The Santa Barbara County Hall of Records is home to thousands of historical housing documents. Some contain racist and discriminatory language. 

The Santa Barbara County Clerk-Recorder’s office is working to change that. 

Since the passage of California Assembly Bill 1466 — a 2021 bill that required California counties to redact discriminatory language from property records — the office has redacted 129 restrictive covenants, which are property deeds or leases that contain unlawful and discriminatory restrictions on the use of county land.

“It’s shocking at first, and then you see it was not an anomaly,” said Melinda Greene, chief deputy clerk recorder.

She even found out that a “modern” building she drives by every day “in the main part of Santa Barbara” once had restrictive language in its documents.

“It’s important for us to understand that it’s not 100 years ago. This is in the ‘60s,” she added.

Greene said even before the legislation was put into effect, she “knew there were rumblings of a potential law” and started doing some preliminary work. 

Facing funding challenges, Greene turned to community partners like Santa Barbara City College and Santa Barbara Trust for Historic Preservation.

“One of the challenges I had was that I wasn’t given any funding to do it,” Greene said. “We didn’t have any ability to work on this ourselves with staff and clearly, it is a lot.”

The two entities received funding through California’s Stop the Hate grant and used the money to staff and advance the project. 

The project team parsed through thousands of housing documents, beginning with documents from 1958 through 1974. They used optical character recognition (OCR), which converts images of printed text documents into searchable text. 

Once a restrictive covenant is identified and a redaction is approved by the Santa Barbara County Counsel – the legal advisor to the County Board of Supervisors – a dark box covers the words and a new document, a restrictive covenant modification form, is paired with the original. 

“All the racist covenants recorded in the 1950s will still be available to view,” Greene said, explaining that the new form will point and reference the historical document that includes the redaction. The deed will still be intact, except for the redacted portion, she said.

“This needs to be done. It is a step forward and making amends and telling a story of what happened, helps people understand the amends that we have to make,” Greene said. 

UC Santa Barbara alumna Fleurette Juda worked on the project as an intern about two years ago. She analyzed dozens of documents using roughly 20 keywords. 

“It’s really dark and disgusting, and there were a lot of variations,” she said. 

Going through the documents hit close to home for her, she said.

“My paternal side is Jewish and my great-grandparents couldn’t buy a home in Los Angeles because of a restrictive covenant,” Juda said. 

Juda and Greene said the OCR wasn’t entirely accurate because it would sometimes bring up “false hits” where it would flag any use of the keywords.

“It could pull up army discharge or marital records,” Juda said. “It definitely was a really big job, and a lot of staring at documents and trying to discern what is what.”

With the anti-discrimination grant money secured by the Trust, staff created five total exhibits. The latest, “Fine Print, Hard Lines: Housing & Exclusion in Santa Barbara,” covers the redaction process and California’s exclusionary laws.

It is currently on display at Casa de la Guerra in Santa Barbara. It will remain there through the end of July, according to Kevin McGarry, the Trust’s associate director for public engagement.

McGarry said displaying the exhibit at the museum at 15 E. De La Guerra St. was intentional because it makes it accessible to the public.

“We wanted to make sure we talked about what the county is doing, but we also wanted to talk about the lasting effects and legacies for people in minority communities,” McGarry said.

McGarry, who grew up in Santa Barbara, said it was difficult to confront the city’s racist past through this exhibit. 

“It’s hard for someone who knows Santa Barbara as this diverse community to think back to a time (when it wasn’t),” he said. 

Greene and McGarry hope the exhibit initiates conversations about the project’s contents while ensuring the area’s racist history isn’t written over.

“This means nothing if we just do it in a backroom and nobody knows that the records ever existed and they are cleaned up,” Greene said. “The Santa Barbara Trust for Historic Preservation is giving visibility to the project.”

The redaction process isn’t over. Greene and her team are still actively going through historical documents, now with the help of an artificial intelligence (AI) tool loaned to the county by the 2024 Stanford RegLab. 

The AI tool can better flag the keywords used in discriminatory contexts and has already been used in other counties, according to Greene. 

“Once we study the differences and learn a little bit more about the AI tool, we are going to go and do the rest of our inventory,” she said. “It will take years to do this. We are going back all the way to the beginning of our records.”

A panel with the project team and exhibit curators will take place at Casa de la Guerra on Sunday at 2 p.m.