Prairie Village, restricted by covenant

Prairie Village was built by the J. C. Nichols Company, and what it was built with was paperwork. Nichols's first instrument was the declaration of restrictions: one document, filed with the subdivision's plat map, governing every lot in the neighbourhood at once - minimum house size and cost, single-family use only, and a bar on the purchase, lease or occupation of any house by anyone who was not white. It was stronger than a restriction written into a single deed because its scope was the whole neighbourhood. The second was the homes association, created alongside it, with compulsory membership, dues, and bylaws that obliged members to enforce the restrictions and allowed the association to fine or sue a resident who defied them. The third, which he began experimenting with in 1914, was the automatically renewing restriction: a twenty-five-year term that renewed itself unless owners cleared an exact bar of timing and votes, which kept the restrictions standing without the legal fragility of declaring them perpetual.

The scale was not local. Between 1906 and 1953 the Country Club District in Kansas City and the adjoining developments across the state line covered some 4,000 acres, more than 6,000 houses and 160 apartment buildings, with upwards of 35,000 residents, and the Nichols company's subdivisions make up the whole of the present-day Kansas cities of Prairie Village, Mission Hills, Westwood and Fairway. Every one of them was covered by racially restrictive covenants. Prairie Village itself began in 1941 with more than a thousand houses, advertised as the place "where people you like like to live", and grew past 3,800. The method was studied and copied by a national real estate industry that was at that moment writing its own rules.

The federal government underwrote it. Under the Federal Housing Administration's "conditional commitment", the agency pre-approved an entire subdivision so that every house in it qualified for an insured mortgage - which also meant every house in it was bound by the FHA's conditions, racial exclusion included. Nichols almost certainly held conditional commitment for Prairie Village. Greater Kansas City took 77,000 FHA-backed mortgages between 1934 and 1962, and fewer than one per cent of them - at most 770 - went to Black buyers.

Redlining is usually read off the red. Prairie Village is what the other end of the same policy looked like. On the 1939 Residential Security Map for the Greater Kansas City area, the Nichols suburbs were coloured green, the lowest lending risk, and the appraisers stated the reason plainly: these were single-family neighbourhoods under deed restrictions, racial covenants among them, so their values would hold. The restriction was not incidental to the grade. It was the qualification for it.

The US Supreme Court held racially restrictive covenants judicially unenforceable in Shelley v. Kraemer in 1948, and the last date the government permitted developers to file such language with a plat was 15 February 1950. Johnson County developers went on filing it until at least 1962. One sociologist's count found that by 1950 about 96 per cent of the county's subdivisions carried racial covenants, with Black families barred from 148 of 154 - the most restricted county in the Kansas City area by twenty percentage points. Between 1940 and 1960 the county's white population went from 32,525 to 142,673. Its Black population went from 795 to 943.

In 1960 Prairie Village had 25,356 residents, and twenty-five of them were Black. Most of the city's houses went up after the covenants had stopped being enforceable, and it made almost no difference: the association, the price floor and the habit did the work the courts had withdrawn from. Donald and Virginia Sewing bought a house in neighbouring Fairway in 1966 and were the first Black family in that Nichols subdivision. Prairie Village is still more than 94 per cent white. The declarations were never erased either - they are recorded instruments, filed with the plats, and a Prairie Village declaration of restrictions hung on the wall of the Johnson County Museum's exhibition on redlining in 2022.