Racist Language Can Now Be Automatically Found in Housing Deeds and Hoa Rules and Taken Out
DoNotPay, which calls itself a "robot lawyer," has made it possible for people to take racist language out of real estate papers by using a computer programme.
DoNotPay, a tech company that focuses on protecting consumers' rights, has made it easy and quick for people to get rid of racist language from California real estate papers like deeds and rules for homeowners' associations. The company told Motherboard that it has automated the process.
Even though the Supreme Court made discriminatory housing restrictions illegal in 1968 (and unenforceable in 1948), real estate documents in county records all over the United States still have language that limits who can buy, sell, and use a certain piece of property based on race, religion, or other factors.
The company's founder and CEO, Joshua Browder, says that DoNotPay, which calls itself a "robot lawyer" that fights for consumer rights, started looking into housing laws after winning cases against homeowners' associations and others over different fees.
"It's amazing that all of this racist language is still in all of these documents," Browder said about what they had found. "So we found a way to remove it automatically."
Last year, California passed new rules that let anyone file to get rid of "unlawfully restrictive covenants" in a real estate document, even if they have nothing to do with the land.
Since July 1, the new rules are in effect, and DoNotPay customers can now share a copy of any real estate document to be checked for racist language. If this kind of wording is found, DoNotPay sends a request to the county to have it taken out.
The number of racist acts has shocked the people who work at DoNotPay. When DoNotPay's vice president of product, Andrew Kim, started working on the project, he looked in the Orange County, California, neighbourhood where he grew up.
"Right away, I found dozens," he said.
One thing stood out more than the rest. It said that "no part of any of said lots shall ever be sold, conveyed, leased, or rented to anyone who is not of the white or Caucasian race." It also said that Hindus, Asians, or anyone who is not of the white or Caucasian race shouldn't be allowed to use or live in them unless they are working for the lot owners or their tenants.
"There are a lot of laws and rights that people have, but they don't know about them or don't have time to follow them. This is the perfect example. Browder said, "No one has time to go to the county office, get the deed, and fill out this form."
He used DoNotPay's method as a test. When DoNotPay found the property's most recent grand deed, it didn't say anything about the racist covenant, even though it was still there. The company then asked the Orange County Clerk's Recorders Office to take it down by sending an automatic request.
By law, the text has to be taken out within 30 days, but the company said that so far, it has only taken a week or two.
"This is the first time I can use technology on a large scale to solve problems that affected people before me," Kim said.
As part of the project, DoNotPay has created a way for "tens of thousands" of California deeds to be searched automatically for more racist words. Browder said, "As a team, we feel very strongly about this, so we're going in to look at a lot of deeds and just removing them for fun, since we have the technology to do so."
Browder started the company when he was a student at Stanford University in 2015. He got a few parking tickets and wanted to find a way to fight them automatically, so he started DoNotPay, which stands for "do not pay parking tickets."
In the year since then, the company has added more services that used to require a lawyer, like filing for bankruptcy and fighting workplace discrimination, that can now be done online.
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