The Asian and Pacific Islanders of Central Oregon group has been hosting potlucks at Orchard Park for six years. The park’s central location in midtown Bend made it a good choice. There’s a picnic table under a gazebo with paved paths and playground nearby, surrounded by rolling lawns and a grove of giant sequoia and oak trees. A hummingbird garden was planted last year, adding dashes of purple, pink and yellow flowers.
But recently the group had a stinging revelation: Chinese and Japanese people were once banned from the property — a ban that’s still on the books.
The evidence is written on an old deed for the property from 1910, located in Volume 20, Page 245 of Deschutes County’s property records database.
The deed’s covenants outlawed the manufacturing and sale of “intoxicating liquor” and the use of the land for a “bawdy house” — a brothel — or a saloon.
“Nor be in any manner, form or way used or occupied by Chinese or Japanese, except that Chinese or Japanese may be employed by residents thereon as servants,” the deed reads.
Similar language was written into the covenants of about 200 property deeds in the area when Bend streets were first platted. While the racist covenants haven’t been enforceable for decades, some say they’re an uncomfortable reminder of a not-so-distant past, when discrimination was commonplace. Removing them would be a step toward making a predominantly white town more inclusive, advocates say.
Raising awareness and helping remove the covenants is the mission of the Good Deeds Program, which was created by the Central Oregon Black Leaders Assembly in 2021. Led by Bend resident and community organizer Riccardo Waites, a group of volunteers unearthed the racist deed language from thousands of old Deschutes County property records, which took several years. In 2024, they mailed letters to property owners, publicized the discovery and created a step-by-step guide for how to remove the language.
But still, no properties in Bend have gone through the legal process to have the covenants removed.
Now, a new interactive map is shining more light on the locations of the racially biased deeds. That’s spurred new community conversations about the racist land use history, its lingering effects and what to do to address it.
A history of exclusion
The local Asian and Pacific Islanders group started in 2020 on Facebook as a place to share Asian food culture and organize trips to Portland or Eugene for ingredients. At the time, Bend didn’t have an Asian grocery store.
But the organizing evolved into a broader cultural support group, which now has more than 600 members on Facebook. Some of them meet once or twice a year at Orchard Park for potlucks, said Phil Chi, one of the group’s founders.
Chi found out about the covenants through the interactive map released this spring. He said he wasn’t necessarily surprised, given Oregon’s history of excluding people of color. But reading the text of the deed was alarming, he said.
Chi is half Chinese and half Polish. He moved to Bend from Seattle in 2013.
“There’s very few of us that are different from the broader community,” Chi said. “And then you run into something like this where it’s like, ‘oh, that’s why, or part of the reason why.’ It just feels a little extra harsh.”
When Oregon became a state in the mid-19th century, exclusionary laws were put into the state’s constitution that kept African Americans from moving here for decades. State and federal laws extended the bans to Chinese people.
Racist land use practices like covenants and redlining — discriminatory mortgage and lending practices— were common across the United States, although local researchers haven’t found evidence of redlining in Bend. Racial covenants were deemed unenforceable by a U.S. Supreme Court case in 1948. Still, it wasn’t illegal to include the language in a deed until the civil rights movement and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. After that, the racist language remained in the chain of deeds for many properties, even if new deeds were signed to replace them.
Racial covenants and other segregationist practices not only kept Oregon and Bend’s population of ethnic minorities small, but prevented people of color from accumulating the generational wealth that comes with owning real estate, according to a 2024 report on fair housing produced by the City of Bend.
Not only that, but the covenants create a chilling effect for people looking to buy a property, said Marlee Baker, a communications coordinator with the Fair Housing Council of Oregon.
“When you see a restrictive covenant, that really causes potential fear: Will I be welcomed in this neighborhood? Will my family be safe in this neighborhood?” Baker said.
Connections to one of Bend’s founders
Ironically, the neighborhood containing racial covenants is one of the City’s most diverse today: the Orchard District northeast of downtown, near Pilot Butte. Census data from 2022 shows the area has the highest proportion of nonwhite people in Bend, at more than 10%, according to a City of Bend fair housing report.
Tawney Howlett is the board chair for the Orchard District neighborhood organization and a member of the Asian and Pacific Islander group.
When she found out about the covenants this spring, she felt compelled to organize a neighborhood meeting to raise awareness, and invited Waites. About 15 people showed up, she said, and many were surprised to learn the racial covenants were in their neighborhood, Howlett said. With its higher number of nonwhite people, the neighborhood organization prides itself on being a “diverse and welcoming” place, emphasizing the fact on yard signs and its website.
Its racist past can be traced back to one of Bend’s founding fathers.
Levi Wiest was one of the most skilled land surveyors of his time, according to a 2025 newsletter from the Deschutes County Historical Society. A descendent of Swiss immigrants, Wiest made his way across the country from Pennsylvania to Bend, where he created a grid system for the fledgling town of Bend in the early 1900s. He was the lead engineer for Alexander Drake (the namesake of Drake Park) and the Pilot Butte Development Company, helping design and construct many of the canals that irrigated farms and homesteads. Wiest served on what was then the Bend School Board and helped organize Bend’s first church, the First Presbyterian Church, along with his wife, Flora.
“He is definitely, with this revelation from the deeds, someone who we hold more than truth about him,” said Kelly Cannon Miller, director with the Deschutes County Historical Society. He was instrumental in the creation of Bend, Cannon-Miller said.
“And he also was racist,” she said.
Wiest also ran an experimental apple orchard on his homestead. As he subdivided his five 40-acre parcels for development, he built in the restrictions to keep Asian people from owning or using the property. The subdivision became known as “Wiestoria,” and the surrounding neighborhood was named the Orchard District after Wiest’s agricultural endeavors.
The Deschutes Historical Museum has several physical copies of Wiestoria deeds containing the racist language.
“It’s our job as our county historical society to be the ones that keep that, so we can show this was real, and it happened here and it made a difference,” Cannon-Miller. “But people shouldn’t have to live under that and have to live with that attached to your house.”
What to do next
Howlett said a few property owners who attended the meeting expressed interest in going through the process to remove the covenants. The Oregon State Legislative Assembly passed bills in 2018 and 2023 to help streamline the process, waiving court fees and requiring local county clerks to record new deeds with the racist language redacted. In 2024, a Lake Oswego couple became the first known property owners to complete the process. They paid about $140 in document recording fees, according to reporting from The Oregonian.
In April, Waites asked a panel of Deschutes County Board of County Commissioner candidates if they would support waiving the fees for owners trying to remove the racist language. All of them said yes.
While the legal path might be streamlined, the Trump Administration has not been friendly to equity and inclusion work, which is part of the reason Waites dissolved the Central Oregon Black Leaders Assembly and continued the Good Deeds project under his radio station, We Black Radio.
While most of the racial covenants are tied to private homes, others are tied to more public places. That includes the U.S. National Bank and Bank of America properties on Third Street, and the site of a planned 60-unit apartment development on Penn Avenue that was subsidized by the City of Bend. Racial covenants lie in the old deeds for the newly named Deschutes River High School, formerly Marshall High School and Bend Tech Academy.
For Waites, it’s still a question as to why public agencies haven’t addressed the covenants.
When Bend-La Pine Schools first received a letter from the Good Deeds project in 2024, the district’s land use attorneys took a close look at the property records and couldn’t find any language that referenced race, according to district spokesperson Scott Maben. Maben said the district asked Waites for more information but didn’t hear back. The 2024 letter listed the volume and page number for where to find the racist language for the school property in Deschutes County’s online property records database.
“It seems like even though I’ve already sent these letters which tell them where to look, what section and page, to find it, they’re just going to the deed you get when you buy the property,” Waites told the Source.
After being contacted by the Source for this story, the district conducted another review and identified a 1917 deed in the historical chain for the property with racial covenants, Maben said in an email. The district found that the racist language didn’t carry forward to future deeds when the property changed hands that year, and the language wasn’t included in the deed when the district bought the property in the 1950s, Maben said.
In a statement, Bend La-Pine Schools called the racial covenants “abhorrent” and condemned the discrimination. Maben said the district has inquired with Deschutes County about removing the racial covenants from the old deed. And moving forward, the district will ask title professionals to search for racially biased covenants in historical deeds before acquiring property.
Something similar happened with the Bend Park & Recreation District’s Orchard Park property. In 2024, the district received a letter pointing out the racial covenants in a deed for the park on file at Deschutes County. When the district did its own research, it found the current deeds and those from when the district bought the property did not include the language, Spokesperson Julie Brown told the Source in an email. Still, Brown said the district at the time indicated a willingness to have the language removed, but didn’t hear back from Waites.
The Asian and Pacific Islanders of Central Oregon group contacted the parks district earlier this year about the property.
“We continue to be willing to have it removed from records and have offered to attend meetings and have conversations about next steps,” Brown said in a statement. “This is complex due to the several pieces of property involved, but it is important and we look forward to taking action to correct it.”
According to Waites, the City of Bend also owns an alleyway in midtown Bend tied to restrictive covenants.
Members of the API group plan to gather at Orchard Park this week. Part of what they’ll discuss is how to continue conversations with the parks district and other public agencies about removing the covenants.
Some hope not only to remove the covenants, but create some kind of historical plaque or memorial to recognize the history of discrimination.
“The Asian community has these points of history that we weren’t welcome here,” said Lee Ann O’Neill, a member of the API group and a founder of the equity consulting group Allyship in Action. “How do we recognize that history and say yes, actually the Asian community is welcome here.”
For Waites, the next step is documenting the process of a homeowner removing racial covenants. He said he also hopes to take the Good Deeds Program to Crook County.
This article appears in the Source September 10, 2026.
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