NPR: No title = no aid
Source: National Public Radio
And you think you've got problems:
The Cousin family home, long and narrow and shotgun style, stands empty. Alice Cousin lives in a rental house three blocks away, dreaming of the day she can move back in.
The house suffered some Katrina-related damage. "We got the wind that tore the upstairs part up," says Cousin. "All the sheetrock fell down on the stove in the kitchen. The gutters come off. I'm tryin' to get it fixed now so I can live in it."
Still, long after the August 2005 hurricane, the house stands unrepaired and moldering. That's partly because Cousin, who's 80 years old, does not have a proper title. Her parents bought the house in the 1940s, and the title remains in their name. The family didn't change the title when her parents died.
"You don't be thinkin' about nothin' like that. You don't think about it," Cousin says, "So when we did decide to do it, Mother was dead and Daddy was dead. So it was me and my other sister. Now my other sister passed last year. So that left just me."
According to law, Cousin and a dozen or so nieces and nephews have a claim on the property. When Cousin applied for government money to fix the house, she was initially turned down by the state-run Road Home Program, which funnels federal Katrina aid to homeowners for rebuilding. Cousin was told that to get the money, she had to prove she owned the home or get a power of attorney from all of the other heirs.
Cousin's daughter, Lois Robinson, says that's been a struggle, largely because of a nephew in California. Robinson says she thinks the nephew should give his share of the house to her mother, as the other nieces and nephews have done.
This article is fascinating stuff as it delves deep into a previously overlooked aspect of property law: heirship titles:
Real estate lawyer Malcolm Meyer points out neighborhoods, including the Ninth Ward, which Katrina left flooded. He says that's where a lot of the heirship property showed up.
Heirship property is a legal term for land handed down informally and owned by multiple heirs. Before Katrina, Meyer thought it was largely a rural phenomenon. It was common among poor farmers who died without a written will, Meyer says.
"They just let everybody know that the eldest son would get this piece, the other son would get this, the daughter and son-in-law would get that, and they divided it up that way and it was acceptable to everybody."
At the time of the storm, Meyer coincidentally had been reading a book by Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto. It described how the lack of property titles hurts many of the world's poor, blocking them from using their most important asset to build economic power. Without a title for collateral, they can't borrow money at low interest rates and invest it.
After Katrina, Meyer was shocked to learn how pervasive informal property transfers were even in the city. He realized that was the situation for as many as 20,000 poor or low-income New Orleanians. Such homeowners were deprived because, initially, the asset could "only provide a roof" over their heads, Meyer says. "But then once the roof was blown away, the asset couldn't even do that."
Currently, transferring title to a house in LA could cost 10% of its value - far too much for many people (far too much for me quite frankly!). This is an area of law that has needed changing for a long time, hopefully that change will come soon....and Mrs. Cousin's nephew will just let her have her house.
