Built for White people: The hidden racist history of some Pittsburgh neighborhoods

Evaline Street, photographed on April 1, 2024, leads into Sampson Acres, on the top distant right, originally a racially restricted subdivision divided in 1936 out of Sampson Farms, in Penn Hills. The home sale deeds originally forbade Black people from owning or living in the houses, unless employed there as servants. (Photo by Stephanie Strasburg/PublicSource) & Home sale deeds for some subdivisions, written as recently as the 1940s, barred the sales of those properties to Black buyers and sometimes other ethnic groups. A new law allows owners to repudiate such language, but echoes of the covenants remain. & by David S. Rotenstein, PublicSource Imagine learning that the home where you grew up has a deed with language prohibiting Black people from buying or renting it.& In Pittsburgh and other cities — even less than a century ago — developers and individual homeowners included restrictions like this one, which appeared in deeds for properties within Charette Homes, a Sewickley subdivision: “No lot or lots in the aforesaid plan of lots, nor any building thereon, shall be used or occupied, or permitted to be used or occupied, by any natural persons other than members of the White or Caucasian Race, except that...