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1922–1968 · SOUTH BEND FILE AT BOUNDARY SIZE; GRANGER'S SHARE STATED AT THE END
The Home Owners' Loan Corporation was created in 1933; its Mortgage Rehabilitation Division began the City Survey in 1935 for cities over 40,000 people, and South Bend was one. Local officials and real estate professionals helped prepare the ratings (the file survives as NARA RG 195, including the "South Bend and Mishawaka, Indiana" folder, and is carried today by the University of Richmond's Mapping Inequality project). The rating language, quoted from the sheets as the Commission reproduces it: an "A" area was among the "new well planned sections" where "good lenders… are willing to make their maximum loans," and it had to be "homogenous." Harter Heights took the top rating for its "lack of Negros or other infiltration," its residents "[n]ative white." Jefferson Park, Coquillard Woods and Sunnymeade took top ratings as "highly restricted," each carrying racial covenants banning non-White residency; Sunnymeade's sheet calls it "[h]ighly restricted" and "[p]robably best section of the city." A "B" area dropped to "C" on the introduction of any foreign-born or non-White residents. "C" areas were "characterized by age, obsolescence, and change of style," the operative factors being no or expiring racial covenants and "infiltration of a lower grade populations" — code, the Commission notes, for non-White and recent-immigrant residents — the areas "lacking homogeneity"; its example, "Olive, from Western to Huron," was "best of the foreign sections," 95 percent Polish with three Black families. "D" areas were "characterized by detrimental influences in a pronounced degree, undesirable population, or an infiltration of it"; one D area is described only as a "[h]ighly undesirable settlement of Negroes with only outlet on Prairie Ave," Beck's Lake was rated D-5, "[n]egro [l]aboring class," 10 percent foreign born, and Linden Place D-6, "Negro and foreign-born," with "[i]nfiltration of Negro" and 22 percent Polish. The named developer who worked the line is A. C. Colpaert, the local real estate professional who helped prepare the ratings — described by Derick Webb as an "ardent segregationist," one of the most vocal opponents of integrated housing, who in one attempt to stop a housing development for Black families declared, "There will be no niggers west of here." The federal government relied on him for the map anyway. The Commission adds that Colpaert "was known for building nice homes for Whites, but shoddy homes for Blacks" — Dorothy Smith, displaced twice by urban renewal, ended up forced to buy what she called a "plaster board box" from Colpaert Realty (art-68-12). The Federal Housing Administration's 1936 Underwriting Manual, paragraph 284(2), is quoted the same way: covenants prohibiting "the occupancy of properties except by the race for which they are intended" were recommended, and "infiltration of inharmonious racial groups" lowered values; the FHA's own maps, mostly destroyed in 1960s litigation, were more restrictive than HOLC's and were used for decades.
The covenants themselves are counted. The Commission's housing subcommittee located 68 plats for housing developments in St. Joseph County, created 1922–1953, containing racially restrictive covenants — most, but not all, inside the South Bend city limits, each plat approved by the Board of Public Works where it lay in the city, each plat standing for many homes, and the count expressly not claimed exhaustive. The language, the subcommittee found, is "very similar" across plats; the specimen it reproduces is the covenant of the 1923 plat for the Jefferson Park Addition (record P1923028, 7 June 1923), reproduced in the filed report as a scanned cursive image. Its wording could not be read from the filed copy's text layer, and it is not paraphrased here or reconstructed — the settler for its exact words is the plat record itself, named below. The busiest filing year was 1947, in anticipation of Shelley v. Kraemer; 1948 was second; and twelve plats carrying racial covenants were approved by county and city officials after the 1948 decision made enforcement unconstitutional (illegality waited for the Fair Housing Act of 1968). At boundary size in Mishawaka: the Tribune reported in 2002 that deeds in Normain Heights, the Second World War veterans' subdivision (National Register-listed 20 March 2002), contain covenants restricting home ownership to Caucasians; the deed wording itself was not quoted in the reporting reached and is not quoted here.
Granger's share, and the named gap. The 68 county plats run 1922–1953 — they predate Granger's suburban build almost entirely. The ground's covenant-bearing stratum, if it has one, would be its postwar fringe plats (Carriage Hills, Swanson Highlands, Georgian Acres and their neighbours, 1940s–1960s); the big plats that define modern Granger — Knollwood's, from 1975 — postdate both Shelley (1948) and the Fair Housing Act (1968), and a racial covenant in them would be an anachronism. Searched for any Granger subdivision covenant in the open record: the Commission's plat work (city-centred, as above), the Tribune record, and the web. No covenant text from any Clay or Harris Township plat was reached. Named gap: the racial-covenant search of Granger's own plat record is uncoverable from open sources. Settler: the St. This row closes as far as the open record goes — HOLC file, FHA manual, the county's 68 plats, Colpaert — with the township plat books named as the remainder.
Sources: South Bend Reparatory Justice Commission, Final Report, History §§II.A, III.B (HOLC sheets; Colpaert; 68 plats; Jefferson Park record P1923028); Mapping Inequality, University of Richmond (HOLC City Survey file, NARA RG 195); South Bend Tribune (2002), Normain Heights covenant reporting; banked neighbourhoods fragment (Granger plat chronology).