IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/aea/aecrev/v101y2011i3p360-65.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Covenants without Courts: Enforcing Residential Segregation with Legally Unenforceable Agreements

Author

Listed:
  • Richard R. W. Brooks

Abstract

Racial restrictive covenants are private agreements prohibiting sale, rental, use or occupancy of properties by persons of designated races, ethnicities, nationalities and religions. Widely acknowledged for facilitating residential segregation, the Supreme Court ruled covenants unenforceable in 1948. Yet they remained legal to write and reference, allowing realtors, banks, insurers, title companies and government agencies to continue to rely on unenforceable covenants in their decisions and policies. Beyond legal enforceability, covenants were essentially signals that coordinated the behavior of a variety of private individual and institutional actors--signals that remained effective without the courts. Evidence is presented to support this claim.

Suggested Citation

  • Richard R. W. Brooks, 2011. "Covenants without Courts: Enforcing Residential Segregation with Legally Unenforceable Agreements," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 101(3), pages 360-365, May.
    • Handle: RePEc:aea:aecrev:v:101:y:2011:i:3:p:360-65
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.aeaweb.org/articles.php?doi=10.1257/aer.101.3.360
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to AEA members and institutional subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Allison Shertzer & Tate Twinam & Randall P. Walsh, 2016. "Race, Ethnicity, and Discriminatory Zoning," American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, American Economic Association, vol. 8(3), pages 217-246, July.
    2. Trevor Kollmann & Simone Marsiglio & Sandy Suardi & Marco Tolotti, 2021. "Social interactions, residential segregation and the dynamics of tipping," Journal of Evolutionary Economics, Springer, vol. 31(4), pages 1355-1388, September.
    3. Shertzer, Allison & Twinam, Tate & Walsh, Randall P., 2022. "Zoning and segregation in urban economic history," Regional Science and Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 94(C).
    4. Swope, Carolyn B. & Hernández, Diana, 2019. "Housing as a determinant of health equity: A conceptual model," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 243(C).

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:aea:aecrev:v:101:y:2011:i:3:p:360-65. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Michael P. Albert (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/aeaaaea.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.