Fragile wealth: Involuntary property loss, ownership disputes, and the contingencies of property

• In Event: Unstable Homeownership: Heirs' Property, Contracts for Deed, and Homeowner Assistance

Abstract

Heirs’ property is one of the most volatile housing tenures in the U.S., but new research reveals that more than 9 million acres of land are held in this tenuous ownership status, with an estimated value of approximately $41 billion. Heirs’ property ownership occurs when a property owner dies without decisive legal documentation describing who should inherit the property—it is passed to the deceased owner’s living descendants according to state laws of intestacy. Black families living in the South turned to the collective heirs’ property ownership tenure following Emancipation as a means of economic self-determination and refuge from racialized violence, but the heirs’ property ownership tenure simultaneously made them vulnerable to wealth destruction via forced partition sales. Forced partition sales have dominated theories about housing instability and the destruction of housing wealth among heirs’ property owners, but there is limited empirical evidence describing how these legal actions unfold. In this paper, I examine the strategies heirs’ property owners use to fight off looming displacement threats due to partition actions. Recent policy reform, the Uniform Partition of Heirs’ Property Act (UPHPA), aims to reduce the displacement risks produced through forced partition sales, but this paper reveals how housing instability among heirs’ property owners persists in the post-UPHPA context. Through an analysis of court documents, property transaction records, ethnographic observations and interviews with heirs’ property owners in Charleston, South Carolina, I identify two types of disputes that emerge during legal proceedings about partition sales that heirs must contend with to defend their ownership status: substantive contests, defined as disagreements about who counts as owner and how much they own, and procedural contests, which refers to challenges against judges’ implementation of various legal regulations. I show that conceptions of property as economic capital come into conflict with sociocultural meanings of property as heirs try to defend their ownership status and convince the court not to displace them.  These findings reveal the continued tenure insecurity of heirs’ property owners despite new regulations in the UPHPA that purport to make the housing tenure more stable. I conclude with recommendations for strengthening the UPHPA, notably by including pathways for low-income heirs to take advantage of the policy’s buyout provisions, and devising stricter barriers to block developers from initiating forced sales of properties where heirs currently reside. Through the challenges of heirs’ property owners, I show that housing instability is not simply the byproduct of owners’ socioeconomic characteristics, but embedded into property laws when shared ownership is structured such that co-owners must limit or extinguish each other’s rights in order to actualize their own.

Author

• Jasmine K Simington, University of Michigan Ann Arbor
  Presenting Author