Heirs to Black-owned homes face ramped-up foreclosures. Here’s who’s pushing back

When Henry Scott’s mother died two years ago, there was never a doubt he’d want to keep her home. He most definitely did.

“It just has a lot of memories for me,” said Scott, 61.

But a title issue — tied to the lack of a will — put a smooth inheritance at risk. Such problems can result in unclear ownership, simmering family feuds and properties falling into disrepair. That can put family homes such as Scott’s at risk of being lost to unscrupulous developers or — as the Miami Herald showed earlier this year — cities seizing them over property violations and selling them to boost municipal revenue.

Black neighborhoods have borne the brunt of these efforts.

But now community organizations in Jacksonville, which is 30% Black, are fighting back, banding together under the banner of a community redevelopment organization called Local Initiatives Support Corporation to help families struggling with what are known as “heirs’ property” issues.

So far this year, the program has resolved 180 such cases across Jacksonville, according to the executive director of the group’s Jacksonville branch, Irvin Cohen. He estimates that this amounts to helping residents preserve $11 million in debt equity.

The Jacksonville program might be a preview of what’s coming to Miami — and an antidote to what has occurred in cities like St. Petersburg, which has foreclosed on hundreds of homes, most in largely Black neighborhoods, and Bradenton.

The Scott family home is just a stone’s throw from McCoys Creek Boulevard Park on Jacksonville’s west side. First purchased by his grandparents in the 1960s, the teal, one-story house still glows with the ghosts of his family’s memories: the lingering scent of his mother’s perfume, the booming peals of his cousins’ laughter, even the bittersweet memory of his grandfather’s “horrible” casserole.

Back in the ‘60s when his grandparents bought the dwelling, Black families faced imposing obstacles to home ownership, often involving “redlining” — where banks refused to make loans in certain neighborhoods, often majority Black ones. That practice cemented patterns of blight and segregation.

Scott’s mother did not create a will before her death, leaving him and his two brothers entangled in an “heirs’ property” dilemma, what can happen when a homeowner dies without an estate plan.

Scott, who is vice president of the community revitalization group North Riverside Community Development Corporation, attended a workshop put on by Cohen’s organization. The group is working to identify potential cases of heirs’ property across Jacksonville and — in conjunction with legal groups like Three Rivers Legal Services and Jacksonville Area Legal Aid — helping residents learn the risks, resolve title issues and minimize the possibility of losing their homes.

“We’re really leaning into heirs’ property as a way to prop up family wealth creation,” Cohen said. “On the other end of the pendulum, I would like to think of it as we are averting a homeless situation.”

In April, Legal Services of Greater Miami received a $600,000 grant from the Wells Fargo Foundation, which will partly be used to brief Miami-Dade residents about the issue and provide free legal assistance to heirs’ property owners in untangling titles, building on the organization’s work so far in Liberty City funded by Bank United.

Legal Services has fielded approximately 30 requests for help with potential heirs’ property matters

“At a time like now, where affordable housing is becoming scarcer and scarcer, keeping a family home that you’ve had for decades is perhaps one of the most affordable ways to stay housed,” said the organization’s advocacy director, Lisa Lauck.

One expert described heirs’ property as “the biggest problem most people have never heard of.”

With no will to formally establish a new titleholder, family members share ownership of the inherited property and these unresolved title issues make it nearly impossible for families to get loans or other financing options to maintain and improve heirs’ property. Even getting a permit to do the work is often a no-go.

The shared ownership — which in some cases involves numerous family members scattered across the country — can also make the properties vulnerable to developers, even if a majority of the owners don’t want to sell.

A Miami Herald investigation earlier this year showed that these kinds of properties have been the target of ramped-up foreclosures over unpaid code fines in numerous cities across the state.

For historic reasons with roots in Reconstruction and the Jim Crow era, heirs’ property in urban areas is disproportionately found in neighborhoods with high concentrations of Black residents. The risks associated with heirs’ property, however, do not solely stem from racial or socioeconomic issues, said Mavis Gragg, a North Carolina attorney who has worked extensively to resolve these cases.

“The issue,” she said, “is that the ownership — the legal bundle of rights that comes with inherited real estate — is very restrictive and very difficult to manage.”

Scott said he’s thankful the Jacksonville program has not only enabled him to protect his family’s home, but is helping his community eliminate barriers to accessing funding for home maintenance.

“There’s such a big need for housing repairs in our area,” Scott said. “These are some very old homes … and we have a lot of residents who really need help with the repairing of their homes.”

Building trust in vulnerable communities

Jacksonville covers the most land of any city in the continental United States, and due to its sprawling footprint, Cohen estimates the city has more than 12,000 heirs’ property cases — more than anywhere else in Florida.

After Hurricane Michael in 2018, Cohen saw the urgent need to address heirs’ property in Jacksonville. Families struggled to get federal relief funding for making repairs because they couldn’t prove they owned their homes, an issue that recent policy changes have sought to fix.

Last year, his team launched its heirs’ property program, which includes a door-knocking campaign, workshop series and referrals to legal services. Through these initiatives, they’re hoping to build relationships with community organizations and residents to help heal historic distrust in the systems central to estate planning.

Discriminatory policies throughout Reconstruction and Jim Crow not only made it more difficult for Black people to obtain home loans, but also kept them from creating wills to formally transfer ownership of property. This generated a sense of mistrust that continues today, with one 2022 survey finding that 77% of Black people nationwide don’t have a will compared to 61% of white people.

Over time, families lacking a paper trail of ownership have struggled because “they’re now being targeted when there’s a hot real estate market,” particularly by “third parties who want to get an interest and then force a sale,” said Gragg, the North Carolina attorney.

Cohen said factors like these have combined to create “a culture that’s ripe for issues of heirs’ property.”

Gerald Dinkins received help from the group navigating through the estate planning process, and felt he could trust their team because of the efforts they took to simplify his responsibilities.

“I hate to use the word ‘easy’ process, but it was a process that didn’t put a lot of strain on me,” Dinkins said. “To me, it meant a lot to have people in the legal office there that were kind and friendly and helpful.”

Dinkins, 66, was already his home’s titleholder when he first attended one of the Jacksonville group’s community meetings. But as a father and step-father, he chose to pursue the group’s help after learning about how lacking estate plans can affect heirs.

“I know one day I’m not going to be here, and I don’t want my kids to have to go through those legal issues — someone trying to take the house, the kids being upset over who’s going to get what,” he added.

A problem ‘most people have never heard of’

Wade Clark was in the process of clearing title to his home in Clearwater when the city foreclosed on him over unpaid code fines. Despite winning a court battle to be declared the sole owner of the house, Clark, a veteran, still lost the property to foreclosure.

“If they had worked with me, after giving me control of the house, I could have gotten a loan on the house through the VA,” Clark said. “It was always a ‘we don’t want to talk to you’ attitude.”

Ryan Thomson, an Auburn University professor who has studied the pervasiveness of heirs’ property across the South, said that owning heirs’ property creates a “catch-22” for families. The difficulty of maintaining heirs’ property leaves owners vulnerable to accruing code violations, and these violations put the owner at risk of losing the property itself.

“We oftentimes refer to heirs’ property as the biggest problem most people have never heard of,” Thomson said. “But this code enforcement strategy has the potential to be the worst problem none of us have heard of.”

State officials took one step to address heirs’ property issues in July 2020 with the adoption of the Uniform Partition of Heirs Property Act, which implemented measures to prevent developers from scooping up heirs’ property below market value. Before heirs’ property can be partitioned and sold, the law requires courts to provide notice to all heirs and enlist an independent appraiser to determine the property’s true market value.

But the law doesn’t address all the risks that owners of heirs’ property face, particularly in urban areas. And some cities across the state are beginning to introduce their own programs to address the issue.

St. Petersburg, a focal point of the Herald’s earlier reporting after it brought foreclosure suits on more than 400 properties with code violations, is now rolling out a new program to help heirs’ property owners address title issues before they lead to foreclosure.

Resolving title issues

Heirs’ property exists at the intersection of real estate law and inheritance law, and to dissect these issues, attorneys have to trace the family’s property history through a thicket of legal documents. Depending on how many heirs are involved, this search can take weeks to years.

The process can grow even thornier once all the heirs have been tracked down.

Because heirs each have an equal stake to the property, resolving disputes can take an emotional toll.

“You’ve been living in a house for 20 years, and your brother or sister in California decides that they want to exercise their interest in a property that they didn’t even realize they had an interest in. I mean, that can get intense,” Cohen said.

For Scott, the process of transferring the deed into his own name took about two months. He feels “so grateful and so thankful” for his two brothers — the other heirs — because they both voluntarily transferred their interest in the property to him, avoiding conflict in clearing the title.

To be able to protect his home — his mother’s home, his grandparents’ home — and its legacy has meant “everything” to him.

“Now I can give it a little tender love and care,” he said, “and pass it on hopefully to my daughter.”