Next City

From Tangled Title to Shared Prosperity

Across the country, low-income communities face threats of displacement, predatory investment activity and limited wealth-building opportunities. One often-overlooked contributor to these dynamics: a lack of formal estate planning. When a homeowner passes away without an estate plan, their home often becomes an “heirs’ property,” a property with no clear title. Without a clear title, homeowners face immense barriers–they cannot access the equity in the home, sell the home for a fair market price, obtain loans for repairs or purchase insurance, among other challenges. For low-income families, this situation can lead to significant home value depreciation, forced sales and even homelessness. Unfortunately, heirs’ properties are widespread, particularly among low-income communities. A conservative analysis estimates that heirs’ properties nationwide have an assessed value of over $32 billion. If communities nationwide could identify households at risk, help address’ estate planning issues and ensure clear transfers of property title, they could stabilize neighborhoods, reduce home loss and protect immense amounts of wealth for low-income residents. Fortunately, a program in Jacksonville, Florida, is showing the way. Heirs’ properties are widespread in Jacksonville and the surrounding area in Duval County, with an estimated 10,000 heirs’ properties in the region. Emerging from a process of deep community engagement, LISC Jacksonville launched its Heirs’ Property Program in 2020 and has since engaged hundreds of households with estate planning services. In this sponsored episode produced in partnership with Results for America, learn more about the immense impact of addressing heirs’ properties and how the model developed in Jacksonville might inspire your community. Download the complete Results for America toolkit on replicating this model by visiting https://results4america.co/heirs-property

A Food Security Solution for Urban and Rural Neighbors

Highlighting our recent coverage on nonprofit and alternative grocery models in Kentucky, this event would look at how communities—from urban Lexington to rural areas—are addressing food insecurity through creative, equitable approaches to food access.

Solutions for Rebuilding After Climate Disaster

Explore how communities in Altadena are rebuilding after devastating wildfires, with a focus on inclusive, community-led design and architecture. It would spotlight the role of Black architects and collaborations like AfroLA, emphasizing environmental justice and equitable recovery.

Telling the Story of Housing Affordability

Even though housing is a crisis in every American city, we hear over and over that telling the story effectively is a big challenge. Today, we’re taking lessons on how to tell the story from the filmmakers of four different documentaries. 

How We Build Community Ownership and Self-Determination

New models of collective power are emerging in neighborhoods where residents have always found ways to support one another, even as economic systems excluded and extracted.  In this sponsored episode with the Center for Cultural Innovation and its AmbitioUS initiative, which commissioned a report by the Urban Institute, local leaders share models from Atlanta and New Orleans that bring financial freedom and self-determination to artists and their communities.  “This work is to provide proof of concept that new worlds are possible, that new economic systems are possible, and that they already exist,” said Christopher Audain, Program Officer at AmbitioUS.  In an example from Atlanta, The Guild founder Nikishka Iyengar describes a hybrid land-trust and community-stewardship model that’s keeping housing and commercial space affordable while allowing residents to invest collectively.  “This is not a stepping stone to become an extractive investor,” said Iyengar. “This is a stepping stone to reorient our relationship to land, to each other, to finance, to all of that.” Meanwhile, Cooperation New Orleans organizers Toya Ex and Tamah Yisrael are part of a network of worker cooperatives formalizing long-standing traditions of mutual aid into a solidarity economy.  “There is a large idea that the capitalist economy is the only way, and time after time history has proven to us that it is not,” said Yisrael, who helped establish Cooperation New Orleans’ loan fund to support small businesses. “People often do a lot of different things to make a way, even when the capitalist system don’t allow us to make a way,” says Ex, who is also the founder of Project Hustle. The report on community ownership and self-determination strategies also includes lessons on democratic investment from Boston Ujima Project and on land stewardship from the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust in Lisjan Territory, showing why shared values and ownership are powerful counters to a disempowering economic system.