John Taylor, Professor of Economics at Stanford University and developer of the "Taylor Rule" for setting interest rates | Stanford University
John Taylor, Professor of Economics at Stanford University and developer of the "Taylor Rule" for setting interest rates | Stanford University
When Dan Ho bought a home in Palo Alto, he was confronted with outdated racial restrictions. “We had to sign papers that said that the ‘property shall not be used or occupied by any person of African, Japanese or Chinese or any Mongolian descent,’ except for the capacity of a servant to a White person,” Ho shared. This clause, though unenforceable since 1948, highlights persistent housing discrimination.
California's 2021 law requires counties to identify and redact such racial covenants from deed records. Santa Clara County alone has millions of documents dating back to 1850. Assistant County Clerk-Recorder Louis Chiaramonte noted the difficulty: “Prior to this collaboration, our team manually read close to 100,000 pages over weeks to identify racial covenants.”
While some counties employed commercial vendors, others relied on volunteers. However, Santa Clara County collaborated with Stanford University's Regulation, Evaluation, and Governance Lab (RegLab) using AI technology. Chief Operating Officer Greta Hansen praised the partnership: “We’re grateful for our partnership with Stanford, which has helped the County substantially expedite this process.”
Stanford’s team trained an open language model for identifying racial covenants with near-perfect accuracy. Co-lead author Faiz Surani explained its efficiency: “We estimate that this system will save 86,500 person-hours and cost less than 2% of what comparable proprietary models would have.” The project focused on deeds from 1902-1980.
The team also linked historical maps with administrative records for geolocation purposes. Chiaramonte expressed surprise at their success: “Of all the items coming out of the state law, we thought that mapping could have been nearly impossible.”
Their findings included estimates that one in four properties in Santa Clara County had racial covenants as of 1950 and identified ten developers responsible for a significant portion of these covenants. They also uncovered a racially restrictive burial policy at a San Jose-owned cemetery.
Mirac Suzgun described the initiative as an effective academic-government collaboration: “This is a compelling illustration...to make this kind of legislative mandate much easier to achieve.” Chiaramonte echoed this sentiment: “This collaboration paved a new path for how we can use technology...”
The research paper is available at https://reglab.github.io/racialcovenants/, offering tools for jurisdictions addressing similar tasks.
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