Protection from Undesirable Neighbors: The Use of Deed Restrictions in Shaker Heights, Ohio

Stringent architectural and building restrictions were put in place as the Van Sweringen Company laid out Shaker Heights, Ohio, an exclusive planned community, incorporated in 1912. In 1925, as African Americans and Jews sought to purchase property there, the company devised and implemented a new restriction that, while containing no overtly discriminatory language, succeeded in achieving the company’s discriminatory objective. The company and, later, the City of Shaker Heights would continue to enforce this restriction well beyond 1948 when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled religious and racial covenants unenforceable.

What’s Good for George Sánchez Is Good for Boyle Heights: Regenerative Scholarship, Urban Racism, Gentrification, and East LA Interchange

The inclusive ideals of George Sánchez have helped shape a new generation of academics who have promoted connections with nonacademic organizations. This article discusses how Sánchez has continued these efforts through his pivotal contributions to an award-winning documentary focusing on the multiethnic, working-class community of Boyle Heights: Betsy Kalin’s film East LA Interchange (2015). East LA Interchange’s greatest contribution to the generative scholarship Sánchez emphasizes is its critical analysis of modern urban problems, utilizing history as a tool for social change. The story of Boyle Heights is not just a history of a single working-class community with a diverse culture. It is also a tale of a neighborhood trying to solve real world problems such as gentrification, unaffordable housing, community displacement, and urban pollution. The film portrays these difficulties in the present while showing that they originated decades ago. Sánchez and East LA Interchange are at their best when they provide the historical contexts of contemporary problems, emphasizing that history is not only the study of the past. Rather, history is the unending dialogue between the past, present, and future, and any significant discourse on today’s urban ills must be rooted in the past. For students and others interested in the diverse communities common in many US metropolitan regions, East LA Interchange has much to offer regarding the issues of immigration, redlining, deed restrictions, political activism, freeway construction, living with racially and ethnically diverse community members, and the nationwide problem of gentrification. These themes, especially gentrification, are the primary focus of this article.

International Real Estate Review

Residential community associations (common interest communities such as condominiums, cooperatives and planned unit developments, as well as properties subject to homeowners associations and architectural review boards) have become the dominant form of ownership for new United States single-family residential units. Community associations typically use covenants, conditions and restrictions (also known as CCRs, C&Rs, deed restrictions or covenants) to impose extensive private-ordered controls over unit owners. This empirical study uses regression analysis of a Web-based community association enforcement practices survey, concluding that more intense private-ordered enforcement is associated with increased unit value and decreased covenant violation levels. It also finds that judicial deference to private-ordered community association enforcement decisions is associated with higher value, and that some measures of social cohesion are associated with decreased covenant violation levels.

Real Estate Development and Urban Form: Roadblocks in the Path to Residential Exclusivity

Many real estate developers in the United States consciously attempted to shape residential neighborhoods, but their success in determining the spatial and social structure of communities was mixed. This article describes the methods available to land developers and realtors and examines the application of these tools to a section of Columbus, Ohio. It demonstrates that the intentions of deed restrictions and other private means of land use control were often undermined by construction delays, general economic conditions, and outmoded requirements, as well as by the timing of annexation and the subsequent application of public zoning ordinances.