Heirs’ Property: Emerging Questions From Education and Outreach Efforts On Voluntary Clear Title Resolution

Heirs’ property title resolution and retention has emerged as a public policy supporting outreach and education efforts and technical assistance to help heirs’ property interest holders voluntarily clear the titles to large amounts of rural and urban acreage. Such efforts provide a window into rural socio-economic concerns including wealth depletion (particularly among Black Americans) and in regard to farm and forest land economic productivity. Unresolved heirs’ property title has also been documented as a hurdle to the distribution of disaster benefits, of particular interest in hurricane-prone North Carolina as those programs, like other federal and state conversation and farm programs, require clear title to impacted parcels (Flemming et al., 2016).

In this edition of the NC State Economist, Associate Extension Professor Robert Andrew Branan, JD gives his perspective as a former practicing attorney with experience in heirs’ property cases who, through his appointment with North Carolina Cooperative Extension, has recently contributed to a series of outreach and education programs on heirs’ property title resolution and retention titled Heirs’ Property at the Community Level (“HP@CL”).