As you read this, there’s a brick house on Union Boulevard with no lights on. It’s a one-story home with a wide front porch and a sycamore twisting over the backyard. Like many houses in Wells-Goodfellow, it’s officially vacant. This one was purchased decades ago by the Foster family. In 2018, one of its members, Nyree Foster, realized, as she grieved the loss of her mother, that no one in her family lived there anymore, so she needed to do something with the place. She didn’t know exactly what. Nor did she yet know the term “tangled title,” a situation where a homeowner dies and the title to the property, or the legal right to possess it, becomes murky—a situation, by the way, that blocks the transfer of intergenerational wealth and leads to vacancy; a situation that researchers have called “an insidiously invisible but pervasive issue,” the tackling of which would help close the racial homeownership gap; a situation that, according to interviews and an SLM data analysis, plagues certain Black neighborhoods and probably other parts of St. Louis, but that our local governments are doing little to quantify or address.
Nyree didn’t yet know about this wider context. She just knew that there was a problem with the title to her family’s house. And that merely thinking about the place made her hurt.
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Her paternal grandparents, James and Odell, labored for long hours to acquire it. They’d left rural Mississippi at midcentury, during the Great Migration, and found jobs in St. Louis: he as a trucker for a railroad, and she as a presser in the Garment District downtown. They bought the house in 1956, joining a wave of Black families moving into North City neighborhoods that, just a few years earlier, had been almost exclusively white. Banks in those days could still legally “redline,” or discriminate against African Americans seeking mortgages; the Fosters’ purchase was financed directly by the sellers, according to a deed of trust in the city’s archives. (The loan was for $5,500, or $60,200 in today’s dollars.) Within 10 years, James succumbed to cancer, leaving behind Odell to look after their home and their son, Larry. Larry soon moved out on his own, and later, with his life partner, Stephanie, had three kids: Nyree and her two younger siblings.
Nyree has memories of being inside the house with Odell, a.k.a. “Granny,” who’d plop her onto the kitchen counter and teach her to bake biscuits, peach cobbler, and cornbread, or descend into the basement to show her how to run the sewing machine. Nyree recalls seeing her granny once in a work uniform; the widow worked hard to maintain the house, Nyree says. Keep a-livin’, Granny would always tell her. “It meant, ‘Life is not always what it seems to be in the moment,’” Nyree says, “that you’ll have to go through good and bad.”
Nyree, her parents, and her siblings experienced both kinds of life after her granny moved back to Mississippi and allowed the family of five to move in. “Union was a very, very busy street back then,” Nyree recalls. “My parents were known as ‘the porch people’ because they always sat out on the porch, and everybody would honk and wave.” But in 1998, she lost her sister to health complications. In 2001, her brother was fatally shot around the corner. Then she lost her granny, in 2004; her father, in 2014; and finally, her mother, in 2018. Responsibility for the property then fell to Nyree.
What’s supposed to happen, generally speaking, is this: A homeowner, while still alive, prepares an estate plan (be it a will, a trust, or a beneficiary deed) that specifies who will get title to the home. The homeowner dies. The designated person does any administrative or legal follow-up that’s required, and then the title transfers to that person. Sometimes, the follow-up never gets done, and the title grows tangled that way. But the most common cause of a tangled title is that the homeowner dies “intestate”—that is, without leaving behind any estate plan at all.
That’s what befell Nyree. Her granny had died without an estate plan. Her parents did, too. Thus, Granny remained the owner of record. Nyree’s own name was not on the deed, that is, the document at city hall that memorializes who has title. She had aspirations to fix up the place and maybe rent it out for extra income. Certain interested parties even approached her about buying it. That could’ve been a cash infusion—the house had recently appraised at about $10,000. But she couldn’t legally do either. She didn’t own the house.
“My grandmother was a really hard-working woman,” says Nyree, who for a variety of reasons has relocated to Arizona. “And to know that I couldn’t do things that I wanted to do with [her house]—it made me feel bad. I felt like I’d let her down.”
Nyree Foster might’ve gotten more help if her story had unfolded in Philadelphia.
There, the problem of tangled titles has been quantified, and it’s huge: A study by Pew Charitable Trusts in 2021 estimated that the city had 10,407 tangled titles that were concentrated in predominantly Black neighborhoods, locking up a combined $1.1 billion in family wealth. City agencies have formed a partnership to help residents sort out the problem, and the city council has funneled millions of dollars to legal-aid nonprofits who focus on it.
In St. Louis, neither the city nor county government has made those moves. One possible reason: the ubiquity of tangled titles has never been quantified here.
Crunching the data in any city is tough, observes Sarah Stein, a senior research adviser at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. First, it’s difficult to find tangled titles without using death records, and governments keep those partially confidential to prevent identity theft and fraud. Second, death records and property records aren’t designed to “talk to” each other, so seeing where they overlap can be challenging.
But you can glimpse the problem with publicly available data. SLM used property and death records, along with the genealogy website Ancestry.com, to hunt for tangled titles. We limited our focus to a cluster of seven North City neighborhoods and five North County municipalities. In that relatively small area, we found about 100 parcels owned by people who’ve been deceased for six years or more—and those are just the worst cases, because titles can also get tangled immediately after a homeowner’s death. Our total, therefore, is surely an undercount. (See infographic.)
Peter Hoffman and Rachel Waterman, attorneys at Legal Services of Eastern Missouri, consider those 100 properties to be a drop in the bucket of the regional problem. “We handle 100 cases a year now, and that’s only what we can handle,” Waterman says. When asked how many tangled titles the region has, both lawyers, who work on LSEM’s Neighborhood Vacancy Initiative, shake their heads. “Thousands,” Waterman says. “Definitely thousands.”
SLM did its analysis the hard way, but the city and county governments have the information that would make the task much easier: the names and addresses of both property owners and the deceased. Could officials find tangled titles, SLM wondered, by seeing where those two datasets overlap, then proactively reach out to any surviving family living there and, at the very least, refer them to the free legal aid at LSEM?
“That’s a good idea,” said Michael Butler, the city’s recorder of deeds, when asked this question. “I will absolutely look into that.”
Scott Lakin, director of the county’s Department of Revenue, points out that over the past year, his staff has worked with LSEM to get about 100 titles untangled, but there’s no room in the budget for a broader effort. “We would have to hire a good number of new employees and train them to do the analysis and maintain records going forward,” he writes in an email. “This would come at a high cost that the County, my department and the other Divisions involved don’t have at this time.”
There’s also a cost to local governments not acting, particularly when tangled-title properties are abandoned by heirs. Such governments lose tax revenue, for one thing. For another, they may become responsible for upkeep (such as mowing) until the property finds a new private owner, sometimes through a tax sale. And if the structures fall vacant, that can catalyze crime, create fire hazards, and drag down nearby property values.
But much of the harm is to the family’s wealth. When a title is tangled, the home becomes “dead capital.” That is, it’s an asset that can’t be sold, rented, or used as collateral to get a loan, as happened to Nyree Foster. Tangled titles also block any surviving family members from receiving financial help for home repair from the city or county.
Kay Terry says she knows all about this. On an overcast afternoon, she steps out onto her front porch in Jennings to explain. Her mother, Maxine, had bought this one-story house in 1976. Although Maxine died in 2011, the title is still in Maxine’s name. Terry, who’s been living at the house, says it needs “maintenance,” gesturing up to a wooden porch ceiling that’s sagging. She tried once or twice, she says, to apply for home-repair assistance from the county. “It’s hard to get financial help [for repairs],” she says. “They won’t do it if it’s not in my name.” (A spokesman for the county’s Department of Human Services says this scenario occurs a “small number” of times per year.)
Yet another constraint of a tangled title: The family can’t modify an existing mortgage on the property. This happened to Markus Haskins of unincorporated North County. Several years ago, he says, his stepfather, with whom he had grown close, died intestate and left behind a house. Haskins was the only surviving family member interested in living in it, he says, but needed a lower mortgage payment. He went to a presentation given by LSEM at the Thomas Dunn Learning Center in Dutchtown, and with LSEM’s help, got the title transferred to his name. He still hasn’t found financing that’s more manageable, he says, but at least now he’ll have the option to take it when he does. And he wants to leave the place to his son and daughter. “It would just make their journey through life a little easier, to get grown and have something of their own, so they didn’t have to go through what I went through,” he says. “And they could maybe add on to it.”
And tangled titles, which trigger all these complications, can only be fixed through a sustained effort, Stein says. “It’s not a static problem,” she says, “there’s not a single list in the world such that you can go solve those and then it’s game over, you win. No. It’s a problem that’s constantly being created.”
But there is a prevention strategy that works, she says: estate planning.
Hoffman says it’s hard to get folks jazzed about a beneficiary deed, a document that, properly worded, automatically transfers title to a specified person upon a homeowner’s death. But this instrument, also called a transfer-on-death deed, is the most efficient solution to tangled titles, he says, because it obviates the problem. “That one little piece of paper—that prevents all of this from ever happening,” he says. “We can do that in an hour.” (Beneficiary deeds, unlike wills, do not require the family to do anything in probate court.)
When a homeowner dies without an estate plan, then instantly and by default, the title fractures among surviving family members so that each owns only a portion of it, according to a hierarchy laid out in statute. The longer the situation festers and the more generations that pass away, the smaller the portions become for those who remain. Hoffman says he recently worked on a case where the title to a home had fractured among 26 heirs, some of whom had only a 1/144th interest in the property—a stake worth a few hundred dollars. With this many cooks in the kitchen, Hoffman says, consensus about what to do with the property becomes practically impossible to reach: “A lot of times, this results in really tense family disputes.”
Many of the 347 cases that Hoffman’s team opened in their first five years were for estate-planning work. They’ve gotten some help in this area from the private sector: Wells Fargo gave them a $100,000 grant to do it, and law firms such as Stinson and Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner have pitched in by sending lawyers to give free clinics in certain neighborhoods. After all, observes Tim O’Connell, a BCLP associate who once served as chief of staff to former Mayor Lyda Krewson, “There are things that the city and the agencies can do, but then there are things that only a lawyer can do. Without LSEM being involved and organizing the work, a lot of titles would still be tangled.” Hoffman says: “We could do a lot more. There’s an almost unending need for estate planning.”
Hoffman’s counterparts at Philadelphia VIP, a legal-aid nonprofit in Pennsylvania, also see estate planning as a key solution to tangled titles—but that group gets public funds to do it. VIP’s managing partner, Kelly Gastley, says the nonprofit and another now receive money from bond-issue-funded legislation to do estate planning free of charge for qualifying residents.
But titles do still need untangling, and the legislation is helping with that, too, to the tune of $7.6 million over four years for free legal assistance, according to Philadelphia councilmember Katherine Gilmore Richardson. Last year, for example, in a matter of months, the legal-aid groups almost doubled their caseloads thanks to the infusion of public money, she says. And a fund that gives grants to residents to cover the non-legal costs of clearing titles (such as title-search fees and the paying down of delinquent water bills) has increased its disbursements by half. “So far,” Richardson says, “we are seeing some progress.”
Making progress on tangled titles, Gastley argues, could solve a related problem: a lack of affordable housing. “We have a saying here: ‘The cheapest place to have someone live is the house they’re already living in,’” she says. If a family home is paid off, Gastley explains, the main costs to live there—excluding utilities, which must be paid anywhere—are taxes and maintenance. And those will typically amount to less than the cheapest available monthly rent. So from a city’s perspective, resolving tangled titles and ensuring a family can stay put would be less expensive than having another vacant house that needs demolishing or a brand-new affordable unit that needs building. “The biggest bang for your buck,” Gastley says, “is keeping people where they already are.”
Progress on tangled titles can also be an important component in closing the racial homeownership gap, says Stein of the Atlanta Fed. Locally, that gap is stark, according to numbers supplied by Stein’s colleagues at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis: In the city and county combined, the rate of ownership is 79 percent among white households and 44 percent among Black households. Access to estate planning, Stein notes, tends to be more limited in communities of color, so part of closing the gap will be increasing that access and preserving what’s already there.
“A pure preservation approach would not necessarily get you to parity,” Stein says, “but if you don’t consider preservation and don’t look at the way wealth erodes out of intergenerational hand-downs, you’re missing part of the puzzle.”
For folks to get all of their documents in order, however, they must be willing to discuss it with lawyers and bureaucrats—and many seniors don’t want to do that, observes Alderwoman Pam Boyd of the new 13th Ward. She has invited Hoffman to talk to her constituents in North City about tangled titles and estate planning. “They’re real private,” says Boyd. “They say, ‘I don’t want people to know my business.’ And I say, ‘If you don’t tell them anything, how can they help you?’”
Hoffman understands the reticence. “People don’t want to think about death,” he says. “Nobody wants to carve out time from their busy day and sit in a stuffy law office and talk about the things they own. And it really isn’t a rich-versus-poor, or Black-versus-white issue. It’s across the board. But people don’t know that if you don’t make a decision, there are some default rules that apply, and they’re probably not what you would’ve wanted to happen.”
Nyree Foster knows that all too well. “My parents—they just thought things would fix themselves, and that’s just not realistic,” she says. “It’s a conversation that has to be had. You think that you’re escaping it, but this is what happens when you avoid it.”
Yet Foster’s story did not end with her family losing the house. LSEM eventually helped her get the title transferred to her name. She saw too much death in the house to want to live there herself, so she’s still thinking about renting it out. The house has been in her family for 67 years, so it pains her to think about selling it, but potential buyers have been in contact. If one makes the right offer, she now has the option.
“I’d like for the house to be something I can build off of,” she says. “I still have hope that I’ll be able to change the dynamics.”
