by David Mendez

The Shoreline City Council has called for a public hearing at its March 30 meeting, as residents and a local real estate agent want to remove a pair of decades-old restrictive covenants from a set of North City properties less than a mile from the city’s light rail corridor.

Thirty properties — including one parcel owned by the city — are affected by the covenants, which are legal restrictions imposed by the original land-owner and tied to a property’s title.

One of the covenants that’ll be addressed at the hearing says that property owners can only build single-family homes on their lot. The other is racially restrictive, a kind of discriminatory, unlawful and unenforceable clause that was meant to ensure that only white people could live on the property.

The first covenant, restricting what can be built on the property, is a major driver of the hearing. Real estate agent Jack Malek brought the matter to the city after a handful of folks reached out to him, he said. Malek declined to name the people he’s working with on the matter, though he said he’s obtained signatures from 17 property owners who are interested in having covenants removed.

“These are people that want to sell their property. They’re not listed yet, because the market is soft. But, you know, leading up to that process, it’s best to go through with a lot of these detail items that would otherwise slow a developer down or have them choose not to purchase you in lieu of another parcel, because those restrictions had been removed,” Malek told The Osprey.

This hearing wouldn’t necessarily strip the covenants from every property all at once — a decision by the council would only affect Shoreline’s property. But the city’s decision may be necessary for all 30 land owners to remove the development restriction. Per the list of covenants, 75% of the landowners of the affected properties must agree to changing the covenants.

While the City of Shoreline’s plot of land would have those covenants stripped, the city doesn’t plan to sell it off to a developer. The plot of land at 18351 10th Avenue NE was given to the city by King County, and it functions as a surface water pump station and micro park, a city staffer told The Osprey.

In 2024, the city council approved its 20-year Comprehensive Plan, which updated the city’s zoning map to allow land developers to build more multi-family housing across Shoreline. The city’s property — as well as that of its neighbors — now sits in MUR-70 zoning, a land definition that allows construction of buildings up to 70 feet tall, or seven stories tall, which may have both apartment-style housing and commercial uses like shops and office spaces.

The rezoning is meant to take advantage of the area’s closeness to nearby Sound Transit light rail stops, especially the Shoreline North/185th Station, which is just more than a block away.

The properties were developed and filed onto a public parcel map, or platted, in 1947 by Evergreen Homes. The development-limiting covenants were a symptom of the time, Malek explained.

“As they were platted, they were restricted in terms of utility. Everybody wanted them to be nice, darling little neighborhoods, which is great when you’ve got a low-density population [like] around World War II,” Malek said. “You were not allowed to have businesses out of the home or located right next to the home, so as to protect people from doing something other than a neighborhood store, like a business — especially something more manufacturing-based or noisy.”

Racially-restrictive covenants were also a product of the eras immediately following World War I and World War II. Shoreline’s Innis Arden development became somewhat infamous for past advertising, touting its status as a “restricted residential community” in a brochure dated to the 1940s. (The Innis Arden homeowners’ association deleted the discriminatory covenants in 2006, using a state law tailored to the neighborhood’s situation.)

In its “Declaration of Protective Restrictions,” Evergreen Homes included a series of 15 covenants for its development in what was then known as “Northend Country Estates.” Covenant 8 states:

Discriminatory covenants were ruled as unconstitutional in 1948 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, and race-based housing discrimination was made wholly illegal after the passage of the Fair Housing Act, part of Civil Rights Act of 1968. And while racially-restrictive covenants have been illegal for decades, they linger in many deeds and agreements across the country — and in Shoreline — like a stubborn mold, as a reminder of the influence bigots and racists have held across American history.

In 2022, a Washington state law came into effect, allowing property owners to remove unlawful, discriminatory covenants from property deeds and have them struck from historic property records.

It’s worth noting that this development covenant would open a land owner up to legal liability should they attempt to build a building that breaks its restrictions. Per the original list of documents, anyone who owns property operating under the same original agreement from 1947 would be able to sue anyone for “violating or attempting to violate” the covenants, either to block their efforts or recover monetary damages.

Kim Lancaster has owned and lived in her home on the same block as the city’s plot since 1984, and her land is subject to the same set of covenants. She confirmed speaking with Malek previously, and knew of the racially discriminatory covenants. “So we signed a declaration, or an affidavit, saying that we wanted to do away with that,” Lancaster told The Osprey.

She wasn’t aware of the single-family home restriction, she said. She’s heard talk of folks in the neighborhood who are looking to group up and sell their land to a developer — including a pitch that involved her own home — but she hasn’t heard anything solid in quite a while.

When asked if she’s planning to sell her home, she shrugged.

“At some point. But we don’t want to be this little house and all these tall buildings around,” Lancaster said. “I’m thinking that big apartment complex over across from the train station, they’ve got to fill that first.”

Two complexes sit next to the train station. Kinect @ Shoreline, a 240 apartment unit project, opened in April 2025, while Alexan 185 is under construction across the street from the station along Eighth Avenue NE.

“It just seems like the development of this area, which we thought would happen when the train station went in, has not happened. And, you know, there’s properties you can see across from the train station that are still sitting,” Lancaster said. “But we love our house and we’re happy to live here for as long as we can.”

Malek, a recent candidate for city council, has long advocated for building more homes and business space within the city.

“These areas need to be developed. We need them, not just as a city, but as a state and a nation. We need to get people off the streets, we need to find housing,” he said. “I’m hopeful that there’ll be some businesses that want to locate here and fill in the infrastructure that we really need.”