The “hitch in the giddy-up”
American Planning Association Planning & Environmental Law November 2011 Vol. 63, No. 11 I p.3
Commentary Heir Property: A Constraint for Planners, an Opportunity for Communities
The Legacy of Steve Larkin
Craig H. Baab
Not much is known about Steve Larkin. He left South Carolina as a freed slave and migrated to Cuba, Alabama, where over time he accumulated upwards of 900 acres of the fertile Black Belt where Cuba is situated, just across the border from Meridian, Mississippi. He married and apparently had one child, Bryant. While hundreds of his living heirs know little of him, they today bear witness to the tangled legal ownership that land causes today. Steve Larkin’s family heritage and continuing story will serve as a real-life framework for planners to better understand the constraints of heir property in their work, as well as the opportunity it presents to strengthen communities.
SCOPE:
What does this mean to the owners of heir property? Each owner’s fractional percentage interest of the entire property does not entitle that person to sell their percentage interest of the actual land. Rather, since that person and all of the other fractional owners have an undivided interest in the entire piece of land, no single owner has the right to sell the land without the agreement of all other owners. However, each owner is able to sell their percentage interest in the land. Let’s begin with a simple example. Grandma and Grandpa owned 100 acres they purchased and for which they had a valid deed. They died in an accident, leaving four offspring. They died without a will, or intestate, in which case state law generally determines a decedent’s heirs-at-law to be a spouse, offspring, sisters and brothers, parents, and the offspring of each of these categories. Furthermore, while state law and the courts will determine who inherits an interest in the 100 acres, none of those owners will have their name on a formal deed.
Discussion of “Heir Property: A Constraint for Planners, an Opportunity for Communities” can be found at: http://blogs.planning.org/ policy/2011/09/26/pel-november-2011/ public at large.
The land Steve Larkin passed to his heirs upon his death is often referred to as heir property, heirs property, family land, or heirs-locked land. Technically, that land is tenancy in-common land, the most widespread type of land ownership in the United States. The name refers to the fact that the tenants or owners of that land each have the responsibility to pay taxes and otherwise contribute to the upkeep of the property. Consequently, none of today’s heirs have “clear title” to the land— that is, none has the ability to identify a discrete parcel of the whole that they own exclusively, since they all own the entire parcel together. The grandparents are the last recorded deed owners, even though their descendants now have ownership rights in the land. The grandparents’ 100 acres is owned by 12 descendants, with their respective ownership interest ranging from 1/4 to 1/8 to 1/16 to 1/32 and finally to 1/64. Despite those widely varying interests, each has the same right as the others to live on and use the entire 100 acres— which is why their ownership interest is referred to as an “undivided fractional interest” in the entire 100 acres. The dollar amount relative to the value of $100,000: 1/4 interest would be worth $25,000; 1/8 interest $12,500; 1/16 share $6,250; 1/32 interest $3,125, and 1/64 share would be valued at $1,562.50. However, the heir owning a percentage interest nominally worth $1562.50, has the same right to use the entire 100 acres as that heir with an interest theoretically valued at $25,000.
Research to date has uncovered some 148 living descendants of Steve Larkin’s six grandchildren. Some 30 appear to be heirs-at-law whose current inheritable interests range from 1/6 to 1/48 to 1/72 to 1/144 of the entire 120 acres. However, these interests are not directly transferable into cash, since if any individual wished to sell the entire property, or sell timber off the property, all would have to concur regardless of how small their interest. The family began to better comprehend the benefits of retaining the land as a family asset.
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Throughout the novel Mama Day by Gloria Naylor, the importance of holding onto the land is one of the dominant themes. Beginning with the matriarch, Sapphira Wade, a slave, who “persuaded Bascombe Wade,” her slave master, “to deed all his slaves every inch of land in Willow Springs...” (Naylor 3). Sapphira knew that land ownership was something that would last.
In the above article, taken from an incident in my hometown of Meridian, Mississippi, the subject of land ownership is the debate. Who owns what and how much do they own? The article makes it clear that heir property cannot be sold by an individual and even though each descendant has a share, the land itself is all one piece.
My oldest son is interested in putting up a trailer on this in-common land in Meridian and he has the right to do it because I am paying taxes on the land. The land was left to me by my father and left to my father by his mother and father, who purchased the land. The only advantage for the other family members to him doing this would be that their taxes would decrease because he would have to pay the taxes on the land that his trailer occupies. To date, all of my family sees the importance of keeping this asset in the family and no one is clamoring to sell the land. However, being heir property, before any sale can be made, everyone must agree. That is the “hitch in the giddy-up”!
