CC & Rs are “Covenants, Conditions and Restrictions“ (sometimes “Covenants, Codes & Restrictions). They are a set of rules drawn up for a neighborhood or subdivision by the builder or by a board comprised of the builder and a few others who want to set the neighborhood standards to keep property values up.
The C, C & Rs are put in place, usually for a set number of years such as for 30 or 35 years, and most of the homes in Silicon Valley do have CC & Rs and most of them are now expired. It’s always for a finite period of time, though usually extendable if the neighbors vote it in again (which I have never seen done), but sometimes gauged by something perhaps not so predictible. The weirdest time line I ever saw referenced something like “until the death of the last living great grandchild of…” and it mentioned one of the Kennedys. Odd, but apparently legit.
What are the CC & Rs about?
Here’s a peek at part of one -
Usually the CC & Rs dictate the minimum size of a home (e.g., the home must be at least “X” number of square feet) that may be built in the subdivision, the setbacks (homes must be so many feet from the street and property lines), what kind of signage may appear (only for sale and for rent signs, for instance), and normally there’s a restriction on farm animals so that people may not raise goats, sheep, chickens and so on in their backyards or breed animals professionally.
Many years ago, some C, C & Rs also had restrictions on who might buy or live in a neighborhood (racial, religious and other restrictions). This is illegal today, of course, and so the first page of any C C and R document you see now will have a large disclaimer stating that any fair housing violations are illegal and are null & void. Since the C C & Rs “run with the property”, they supposedly cannot be amended (though I have never been convinced that they couldn’t be - just that the government chooses to require the disclaimer instead).
Do the C C & Rs matter?
For the most part, they are irrelevant because in most of Santa Clara County, they have long since expired.
They can be a little helpful, though, as sometimes the setbacks (which may still be enforceable) may be stated more clearly than in the preliminary title report or elsewhere.
Often, too, they hide some historically interesting tidbits. Today I read the C C & Rs for a Leep built home (a very good builder of tract housing in the Santa Clara Valley) in the Cambrian Park area of San Jose. I know that there’s an area of Campbell (that has a Los Gatos mailing address) with Leep homes; one street in this area near the Saratoga and Los Gatos border is named Elwood and another Bearden. Today I learned that there were two builders of these homes, Elwood J. Leep and Leonard Bearden, Sr. So that was a fun tidbit - I have sold many “Leep homes” over the years, have known them to be well built but never had the builders’ first names before.
To summarize, in most cases, the C C & Rs won’t provide you with a lot of helpful information, but do try to obtain them anyway when buying a home in Santa Clara County. There may be information that is interesting, if not necessarily useful - and you never know, there may be a tidbit of helpful information buried in there along with the strange admonitions that homes not cost less than $10,000 when sold. That’s the least of our worries today!
