Heirs Property and Disaster Relief Preparedness

Heirs property is created when a landowner dies without a will, meaning all their heirs hold the property collectively as “tenants in common.” Over the course of generations, this property becomes one with a “tangled title,” whereby the legal ownership becomes difficult to nearly impossible to prove, even if families have lived on the land their entire lives for generations.

In 2025, the Lincoln Institute commissioned three case studies on the intersection of heirs property and disaster preparedness. These case studies focused on how this unstable form of ownership makes residents vulnerable to disasters and has excluded them from relief programs, and what responses have been taken to include them. The three papers examine the lead-up and community-based strategies to work with heirs property owners in three different instances—one focusing on Louisiana after hurricane Katrina, one in an unincorporated peripheral “freedom colony” in Texas, and one comparing the different strategies taken in rural and urban Texas.

In this 90-minute webinar, each group will present their findings. A discussant from the Climigration Network will provide higher-level commentary and situate the papers in the larger context of disaster relief and preparedness.

Speakers

Ariadna Reyes-Sánchez, Assistant Professor, The University of Texas at Arlington
Malini Roy, Assistant Professor, The University of Texas at Arlington
Maria Nishat Tasnim, Graduate Research Assistant, Texas A&M University
Marla Nelson, Professor, University of New Orleans
Laura Tuggle, Executive Director, Southeast Louisiana Legal Services
Ifeyinwa Davis, Program Director, Louisiana Appleseed
Kelly Main, Founder and Executive director, Buy-In