By JC Medina
In a late acknowledgment, the Thurston Board of County Commissioners proclaimed April 2025 as Fair Housing Month, highlighting both the ongoing importance of equitable access to housing and the county's efforts to confront the legacy of racially restrictive covenants.
Speaking before the board at a meeting on Tuesday, April 29, Mark Kitabayashi, president of the Thurston County Realtors Association, emphasized fair housing is important for all residents and is part of the “American dream,” whether buying or renting a home.
“Fair housing is important for all of us,” Kitabayashi said. “We all believe, regardless of your political affiliations … I think that everybody in this country should have an opportunity to have a roof over their head.”
Kitabayashi acknowledged a "dark history" for the Realtors Association, which campaigned against the 1968 fair housing law but is now a proponent.
“Hopefully, in the near future, we could say that unfair housing was history and fair housing is the norm,” said Kitabayashi, stressing that achieving fair housing requires collective effort.
Thurston County Auditor Mary Hall addressed the historical context of racially restrictive covenants, calling them a "painful legacy" of discrimination that shaped housing patterns and created segregated communities across the country and in Thurston County.
Despite being deemed illegal quite some time ago, Hall stated these covenants continued to be filed locally.
To address this, Hall said her office implemented an outreach program to help residents modify their land records to remove the restrictive language for free.
According to Hall, this effort was recognized with a national award.
A staff from the Auditor's Office provided details, stating an initial outreach in early 2021 identified around 300 parcels in approximately one-half dozen subdivisions with “racially restrictive covenants.”
The outreach involved direct, personal contact with landowners, providing step-by-step guidance.
The county program benefited from community support, with Olympia Federal Savings providing free notary services and Windermere Real Estate, through a partnership, offering free e-notary services.
The Thurston County Bar Association's inclusion and diversity section recruited volunteer lawyers to assist residents with completing forms.
Despite these initial efforts, the scale of the remaining work was underscored by recent research.
The Auditor's Office provided the University of Washington with its digital archive, allowing the university to use artificial intelligence to identify “restrictive covenants.”
This research expanded the understanding of the issue, identifying more than 1,600 restrictive properties across 35 subdivisions in Thurston County.
Hall stated while restrictive covenants are unenforceable, it is "important to actually get them removed to create healing in our community and people going forward looking at these documents don't feel a sense that they don't belong.”
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