by Lizzie Presser

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Federal lawmakers introduced a legislative package on Tuesday that would expand heirs’ property owners’ access to disaster relief and provide assistance in clearing titles. Heirs’ property refers to land that has been passed down informally within families; without clear titles, owners can be ineligible for government aid and their land vulnerable to forced sales. Rep. Lizzie Fletcher, a Democrat from Texas, decided to introduce legislation after reading a ProPublica-New Yorker investigation on the legal and financial risks of holding land as heirs’ property.

More than a third of Black-owned land in the South is heirs’ property. The practice of conveying land without a will dates to Reconstruction, when many Black families did not have access to courts, and it continued through the Jim Crow era. The ProPublica-New Yorker story examined how heirs’ property owners can be locked out of federal assistance and........

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