to work with town partners such as the Brighton Central School District, Brighton Memorial Library, and the Brighton Town Council Inclusion, Diversity, and Equity Advisory (IDEA) Board to share this history, share this process, and determine additional steps forward.   

Still Have Questions?

We’d love to see other communities remove restrictive covenants from their deeds. If you have “how-to” questions with which we can help, please contact Stacia Rush at stacia@frontiernet.net.

Last updated: December 2020