You never know what you’re going to find when you dig into Covenants and Restrictions.
“1. No shop, store, trailer, temporary living structure, factory, hospital, asylum, institution, tourist home or business house of any kind, and no apartment house shall be erected or maintained on said property and said property shall be used solely for a single family residence.”
Read that again. Asylums?
Were asylums *really* that big of a threat in the 1960s in Albemarle County neighborhoods?
What are Covenants and Restrictions?
1.6 Covenants and Restrictions. “Covenants and Restrictions” means all covenants, conditions, restrictions, equitable servitudes, and all other similar matters now or hereafter affecting the Property, including any condominium, planned unit development, or cooperative apartment declaration of covenants, conditions and restrictions, by-laws, articles, rules, and regulations to which Trustor or the Property is subject or bound.
Shorter, simpler answer:
C&Rs are basically simple HOA rules without the HOA (usually), typically aren’t disclosed as HOAs are, you (or your agent) need to find them filed at the courthouse (or, at Nest, we have someone who does that electronically, and they are amazing) and the Covenants and Restrictions run with the land — meaning, they are deeded to the property, and whomever owns the land also agrees to abide by the C&Rs.
Some C&Rs are, in a word, bad. To use another word, racist.
To learn more about racist covenants and restrictions in Charlottesville and Albemarle, start at Mapping Cville.
For our first map, I’m plotting every single deed in the city that contains a racist covenant within it. (There are thousands.) These covenants prohibit the sale of homes to African-Americans. See clause #2 in the above deed in the Park Plaza neighborhood in North Downtown.
“No property in this subdivision shall be sold to any person not of the Caucasian race.”
This deed is from 1928, and yet here we are, 90 years later, and the vast majority of residents in this neighborhood are still white. As we’ll show throughout the life of this project, this isn’t by accident or coincidence.
Interested in Learning More?
Jim Duncan has been helping buyers and sellers in Charlottesville’s neighborhoods for 25 years. Get local insight born of experience.
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