Washington Gov. Jay Inslee signed legislation last week that will tax documents filed with county auditors to provide a form of reparations to victims of past housing discrimination.
KING 5 News, a Seattle TV station, described it here as a “$100 processing fee for homebuyers,” but the law says here that county auditors must collect $100 per document recorded, which includes liens, plats, and surveys, in addition to deeds and titles, so it covers more than home sales.
Also, a typical real estate transaction involves recording multiple documents, (e.g. deed and mortgage documents), so this law will add hundreds of dollars to the cost of purchasing a home. The fee goes into effect January 1, 2024.
According to KING 5 News, the fee is expected to raise $150 million a year to help victims of racial convenants and their descendants buy homes. They’ll get loans from the program for down payments and closing costs that must be repaid when the home is sold.
Eligibility is limited to “first-time homebuyers,” as defined by the law, who resided in Washington before April 11, 1968, and their descendants, and were or would’vee been “excluded from homeownership in Washington state by a racially restrictive real estate covenant” before that date. That’s when racial covenants became legally unenforceable.
Before then, racial covenants were commonplace, and were used by developers to create whites-only neighborhoods. (One such neighborhood was Seattle’s Queen Anne Hill area.) The practical effect was to create segregated housing in cities and suburbs.
What this law does is tax today’s homebuyers for housing discrimination that occurred 55 years and longer ago. Like all race-based reparations proposals, this law is premised on the conclusion that lingering effects of long-ago racism by now-dead generations still affect those living today.
Needless to say, race-based reparations are a touchy subject, and a hot political issue. A California commission recently recommended paying cash reparations to descendants of slaves, which PBS News reported here could cost the state $800 billion, an impossible sum. California was never a slave state, but pre-statehood slavery existed there, mostly when southerners brought slaves with them during the gold rush to work the mines. Long before that, Spaniards enslaved Native Americans in present-day California.
The Washington law takes the form of in-kind reparations, rather than direct cash distributions. Its supporters hope it will help address present-day problems of homelessness, substandard housing. and wealth inequities. It’s based on the assumption that owning a home remains an essential part of the “American Dream.”