Thinking Differently about Community
Defining our community in the widest terms, and answering our people’s call to help victims of Hurricane Katrina. Finding the best way to match our skills to the crisis. Building a long-term project that one day will help communities across the US.
Hurricane Katrina highlighted long-ignored problems in poor communities in some southern states in the US. Much of the aid for the victims of Katrina was directed to homeowners. But in many poor areas, it is not always clear who has title to a property thanks to the issue of “heirs’ property”: fractured property ownership resulting from real estate being passed down informally through generations of a family, without wills being executed.
People living on the property might be considered to be de facto owners, but official title records may say something different. As a result, people in coastal Mississippi who need it most have been unable to access financial assistance to rebuild properties they live in, insure, maintain and pay taxes on. To compound the problem, their properties are effectively out of useful circulation. As a result, owners cannot do what middleclass homeowners can: that is, to sell, mortgage or refinance.
DLA Piper doesn’t have an office in Mississippi, but many of us have lived there or visited, others have friends or relatives in the state, and others went to law school there. For us, helping the victims of Katrina was first about contributing to the volunteer relief effort and then about finding the project in which we could have the maximum impact. We learned about the heirs’ property problem and the acute need for volunteer help in coastal Mississippi from the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law (a long-term partner with DLA Piper on a number of pro bono projects) and the Mississippi Center for Justice.
In the summer of 2007 DLA Piper lawyers and paralegals visited the Mississippi coast, to meet people and put together a plan to obtain grant money for people affected by heirs’ property and then to put damaged houses and apartments back into useful circulation. Our hope is to repair some of the economic damage and help communities get back on their feet.
Long term, we aim to help solve the root problems of heirs’ property and to alleviate the serious affordable housing shortage in the region that continues to be hampered by recovery efforts. Lawyers are now in Mississippi each month. Working in teams, they have handled almost 60 cases to date. It’s an open-ended commitment supported by people across DLA Piper, from partners to paralegals. Real estate companies are now studying the project as part of a wider effort to rejuvenate run-down districts.