Built for White people: The hidden racist history of some Pittsburgh neighborhoods

Evaline Street, photographed on April 1, 2024, leads into Sampson Acres, on the top distant right, originally a racially restricted subdivision divided in 1936 out of Sampson Farms, in Penn Hills. The home sale deeds originally forbade Black people from owning or living in the houses, unless employed there as servants. (Photo by Stephanie Strasburg/PublicSource)

Home sale deeds for some subdivisions, written as recently as the 1940s, barred the sales of those properties to Black buyers and sometimes other ethnic groups. A new law allows owners to repudiate such language, but echoes of the covenants remain.

by David S. Rotenstein, PublicSource

Imagine learning that the home where you grew up has a deed with language prohibiting Black people from buying or renting it.

In Pittsburgh and other cities — even less than a century ago — developers and individual homeowners included restrictions like this one, which appeared in deeds for properties within Charette Homes, a Sewickley subdivision: “No lot or lots in the aforesaid plan of lots, nor any building thereon, shall be used or occupied, or permitted to be used or occupied, by any natural persons other than members of the White or Caucasian Race, except that the premises may be occupied in part by bona fide domestic servants of another Race employed on the premises.”

PublicSource examined 18 subdivisions inside the city and in its suburbs in which race was a factor in determining who could live there. Some of these communities had deeds with explicit wording like the ones filed in the 1940s for Charette Homes. Others, like Pittsburgh’s Schenley Farms and Stanton Heights Manor, used contracts limiting sales to buyers approved by existing owners or the developer.

Interactive map: A history and virtual tour of some racially restricted neighborhoods in the Pittsburgh-area.

A picket fence frames green lawns, yellow flowers, and sidewalks in front of the tidy facades of the Charette Place homes. — Houses along Charette Place in the formerly racially restricted neighborhood of Charette Homes, photographed on April 2, in Sewickley. (Photo by Stephanie Strasburg/PublicSource)

Racially restrictive deed covenants were contracts that reinforced segregation. Along with redlining, they contributed to the creation of urban and suburban ghettos where Black people and other ethnic minorities were forced to live. The impacts went far beyond housing and may be seen in enduring inequities in education, health and employment.

Though racially restrictive covenants are still attached to properties, technically carrying through from one deed to the next, they have been unenforceable in the courts since 1948, thanks to a U.S. Supreme Court ruling. Last year, the Pennsylvania General Assembly passed a law making it possible for property owners to repudiate deeds with racially offensive language. But the effects of the covenants echo on: Many of the segregated subdivisions created in the 20th century remain mostly White.

The racial contract

Segregation gained a strong foothold in American society around the turn of the 20th-century. Jim Crow laws enabled transportation companies to separate passengers; hotel, restaurant and theater owners could deny service to non-white people or force them into segregated spaces; and racial zoning and the use of racially restrictive deed covenants gerrymandered landscapes into Black and white blocks and neighborhoods.

In an age when eugenics was a popular belief and when many people believed in cultural evolution, non-white people (and non-Christians) frequently were considered inferior and harmful — “nuisances” that were threats to property values and public health.

Historians have identified isolated examples of property deeds dating to the 1850s that excluded purchasers of specific races and ethnic origins. It wasn’t until the 1890s, though, and the creation of Baltimore’s Roland Park subdivision that white people deployed racially restrictive deed covenants across an entire planned community to exclude Black residents.