John Murray Quotes
Development in this county is always going to be an issue. Until development and zoning are handled on a regional basis, rather than each municipality left to its own devices, we will suffer from developers having the upper hand in suits and in front of zoning boards.
A restrictive covenant was a condition that was written into the deed on a piece of property. Even if the owner of the home did not want to discriminate, the previous owners who wrote the restrictive covenant into the deed (or his relatives and heirs) could sue and invalidate the sale. In many cases, insurance would not sell title insurance or banks would not give mortgages for a Black or a Jew where there was a covenant in the deed, even if the covenant was more than 100 years old. Homeowner associations would also enforce the covenants which were originally written into all the deeds of the development. 5 years after this was written, President Harry S Truman ordered that protective covenants be challenged as unconstitutional before the Supreme Court. Once the supreme court ruled that restrictive covenants were unconstitutional, no court would enforce any of these lawsuits.
Roosevelt thought like Jefferson that it was not desirable to have a large proportion of the population residing in cities, and one of the more successful aspects of the New Deal with the improvement of conditions in rural America. Despite that, the trend to the cities was inexorable in America with the rest of the world following that trend.
