If you were fortunate enough to complete a real estate transaction in our tight housing market since the beginning of 2024, you unknowingly participated in our state’s first of its kind racial reparations program. The benefits paid out under that program, referred to as the Covenant Homeownership Program, were extended by our legislature this year.

It’s a program initiated to address racism but that I believe perpetuates that very wrongdoing.

My maternal grandparents immigrated from Italy and lived with several other Italian families on a dead-end street running alongside the railroad tracks in a then rural area outside of Philadelphia. My grandfather’s race was noted as “Italian” on his selective service card. Just down the road, on another dead-end street, lived the town’s few Black families. I don’t know if the relegation of the town’s Italians and Blacks to their respective dead-end streets was done by force of law or practice.

But I understand somewhat the practice of red-lining. It’s something to which I was never subject as two generations later I was simply “white” and did not experience any racial or national origin discrimination.

That historically has not been the case for Blacks and many other people of color, for which exclusionary housing practices in some cases persisted until the Fair Housing Act of 1968. In 2023, Washington State’s legislature passed HB 1474 to create the Covenant Homeownership Program (CHP) and a CHP treasury account to document and address past and ongoing housing discrimination against Black, indigenous, and other people of color (BIPOC).

If after Jan. 1, 2024 you recorded a real estate document at the courthouse in Port Townsend, you paid an additional $100 document recordation fee to fund the CHP. The CHP recordation fees have been used to provide down-payment and closing-cost assistance to BIPOC individuals.

Specifically, a zero-interest loan, secondary to a primary mortgage, is provided to cover down payment and closing costs. The CHP loan can cover up to 20% of the home’s purchase price or $150,000, plus closing costs. Borrowers are not required to make monthly payments, and the loan is only repaid when the home is sold or refinanced.

To be eligible for the program, a buyer must: (1) have a household income at or below 100% of the Area Median Income (AMI, or $88,300 in Jefferson County); (2) be a first-time homebuyer; (3) have lived or had a parent, grandparent, or great-grandparent that lived in Washington before April 1968, and, critically, (4) you or that parent/grandparent must be or have been of the right race.

Specifically, you or your parent/grandparent must be or have been Black, Hispanic, Native American, Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander, Korean or Asian Indian.

If you are Japanese, Chinese, or Jewish, or any flavor of White, sorry, you are not eligible. It does not matter whether your ancestors may have actually been subject to red-lining, or whether a CHP beneficiary’s ancestors were not. If you are the wrong color, you cannot partake of this benefit.

But should you manage to buy a house, you are required to pay reparations to those in the enumerated groups to fund their housing purchase. Visit many Olympic Peninsula mobile home parks and apartment complexes and you will find members of multi-generational Olympic Peninsula families struggling to pay rent. And they are of all races.

Is it fair to provide one more financial obstacle in the form of increased recordation fees to a young person who may strive to finally become the first generation in their family to be a homeowner?

Our legislature has now passed HB 1696 which, if signed by the governor, will expand the CHP to include people from the enumerated groups who earn up to 120% of AMI. Further, if a beneficiary earns no more than 80% of AMI and the CHP loan has been outstanding for at least five years, the loan will be forgiven. This will be a great benefit for those that qualify but, again, if you are of the wrong ancestry, you are out of luck.

It is hard for me to not see the CHP as a racist program. And implementing one racist practice as reparations for an earlier racist practice is something I have trouble stomaching.

Marcia Kelbon is an attorney and engineer based in Quilcene. Contact: mkelbonpolitical@gmail.com