FROM OLIVIA BARROW STRAUSS, VICE PRESIDENT, NEIGHBORHOOD DEVELOPMENT, JPMORGANCHASE
JULY 2025
AFN Short Take is a blog series highlighting insights and perspectives from recent AFN programming events.

Heirs’ property—the informal inheritance of land or homes without clear legal title—remains a widespread but often invisible barrier to wealth preservation in low-income communities and communities of color. Often seen as a gift from one generation to the next, heirs’ property can serve as a foundation for housing, business development, and family stability. Yet without a clear title, legal and financial challenges are likely to arise.

Since 2023, Asset Funders Network has worked to highlight the philanthropic opportunities embedded in this often-overlooked issue.Together, these briefs laid the groundwork for action:

  • Heirs’ Property: Acting to Preserve Wealth introduced the scope of the problem and practical interventions that funders could support.
  • Heirs’ Property: Policies to Preserve Wealth followed with a state-by-state checklist to identify legal gaps and reform opportunities.

Now, AFN has released a third installment—Heirs’ Property: Investing to Preserve Wealth—focused on the research opportunity for funders. This newest brief presents the first-ever social return on investment (SROI) analysis of heirs’ property interventions and quantifies just how impactful philanthropic action can be in this space.

The brief was the centerpiece of a June 2025 AFN webinar featuring economist and author Dr. Jose Diaz, and representatives from JPMorganChase, Builders of Hope, and the Center for New York City Neighborhoods. The conversation made one thing clear: with the right support, heirs’ property can become a powerful lever for community stability, wealth preservation, and systems change.

A High-Return Case for Philanthropy

The SROI analysis modeled six typical heirs’ property interventions—from title clearing and mediation to foreclosure prevention—and found that each delivered more than a dollar of social benefit for every dollar invested. Some returns were significantly higher:

  • Avoiding foreclosure generated a 36:1 return

  • Preventing forced partition sales yielded 7:1 returns

“A return of 7-to-1 or 36-to-1 is far above what’s typical in philanthropic investments,” said economist Dr. Jose Diaz. “These findings suggest that heirs’ property interventions offer some of the highest returns available for funders focused on both individual and community impact.”

The research also showed that nonprofit programs with direct experience in tangled title cases are at least twice as effective as general legal services providers, underscoring the need for philanthropic support that builds both capacity and coordination.

For JPMorganChase, the results of AFN’s new return-on-investment analysis reinforce the bank’s strategy, which identified heirs’ property as a key barrier to household stability and generational wealth. By aligning philanthropic capital, policy expertise, and business resources, JPMorganChase has worked to advance scalable solutions. Supporting the SROI analysis helped confirm what had long been a working hypothesis: investing in heirs’ property interventions can generate significant, measurable impact for communities.

What’s Working: Local Models Leading the Way

In Dallas, Builders of Hope began focusing on heirs’ property after recognizing how frequently it undercut affordable housing efforts. “We were building new homes while longtime residents were quietly losing theirs,” said James Armstrong, the group’s President and CEO. Their new Homestead Preservation Center combines legal aid, tax support, and property improvement—tools designed to protect inherited homes and the families who live in them.

“A neighborhood turns over at a quicker rate than it would if there were activities and solutions like this. And so we are so delighted for the research that is coming forth because it is ammunition for us to go to funders and point to data to prove why this work is so important in the neighborhoods that we serve.”

James Armstrong, Builders for Hope

In New York City, the Center for NYC Neighborhoods has built an ecosystem of legal services, policy reforms, and charitable lending to help families retain ownership of inherited homes. Through its CDFI arm, Sustainable Neighborhoods, the organization has deep experience navigating tangled titles but lacked the capital needed to scale that support.

To meet the need, the Center developed the Heirs’ Property Preservation Fund, offering up to $50,000 in small-dollar loans for title resolution, buyouts, and repairs. Loan terms are tailored to household needs, including 0% standing-lien loans for very low-income households and amortizing loans for heirs locked out of traditional credit.

“We’ve built the ecosystem. We’ve trained our partners. We’ve modeled it out with a fund designed to be recyclable, so once one household resolves their title, the capital can be redeployed to the next. What’s missing is a source of capital to resolve these issues.

K. Scott Kohanowski, General Counsel, Center for NYC Neighborhoods

Zooming In: From Data to Dialogue

Speakers emphasized that heirs’ property work is not one-size-fits-all. While national data helps make the case, place-based analysis can sharpen it further and ensure funders are acting on the most relevant opportunities. “The next step is localizing it,” said Dr. Diaz. “The return on investment might be even higher in specific communities.”

Language also matters. Families and communities may not identify with the term “heirs’ property,” but the issues are familiar, whether they’re being referenced as “family land” or “transfer upon death” deeds vs. “beneficiary” deeds. Recognizing the local vocabulary of inheritance and ownership is essential to building trust and reaching those affected.

Panelists agreed: whether your portfolio focuses on disaster recovery, housing access, neighborhood revitalization, entrepreneurship or wealth building, heirs’ property solutions align. “You don’t have to do it all,” one speaker noted. “Just get in where you fit in.”

Where Philanthropy Can Lead

Philanthropy has a unique role to play in preserving generational wealth—and in preventing its quiet erosion through heirs’ property loss. The SROI analysis provides strong justification for investment and community advocates and practitioners can provide guidance from what’s already working on the ground.

Speakers pointed to multiple areas where funders can make a difference:

  • Seed flexible capital pools designed to help families resolve title issues, buy out speculators, and complete urgent repairs when other programs won’t.
  • Fund homestead preservation strategies that combine legal aid, property tax support, and maintenance planning, especially in regions experiencing economic change and displacement pressure.
  • Support localized research and prevalence mapping to identify the scale of the issue in your state, city, or region, building the case for policy reform and targeted intervention.
  • Back culturally-relevant estate planning that meets families where they are—in language, in community, and in trust—through clinics, toolkits, or outreach led by grassroots organizations.
  • Advance policy reform that gives heirs more protections and tools, such as transfer-on-death deeds, partition sale safeguards, and access to public programs despite tangled titles.

As one speaker put it: “This isn’t a legal issue or a housing issue or a finance issue. It’s all of them—and that means there are many ways to show up.”

Explore More

AFN has compiled a comprehensive set of resources on heirs’ property, including a full recording of the webinar, briefs and policy tools on heirs’ property, and publications from JPMorganChase offering further context on housing stability and wealth preservation.

You can access all materials here.