8/15/2011

Study: Heir Property Cause of Poverty, Land Loss in Black Belt

AUBURN, Ala.—Heir property is land that is owned collectively by the descendants of a property owner who died without a will, and extensive research by Auburn University rural sociologist Conner Bailey and Auburn graduate student Janice Dyer indicates the phenomenon is a major cause of land loss among rural African Americans and a key contributor to the persistent poverty, high unemployment, substandard and abandoned housing, under-used resources and disinvestment that characterize Alabama’s 12-county Black Belt region.

In five years of research that has included face-to-face interviews with many heir property co-owners in the Black Belt, the Alabama Ag Experiment Station social scientists have documented the serious problems and risks associated with land that has been passed from generation to generation without a clear title and, based on a quantitative analysis of heir property in the Black Belt county of Macon, have determined that as much as $300 million worth of land could be tied up in clouded titles in what is one of the poorest regions in the U.S.

“If that wealth were accessible, it could potentially change the economic, political and social fabric of the Black Belt,” Dyer said.

Though heir property exists statewide and in urban as well as rural environments, the majority is in the Black Belt because after the Civil War, many blacks newly freed from the cotton plantations that had dominated the region in the late 19th century were able to buy or were deeded land there to live on and farm. Few of those landowners, however, had written wills, and when they died, their immediate family members inherited the land communally, according to state laws. That set the heir-property cycle in motion.

“So still today, every time an heir to a piece of land dies intestate, the number of co-owners increases, and each person’s share of the estate gets smaller,” Bailey said. “The more fractionalized the property becomes, the more complex the issues get, the more difficult using the land productively becomes and the more vulnerable the land is to being bought by someone outside the family.”

Hei property is limited as an income source because any use of the land requires the consent and signature of every heir—“not just the ones who may still live on and care for and pay taxes on the land but those who live six or seven states away and have never set foot on the place, too,” Bailey said.

Without full agreement, land that has multiple owners and still has the original landowner’s name on the deed can’t be used as collateral for loans, isn’t eligible for federal agriculture and housing programs and can’t be leased for farm or recreational purposes, nor can any timber be harvested and sold from it. And resident heirs should be reluctant to invest their resources in improvements to the land, such as planting trees or building a home, because those trees and that home become the property of all who hold an interest in the to the land.

The biggest threats to land ownership are tax sales and forced partition sales. Tax sales occur if annual property taxes aren’t paid. The government takes the property and auctions it off to make up for the unpaid taxes, and though the heirs have the chance to pay the taxes first, they may have trouble contacting each other and organizing in time to save the property.

Court-ordered partition sales result when one or several heirs, typically those far removed from the property, decide it’s time to sell, even against the wishes of the remaining heirs. The property is auctioned off and sold, usually at a fraction of its true value, to the highest bidder. Although those heirs closely connected to the land may pool their resources in an effort to buy the property, they are seldom able to outbid developers or real estate speculators and the land is lost.

Thus far, the Auburn research has prompted the Alabama Cooperative Extension System to hold a series of 39 workshops for heir property owners around the state make the landowners aware of their rights, responsibilities and risks. In addition, the national Uniform Law Commission in 2010 approved a Uniform Partition of Heirs Property Act that individual states can adopt to help protect heir property co-owners from real estate speculation and efforts to strip them of their real property and real property wealth without adequate recourse. The act earned the endorsement of the American Bar Association in February 2011.

For more about heir property in Alabama, visit www.ag.auburn.edu/ agec/heirproperty.

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OFFICE OF AG COMMUNICATIONS & MARKETING
Auburn University College of Agriculture
Alabama Agricultural Experiment Station
3 COMER HALL, AUBURN UNIVERSITY
AUBURN, AL 36849
334-844-4877 (PHONE) 334-844-5892 (FAX)
AgComm@auburn.edu