 Good afternoon. Welcome to the Howard University School of Business. This is a very important event that we are honored to host. And I want to thank New America for bringing this to our attention. Of course, we have, as you all know, a lot of great things going on in the school of business. This is an important instructional opportunity for our students. But also, I think it's important for some of our faculty, staff, and other stakeholders in the university, because this issue is something that's relevant to all of us, I think. We have several people who are experiencing issues with heiress property. And so this is something that we find intriguing, very important, and we're looking forward to the information that's going to be shared with us today. I am Anthony Willbonne, Associate Dean in the School of Business, on behalf of Dr. Baron Harvey, who's the dean, who's with us this evening in the back of the room. Again, I welcome you to the School of Business on behalf of the students, the staff, and the faculty. I have the honor this morning of introducing Ms. Tyra Mariani, President and Chief Operating Officer at New America. Prior to joining New America, Tyra was appointed Chief of Staff to the US Department Secretary of Education and Deputy Chief of Staff to the US Secretary of Education under the Obama Administration. In these roles, Tyra helped shape policies and programs impacting education from early learning through college and career. She also led complex interagency and cross-departmental teams that took several administration priorities, from vision to strategy and implementation, including the President's My Brother's Keeper Initiative and Respect. Prior to joining the Department of Education, Ms. Mariani launched entrepreneurial efforts to build human capital in the education sector as founder of the Greater New Orleans Region of Leaders. We are proud that Tyra is also an alumnus of the School of Business, receiving her bachelor degree in business administration from Howard, valedictorian of her class. So we want to note that as well. And she has her master's degree from a lesser institution, Stanford University. But we are so proud that she is here to bring this program with her. And I'm going to bring to the stage Tyra. Tyra, come up and give her a hand, please. Thank you, Dr. Wobon. I can't tell you how excited that I am to be back in this room my earliest memories of Howard were spending time in this room learning how to dress for corporate America. And we wore business suits every week. And I learned I couldn't wear my big earrings because that would not work in corporate America. And Howard was so foundational to all that I achieved since then. It was such a nurturing environment for me and really gave me some of my earliest learnings about what a good leader looked like and what a good manager looked like. So I couldn't be more excited to be here today. So welcome and thank you for joining us for today's event, the biggest problem you've never heard of, examining AIR's property and black property loss. I first want to start by thanking Howard School of Business and Howard School of Law for working with us and bringing this event together today under the leadership of Yuya Panfil, who is our director of the future of property rights at New America. You've probably not heard of New America before, potentially. So if I may familiarize you with our organization, we are dedicated to renewing the promise of America, helping to realize our nation's highest ideals. And we're a different kind of think tank, one that is dedicated to public problem solving. Our team is one of visionary researchers, change makers, technologists and storytellers who all understand the opportunities and the challenges presented by today's dramatic social and technological change. We're searching for powerful ideas wherever they are, and we conduct research and listen to people in communities across America to develop evidence-based solutions to some of our common challenges. And we share stories about solutions that work often given voice to some of the civic innovators around the country that are solving real problems. There are 2 billion people, 2 billion with a B, who cannot access the most basic property rights around the world. Even though technology exists to unlock and enable some of that access, and by not leveraging technology where it can be utilized, policymakers continue to deny access to property rights for people. Our future of property rights program aims to help solve today's property rights challenges, both domestically and globally, by helping to shrink the gap between technologists and policymakers. And this is just some of the reasons why we're so excited to be here today. Before our esteemed panelists come up, I thought I would give you just a little bit to sort of set the stage, and they will certainly expand upon these ideas. It is a fact that the United States suffers from a racial wealth gap. My guess is I, in looking at this room, that is no surprise to you. But perhaps you don't know that the White Household has 10 times more wealth than the typical African-American household. And if current trends were to continue, it would take over 200 years for the average African-American family to accumulate the same amount of wealth. And of course, we know that the goal post continues to move so even longer. Wealth, which is an individual and a family's financial network, often functions as a sort of generational stepping stone, that older generations pass on to future generations to benefit from. But that stepping stone has traditionally not benefited African-Americans throughout our country's history. From centuries of enslavement to Jim and Jane Crow laws, school segregation, mass incarceration, and the list goes on, policies have consistently prevented African-Americans from realizing the American dream. And so we're gathered here today to discuss what I would call, and I'm sure my panelists would agree, a critical understudied component of the waste show wealth gap, which is property. Take, for example, there was a New York Times article in 2017 that said that the average homeowner boasts a net worth of $194,000, which is 36 times the average of that of a renters, which is about $5,400. African-Americans continue to be displaced from their homes and land. In the last century has seen a precipitous decline in the amount of black-owned agricultural land, partly as a result of Aire's property, which is a former property ownership through which land is passed down without a will to descendants of the original owner. And this informal partnership system has often been exploited and forced partition sales and removed black families from their property. Van Newkirk, who is one of our panelists and a new America fellow, had an Atlantic cover story that talked about how black farmers throughout the US history, throughout our history, were regularly denied access to loans and government programs leading to mortgage foreclosure. Many of those who escaped foreclosure were subjected to inflated property, appraisals resulting in unaffordable tax obligations and tax sales. But Aire's property is hardly the only example of the pernicious impacts of property rights and security. We can walk just around the neighborhood of Howard University to see that, because DC has become the poster child for gentrification. Gentrification, I would argue, gone wrong as it scores the record for displacing African-American residents at some of the highest rates in the country. Stark racial disparities and will-making as well, leave residents across the nation who are heirs to property and lack title documents unable to access aid. We saw this in Hurricane Katrina, which is my hometown. And it prevents them from rebuilding after a disaster. And African-Americans continue to live with the legacy, which we were talking about just at the beginning before we started, the legacy of state-sponsored housing segregation throughout the 20th century, just one of which was the refusal of the Federal Housing Administration to provide loans for the construction of homes to be sold to African-Americans. So we will use Aire's property and Black land laws as a jumping off point to talk about property as a key component of generational wealth and equally important to talk about innovative solutions like the Grounded Solutions Network and others that are pursuing goals to secure the property rights of African-Americans. So with that, I want to get out of the way so that our experts can engage us. Again, so pleased to be in partnership with Howard University on this. And I hope and expect like me, you're looking forward to a robust conversation. With that, I will turn it over to Yulia to introduce our panelists. Thank you. Thank you, Tyra. Thank you to the Howard University School of Business and the Howard University School of Law for embarking with us on this critical discussion. My name is Yulia Panfill. I am the director of the Future of Property Rights program at New America. And I am pleased to introduce our distinguished panel. First, let me introduce Van Newkirk, who is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he covers politics and policy. In the summer of 2019, The Atlantic cover story, The Great Land Robbery, helped ignite a national conversation around heirs property and black land loss. Prior to his work at The Atlantic, Van was at Daily Coase, where he focused on justice and health issues. And he focused on the intersection of policy, race, class, and culture. Van is also currently a fellow at New America. Welcome, Van. Next, I am proud to introduce Thomas Mitchell, who is a professor at Texas A&M School of Law, where he co-directs a program in real estate and community development law. Thomas is also the principal drafter of the Uniform Partition of Heirs Property Act, which is the primary legal instrument that is helping to solve challenges related to heirs property. Thomas, welcome. Next, it is my pleasure to introduce Tony Pickett, who is the chief executive officer of the Grounded Solutions Network, a national organization that promotes innovative housing solutions. Prior to joining Grounded Solutions Network, Tony was a senior vice president of master site development for the Urban Land Conservancy and the founding executive director of the Atlanta Land Trust Collaborative. Welcome, Tony. And finally, it is my pleasure to welcome our moderator, Marsha Chatlane. Marsha is an associate professor of history and African-American studies at Georgetown University. Marsha is a scholar of African-American life and culture and the author of two books. Her first book, Southside Girls, Growing Up in the Great Migration, was published in 2015. And Marsha just published her second book called Franchise, The Golden Arches in Black America. Marsha was also a Schmidt Fellow at New America from 2016 to 2018. Welcome, Marsha. Hello, everyone. I think it is incredibly fitting for us to be at Howard University, a place that has long been part of the tradition of cultivating leadership for the world with a particular focus on the struggles of African-American peoples. And this conversation really rests at the intersection of law and business and public policy. And so I'd like to start our conversation with a question for the panel about what is at stake. For a number of us who don't own property, don't believe that we could ever fall to generational problems, why must we all be invested in this issue of how property moves generationally as well as access to property? I would like to start with you, Vin. So I think, you can hear me? You're good? OK. I think the general thing here is that the history of wealth in America has largely been the history for the average American, the history of land in America. And for the average American, it will be the future of wealth will be the future of land in America, the future of property. And when we're talking about these questions in the current moment of both the racial wealth gap and the larger wealth inequality between the 1% and 99%, those are all issues revolving around land, around property. The Great Recession was, at its root, a crisis of land and ownership. And so I think, really, when we're trying to disentangle all these questions about wealth, about promise, about the possibility of America, there is no way around it. The question at the center of all that is who owns what? Thomas? So first of all, I want to say it's also great to be back at Howard. I'm a alum of Howard University School of Law in 1993. If I was at Texas A&M, I required to start every meeting by saying howdy at risk of being unprofessional. This is the only time I'll do this. I'm at Howard. So bison, you know. All right, so with that said, I want to build upon what's been said before. And in terms of the ability to function in our society, to advance ourselves professionally in other ways, it's important to have wealth, not just for ourselves, but in terms of over the course of multiple generations. When one owns property, you have collateral that can be used to get a loan to finance your children's education. And so oftentimes, with the lack of wealth that we have in the African-American community, it doesn't just impact our current generation. It impacts generations that cascade over in the future. So there's obviously in terms of when we talk about building wealth for all the reasons we've heard before, that's powerful in and of itself. I would also argue that we shouldn't limit it to the economic value of owning property. Property also has non-economic values in terms of cultural heritage, historic value. So if you take, for example, in Hilton Head, for those who've been to Hilton Head in the last several decades, it's seen as kind of a resort area, golf courses. Up until about 1950, a substantial number of property owners in Hilton Head were African-American, maybe the majority. And when you think about all of the cultural heritage and the importance with Gullah people, that essentially now has been erased. There's damage that's done to a people when their cultural and historic heritage essentially has been erased. And that's often happened with the loss we've had in voluntary loss of property in both rural areas and in urban areas, right? So we've talked about DC and DC having gentrification on steroids. When I was at law school, DC was still a majority African-American city. It is unrecognizable and substantial part when you come to DC in 2020. And so not only have we had people forced out, but you start thinking about the cultural heritage of that that is at risk of also being erased. Let me just kind of stop there. I'll just add that from our perspective at Grounded Solutions, one of the primary models that we promote around the country to promote affordable homeownership is the community land trust model. At the core of that is community control of land, making sure that a local community actually has some say in how land is owned and used from generation to generation. And so the points that you raise about land being the source of wealth, a lot of people in this country don't know at the start of this nation. There were grants and special privileges allotted to white Europeans who came to this country and they said, oh, how many people are in your household? Well, you got a corresponding number of acres based on wanting that population to gain traction, gain a foothold in settling the new world. And so as you mentioned for African-Americans in particular, that was never part of the game. It was always an exclusionary proposition for us to have control of land. And so I'll just say the very first community land trust got established during the 1960s as part of the civil rights movement in Albany, Georgia. And it was really over and a response to sharecropping, understanding that for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee to go down and organize people to vote, the reaction to that from landowners that sharecroppers were working for was to evict them from the property. So they and their families had no way to earn a living and became nomadic and often had to migrate north in order to gain some viable means to support themselves. So the response was how can we come up with a way for Black tenant farmers in the South to own land? A group of folks, including two cousins of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. ended up going to Israel and studying their communal farm operations in Israel. They came back and created what we use today as the community land trust model, saying not one single owner of land, but a collective ownership of land in an agreement about what the use of that land is. We've translated that into modern community land trust home ownership by separating ownership of the land, giving that to a nonprofit entity that is predominantly community controlled by a board of directors and then selling the actual home and mortgaging that home and having a long-term land lease govern the relationship between the homeowner and the land trust. Contrary to what most people have perceived about that model, one of the things that's incorporated into it is limiting the share of equity that a homeowner can take out of the home once they sell it. That particular point we were discussing it earlier is often interpreted as unfair, limiting the ability of the family that owns the home to generate wealth. Well, I'm here to tell you we released a study last year, a 33-year study of what we call shared equity home ownership, community land trusts and other programs of that nature, the performance of them over time and found that for an average investment of $1,800 from a family and buying a community land trust and shared equity home, they were able to glean a return of $14,000 and the average tenure of those families before they decided to sell was anywhere from five to seven years. You can't get that kind of return in any other investment vehicle. So contrary, I want you to help me put it out there into the world, contrary to what people think, shared equity home ownership, including community land trusts, is wealth generating. So that community-owned land is helping families to generate wealth and, I'll add on, a majority of them are transitioning once they sell their land trust home to regular market rate home ownership. So it's a stepping stone to get them into the economic mainstream game of market rate home ownership. Each of you has taken this kind of issue of property land from a different perspective, but one of the through lines in all of the challenges of black property ownership is both the legal and extra legal means that are used to dispossess and displace black folks. And so for each of you in the context of the work that you do, what are some of the mechanisms, the legal mechanisms that have undermined the capacity for black property ownership and generational wealth in order for us to understand how we maneuver a system that in many ways I think we can say is if not only rigged, but particularly nefarious. I view the legal and extra legal avenues of land loss as kind of a continuum, especially because when you're considering a question of if the government is doing it, is it legal or extra? No, say that. What I focused on in the cover story was systematic denial by pieces of the USDA of loans to black farmers in the Mississippi Delta, which is representative of a large-scale discrimination against, in lots of different ways, the ways that USDA funds farmers, they discriminate against black farmers in that effort and pretty easy straightforward line between black land ownership in lots of cases and USDA discrimination in black land loss. But those things weren't necessarily, the denial of a loan, I think actually as Tyra put it in the introduction, the denial of a loan itself isn't necessarily the theft, right? It's a denial of a loan in compounding with an unfair tax assessment of land. It's a denial of that loan compounding with Jim Crow equipment salesmen selling you a tractor at 150 or 200% markup. It's the compounding of all that stuff with the basic stresses of Jim Crow life, of not being able to afford lawyers, of not being able to go to fancy clinics on land retention. And so all those things function together, essentially at the end of the day, and then contribute to the thing that we're talking, that the title of this program, when you have land that has an unclear title or heirs property or you have succession issues, those, all those factors compound and become these sort of pressures, 360 degrees of pressure that force maybe one person in the family to sell and then we have the heirs property problem. So I very much agree with the van that there's an interaction between the extra legal and the legal, or even, like you said, it's the government that we even call that extra legal. But since I am the lawyer on the panel and the law professor, let me just focus on some of the legal processes that have resulted in the involuntary loss of property by African-Americans. So typically we think of that there are five. And so how many people from the law school are here? Oh, look at that. The law school representin', all right. So we have that the five legal processes are eminent domain, adverse possession, foreclosure, tax sales and partition sales. And I totally agree with van that when I think of it in some ways that in the work that I do with heirs property owners and partition is in many respects they've been kind of softened up. They're already in a vulnerable economic position that will not enable them to do well in a partition action because they don't have the wealth, for example, to bid at these forced sales. But I also wanna make the point that oftentimes, and this is to the law students here and maybe the law professors, including those who taught me, Professor Rogers, for example, is that there are things that lawyers can be doing in terms of building the competency to be experts in these areas that we, in law we often make the distinction between litigators and transactional folks. So transactions, we're talking about folks who do estate planning, probate, real estate develop, real estate transactions, tax. And oftentimes, this is like I'd say in law schools throughout America, we have a subset of students interested in social justice and public interest, but they gravitate towards doing litigation stuff. This transactional stuff is seen as being corporate and as a skill set that's irrelevant to promoting social justice. And if there's one message I wanna get out today is that that is a wrong way of thinking about things and consistent with traditions of Howard's law school and it's being at the forefront of civil rights, we have to understand that vindicating people's economic rights is just as important at these other areas. And so in the work that I do oftentimes, there is a small subset of attorneys who have the legal training to help these families and I have messages that come pouring in from these families across the country. And the sad thing is there are very few attorneys I know who I can refer these families to. So let me just, that's a bullet point that I want to share with you if you were thinking any of you that transactional courses are kind of being, and I'm not trying to disparage corporate, but that it's somehow inconsistent with vindicating and promoting social justice. I'll just sum it up as a term that probably all of you are familiar with, redlining, restricting access to financial products in majority non-white neighborhoods. Clearly that has had a generational impact. And when we talk about the racial wealth gap, that is one of the primary factors that has resulted in that vast gulf between families of color, their assets and net worth and white families in this country. And so it was a very intentional thing that was done to black communities and communities of color all over this country. If you read the author Richard Rothstein's book, Color of Law, he talks extensively about that and the impact of that in multiple places across the United States. Throughout this conversation, we point into different directions on how we can work this issue, whether it's through a state planning, whether it's through advocacy, but there's definitely a policy component that I think allows a broader group of people to the table. And we're at Howard University, which is at the center of so much important work, not only in this city, but in educating leadership. And so I want us to think a little bit about that historic relationship of the historically black college and the policy network that can build around these issues. Where do you see some of our most talented and most compassionate leaders working in the policy space to address some of these issues? Or is anyone doing what needs to be done? I mean, it doesn't have to be a positive question. I'll go first this time. I have both a state and local and a national policy team. And I hope you all are aware of the fact that right now the Community Reinvestment Act is really under attack. The current administration has proposed a revision to the Community Reinvestment Act that actually has the reverse effect. It does not allow banks and other financial institutions to really focus on serving underserved communities. And it's couched in a lot of very intricate policy language, but the ultimate upshot of it is, we are part of several coalitions that have been weighing in pretty consistently in opposition to that change. So I would say the more folks that we can have as part of those coalitions, and I'm happy to share more information about which ones those are, and they're mainly based here in DC, that would be of great help. The other thing is even at the local level, the District of Columbia right now is considering, and I'll be selfish about this, some community land trust authorizing legislation. Community land trusts don't actually require it, but they want to try to standardize their support over the long term for community land trusts. The best example that I can give you is the Douglas Community Land Trust operating east of the river. Trying to get ahead of what we all know will be a wave of new investment that would ultimately, if not managed correctly, displace large numbers of African-American families. That is one of the last bastions real African-American community, social and culturally left in the district. So really trying to focus along with the District Council members on what would be the best and most useful policy in terms of supporting this community land trust approach, and I'll say I helped to develop a business plan for the Douglas Community Land Trust before I moved to DC and assumed my current position, and over the next 10 year period, it's assumed that while that land trust will start east of the river, it will eventually expand district wide. So keeping some portion of the housing stock within the district affordable permanently is the goal of that land trust. So if people are interested in maybe some type of volunteer or even internship or fellowship opportunity, I would love to have more conversation about that. Yeah, I think I went to a different HBCU. I went to Moore House. I'm sorry about that, guys. But I'm excited to be at Howard talking about this. My dad went to Howard, and I think one thing that I wish I had learned more while I was in school was that the history of HBCUs is almost synonymous with the history of black land ownership, land retention, with where we live and how we live. You think about the reason why DC became known as Chocolate City. Howard was no small part of that reason. And you look at the way that I focused on rural black land ownership. The only reason people were able to hold onto our land at all, who were farmers, was because black extension agents from the USDA at land grant colleges, black HBCUs that were land grants, were essentially bucked the USDA party line and taught black people how to keep their land, how to grow the crops they needed to be profitable in ways that actually the USDA wasn't all that into. And so I think, yeah, there are definite ways that people can support existing legislation, existing efforts on the ground. You can think about becoming more involved in the real wave of community land trust movement that's going across country. You can think about stuff like Doug Jones's and Tim Scott's bill to help with air property. But also I think the general, just of how we live and operate as children of HBCUs, as students who go here, as people who care the legacy on with us, we all have a small part to play, whether it's deciding to invest in land and a land trust, whether it's deciding where we want to move or not, whether we want to rent or not. We all have a part to play in that ongoing history of black land ownership and retention. And I think if you went back to HBCUs in the early 20th century, this was one of the dominant conversations they were having and I think we should get back to that. Yeah, so I think that as I indicated, there tends to be a dearth of attorneys who can represent individual families and individual family matters. And I think that's very important to address. But also then, if we think about this systemically as a policy-wide, there's a couple of organizations that I work with. So one has been called the Heirs Property Retention Coalition, which is a coalition of public interest law firms, community-based organizations that have deep history in working on Heirs Property issues in the trenches. And so that's been kind of an effective coalition and the individual members of the coalition to one degree or another have been relatively effective. But also at a kind of systemic level in terms of law reform. So there's an organization that I bet hardly any of the law students, maybe even the professors, if my talks at other law faculties across the country is representative of this room, that is called the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws. And usually when I mention that, people's eyes glaze over, including law professors who are tenured with chairs. And so when that happens, then I say, have you ever heard of something called the Uniform Commercial Code, the UCC? And then among the lawyers at least, like their eyes light up, right? And I said, that wasn't like mana that came down from heaven. There was an organization, in that case actually two organizations, the Uniform Law Commission and the American Law Institute, that drafted that. These are levers or tools, organizations that have been severely underutilized by people who are trying to promote social justice. So that's been another thing I've been trying to proselytize. So I'll tie it to what I'm probably most known for in terms of my legal reform, being the principal drafter of the Uniform Partition of Heirs Property Act. So it's been the most significant reform of partition law in this country's history. We have, we've had states, we now have 15 states that have enacted into law, as well as the U.S. Virgin Islands. And some of the states where we've had it enacted, the last change to the partition law was 125 years ago. But most folks don't know about the Uniform Law Commission. So this is a, I've been kind of trying to let other kind of organizations committed to social justice legally know about the work that the Uniform Law Commission does because you have to actually write a proposal to them. They vet it, they can accept it and set up a drafting committee. Without working through the Uniform Law Commission, the success we've had in all these states would never have happened. They are an organization that has deep ties, their membership, their Uniform Law Commissioners have to be an attorney and they're consists of, they're all appointed by governors or I guess in D.C. would be the mayor. You know, these people are judges, they're members of legislatures and they're leading attorneys in private practice. They have deep social networks and capital and the success we've had across the country is we draw on these folks. Some of them are in legislatures where we're working, some of them are buddies with people in the legislature so we never would have had this success that we've had. So I think it's just important for folks to know that as important as working on individual matters, if you're working more broadly, you need to know what are these levers of power and you need to be able to access them and utilize them and draw upon them. And so then I'll kind of turn it back to the role when I think of Howard, right? So obviously the law school has, was it the forefront of the challenge to Jim Crow segregation in schools, all those important cases that built up to Brown versus Board, sweat versus painter, et cetera, were all mooted at Howard Law School. And I just, what I'd heard, I know that the law school has the Thurgood Marshall, right. You know, and I think that too, what we need to do is you think about, as Martin Luther King talked about, was that unaddressed part was the economic rights. And so I think that having institutions like Howard, whether it's the business school or the law school, kind of draw upon that history, but then not be static, not be backwards looking, but be forwards looking and thinking about how can they extend their social justice commitment in a way that would rid down to the benefit of African-Americans generally. And for all the reasons that we've talked about in terms of, first of all, you know, with African-Americans, it was the African-Americans as we know in Dred Scott, we were once considered property, ourselves. And that we had no rights that white Americans needed to respect. To the challenges of accumulating property, and then what we see is the attack on that property ownership, and we've been going backwards. So I think that that's important in terms of an institution like an HBCU specifically, let's talk about Howard, playing a substantial role, right. And we both need folks who are trained in terms of business and in terms of law. I'll just mention one other person who happens to be here. So this is Mavis-Gragas here. She's with a incredibly important, I'll call it a pilot project. I don't want to diminish it that way. That is, it's called the Sustainable Forestry and Land Retention Program that's working with African-Americans who own land in the South. They are piloting in three states. This is where these are African-Americans who own land that has forestry potential that could be used to build wealth. I got to know this project because when they started working with African-American families, they encountered the problem that these families had heirs property problems and the legal problems were inhibiting their ability to build them. So a lot of what the SFLR does, I mean there's some legal, but there's also the business development of how we can leverage this property ownership to actually build wealth. So there's a role for all kinds of folks, but specifically including folks who have training in business and training in law. A lot of the issues you touch upon are at that nexus of understanding history and historical trends, staying vigilant about current policy, but also preparing for the future. And so when you talk to people who are in the position of having property, having access to land or a house or about to buy a house, what are some of the ways that you feel like there needs to, or what are the types of things that people need to understand about ownership in its current state so that they can imagine the future differently? Cause I know that in Washington DC, this is a source of tension about gentrification, about who you're gonna sell your house to, for how much and why, where are you moving into and what are your intentions. And so I'm really curious in your conversations with people about their own perspectives on land and how it's supposed to create wealth, what are some of the pieces of advice or insights that you share? I'm 31 and for, I really didn't wanna like own a house at all. I didn't wanna cut the grass. It's such a pain. Oh, you just wait. I gotta get out of here for a furnace situation. You don't want that trouble. And then I got the house and my basement flooded. Absolutely. And all the hassles, I feel like it's a conversation that's common among millennials among Gen Z is, who wants a house? Who wants to go live the little suburban white picket fence life? I can rent a place and do just fine. And actually in reporting for that story, I realized just how different my perspective was on it from I guess like folks who grew up in Jim Crow who were a generation, not even that removed from sharecropping, right? I think, yeah, there are some conversations to be had and actually maybe Tony's a person he won't be talking to because there are models now. There are ways to think about real estate about land ownership that maybe don't revolve around the idea that maybe a passe now, which is like going and getting a dog and living out in the suburbs, living that type of life. There are ways now I think to think about ownership that may fit our sensibilities that aren't the sort of 1950s suburbia way of thinking about it. So I think in terms of just ownership, right? Whether or not that's your preference or not, you can't force people to have a preference that they don't. There's good reasons why sometimes people don't want to own and rent. And one of the important things I think, especially where Howard to realize is that when you look at African-Americans generally and you look at their asset portfolios, they're skewed to property ownership. And what we've had in the last 15 years is we had the high water mark for home ownership in the African-American community was about 2004, it was almost 50%. We're now down to 40.6%. And to tell you how bad that is, at the time that the Federal Fair Housing Act was enacted into law, the home ownership rate was 42% in the African-American. So we're in a worse position today than we were prior to the Federal Fair Housing Act, which is pretty depressing when you actually think about it. And so there's a couple of things I think that we've also had in the great recession, disproportionately African-Americans were hit. But in that context, it was kind of what some people recall was reverse redlining. We have, we still live in an incredibly segregated America. And as opposed to just the denial of loans, what we had was predatory loans in those communities. It was kind of, I looked at, I think the Washington Post did a great article about in the Atlanta area. It was pretty shocking was that professional African-Americans, relatively high income African-Americans had agreed to loans that had, who would have otherwise qualified for your standard loans, entered into agreements that were predatory. So that says something about financial literacy. So that's one thing is we need to make sure that we are financially literate when we enter into these transactions. And even among the professional class of African-Americans, there sometimes is a gap. So let me just, this is another thing I'm processing about. We talked about the lack of the state planning. So let me just give you a quick statistic. All those, there's been no national studies. Variety of studies that show the rate of will-making in this country or state planning is between 40 and 60%. I'm gonna look at a study I'm familiar with most recently. Showed that the overall will-making rate in America was 57%. For, it broke it out by race and ethnicity. And for every racial or ethnic group, and this is not surprising, the rate of will-making or state planning is correlated with the education levels. Those with the lowest education have the lowest rate of the state planning or will-making. Those with the highest. But here's one thing, something I wanna leave with you. Among white Americans this study showed that the rate of will-making amongst those who had the least education, those without a high school degree, was 57%. The highest rate was white Americans with a college degree or more and it was 72%. The highest rate of will-making in the African-American community was, not surprisingly, African-Americans with a college degree or graduate degree. Do you know what the rate of will-making was for that group? Which is, y'all, 32%. Not making a will, not having a state planning. If you own property, we'll ensure that when your property passes to the next generation, it will pass under an ownership form. We call it heirs property. For the law students or lawyers, it's tenancy in common ownership. Tenancy in common ownership under the default rules that the state gives you is well-recognized to be the most unstable form of common real property ownership in America. If you went to an estate planner or a business planner, they would give you options of the ways you could own your property, an LLC, a partnership. You can contract around a tenancy in common. They call them tick agreements. But the one thing they would tell you is never own it under a tenancy in common, under the default rules. And the majority of African-Americans who own common property, you know how they own it? Tenancy in common under the default rules. And so there's both the financial literacy but also the legal literacy. And so I think that, you know, that's, I mean, this is kind of a depressing point. I was asked to give a talk at the ABA's annual meeting in Toronto a few years ago and we're talking about heirs property and these are all lawyers, right? Disproportionately African-American attorneys. And so, you know, I was telling them, of course when you advise your clients or your family, you know, tell them about the various ownership structures and the options. And afterwards I had a huge group of these lawyers come up to me and said, no, my family's got heirs property. Like there's options? Like they had no idea. Then I asked them, what area do you practice in? Criminal law, family law, they just, they had no idea and these are the attorneys. And that was pretty depressing to me that if it's the attorneys don't know. So anyway, so financial literacy, legal literacy. Wow, I think you guys covered a lot of the points there. The only thing I would add is, again, there's some consideration to be made for type of housing. We've all been conditioned over many generations to believe in the American dream. This standalone single family home with a nice yard, with a fence around it. And what most people don't realize is single family zoning is another means to exclude. If you make the lot size a certain size and you make that a certain price, you can effectively exclude lower income people from living in that community. So that's another thing back on the policy side that we need to start to talk more about. But also in our world, there are limited equity co-ops. There are condominiums that are done under the land trust model. I would urge folks based on their lifestyle to start thinking about the type of house that they actually want to live in and invest and then treat it like an investment. And once you make that initial purchase, there will come more investment that needs to be planned for. So back to the financial literacy part. And one of the advantages of our programs is that we incorporate what we call stewardship. There's a long-term relationship between our nonprofit land trust or even limited equity co-op and the home owner. And you can come to us for advice. In some cases, we require under community land trust the owner to pay a very small nominal annual ground lease to cover some of the land trust operating costs. But we also include in that sometimes a reserve for maintenance and improvements over time. So collectively, if enough people are contributing to that, when some need arises that is an emergency that someone can't cover necessarily in a short-term expense, the land trust can step in to cover some of that. So think about sort of back to that question of what type of ownership and what type of home you want to occupy. I'd also say most people are not well aware or thinking about when they purchase that home. What are the implications in terms of the school district? That is the other link that is often tied to the value of a particular home in a particular neighborhood. So thinking ahead to, okay, well, do I want to live in the good school district or do I want to live in a district where I know I need to help to make the school, the good school district? Those are some of the choices that people have to really think about. Man, I wish I had talked to you before I got to the house. And with that, we're gonna have an opportunity to open it up for questions and comments. We'll have folks with microphones who'll come to the audience. But before we do that, please just join me in thanking this incredible panel for their insights. So first fan, I can't resist saying condo, no dog or picket fence required or children. But I want to go back to the estate planning. It feels like a super, it feels like an easy way to retain whatever wealth we do have. And I'm curious, and I think in part it comes to folks not thinking about what assets they do have and wanting to pass that down that you sort of think I don't have anything to give on. I'm just curious if you all have thoughts on how we get more folks thinking about estate planning because again, I think it's one of the simplest ways we can retain wealth, whatever wealth we do have. I mean, I would say that there are various nonprofit organizations doing some, but just in my world, I call it law school world, I think highlighting what I talk about is the racial estate planning or wheel making gap and making it, it is a thing. So bringing that to people's attention and having some school be a leader in seeking to address this issue, given all of the negative ramifications that flow, right? I would hope that maybe Howard's law school might be interested in taking this up, but it doesn't have to be Howard. I mean, Howard doesn't have to be answering all the problems, but I think that if you had a beach head, you had a leader that could do this and show some success that, you know, I think you could then develop or make it sustainable. So that's something I think about. I think one thing, especially with a room full of young folks is we think of estate planning as a thing that you should do when you're old, only when you're old. And I've seen it in my own family and reporting is we don't live as long as other folks on average. And you see lots of people who are sort of middle-aged and then a disaster happens and somebody has a heart attack and that's it. And I think we should, as young folks, start thinking more and more long-term about estate planning. We like to think that we only need accountants when we have money. We like to think we only need lawyers and no lawyers when we're in trouble. And I think getting to, generally, this is a skewed room full of people who are going into law and business, but generally thinking about ways we interface with the systems of wealth preservation and maintenance earlier. Good morning and thank you very much. I am from the law school, Professor Thomas, but I want to talk about something I didn't hear you mention. I spent the last three years working on a reverse mortgage case in realizing what was actually happening because it kind of went right past my vision. I didn't realize it. Predatory lending, here in the area of reverse mortgage over here in Northeast Washington, it looked that when I talked to this family, it sounded like Walker Thomas. Exactly how this loan was created, et cetera. And I've been having a hard time finding someone working in this area, looking on it from the back side, meaning that how do we go to the other side and fight from the other side and say these are predatory lenders who did this and we need to take them down because they were like 63 families in Northeast Washington under one company. And that's like easy bait. The people will die. And the heirs probably don't have the financial resources to buy that property back from these lenders and it goes right out the door. So I'm here, I'm not stopped fighting. I'm gonna keep fighting. I'm gonna keep knocking on doors and trying to get people's attention. I went to the attorney general in DC to say, hello, this is a problem here in DC and we need to be dealing with it. So do you guys have any experience or knowledge of any organizations that are fighting in the reverse mortgage area? I would refer you to our partners at the National Fair Housing Alliance. If you haven't spoken with them, they're here, but I think they probably have some experience in that realm. Your question, has there been any media attention? Because in my work, what I've realized is that the legal expertise is necessary, but often insufficient without the media attention, right? So one of the state that we just got our Uniform Partition of Heirs Property Act, the most recent state was New York. New York, we basically were told talking to leaders in the bar and the legislature, the last 10 years, they were like, stop calling us, we're not interested. And then there was a investigative journalist for NY1 in New York City who discovered that there were real estate investors that were preying upon African-American families that had gotten brownstones and Harlem and in every borough of New York City. These were high equity properties because initially oftentimes these were red lines so the families oftentimes bought them with cash. And it really was her report in NY1 that led the legislature, I think we had gone from having them say don't ever call us again to within, after her report, there was a competition among members of the New York legislature to see who could introduce our act first. So that's one thing I've learned in mind. I don't know if there's been any media attention in DC about this. Hi, I'm Tina Nelson. I'm with legal counsel for the elderly here in DC. Actually have an estate and probate practice at LCE. And I did testify on behalf of the Uniform Heirs Partition Act that was introduced here at DC legislation. But there was a lot of opposition from the estates bar section. And I know you said there are 15 jurisdictions in which it has been passed. So just wondering like how did you deal with the opposition from the private attorneys who were opposed to it? Yeah, so I think one of the things that I benefited from is right after undergrad, my first job before I went to law school. I worked on Capitol Hill. I learned something about the legislative process. I call it the good, the bad, and the ugly. And so I think the biggest resistance we have was not from real estate developers or investors, which was what we anticipated, but was from the bar, right? Especially the real estate bar. In some places we've been able to meet with them and we got it passed in Texas in 2017. There was initially opposition among the leadership of the real property probate and trust law section of the Texas bar. And I just ended up meeting with the chair of the section and we had a long sit down. And it turns out that there were people within the bar who strongly opposed it and I just said, listen, I'll sit down with you and you tell me what the concerns are. And I'll try to be as fair as possible. And it turns out that 80%, 90% of the claims that were made were just factually incorrect. So by the time I walked out of his office I had gotten them from opposing it to taking a neutral position. And all we needed them was to stay on the sidelines. So we've had that. I've had that in a couple of states just so that's just kind of individual meetings and in the trenches. It's probably not gonna be relevant to DC. What helped us in New York was the media attention that just made it politically unpalatable to oppose it. One of the things we benefited from is I think you referenced Senator Scott and Doug Jones that's on the Senate side, on the House side. We had sponsors of these heirs property provisions of the Farm Bill. So what I was in, hand to hand combat the last few months with the Florida bar and the Virginia bar because we've had, there's, like I said, six states in DC. Two of the states are Florida and Virginia, right? And these are high priority states for us. And initially a year ago the Virginia bar and the Florida bar came out opposing it and how we were able to get them turned around was we basically told them, fine, oppose it. And what we're gonna do is we're gonna reference the Federal Farm Bill and we're gonna make it known that your state bar is the organization that is preventing farmers and ranchers in your states from being able to access the benefits that farmers and ranchers in other states are gonna be able to access through greater participation in a whole variety of USDA programs. And ultimately their lobbyists said that would be a bad look for them. You know, so we had some pretty intense negotiations but clearly the Farm Bill helped us in a way that that's not relevant in DC, right? But I'd say that the media might be a source of pressure but also in my experience as I indicated that a lot of these real estate and probate attorneys really just had a misunderstanding of what the bill does, right? So in terms of the probate attorneys, we've had great support from the, it's called the American College of Trust and Estate Council, ACTEC. Which is an incredibly important organization for estate planning and probate attorneys. Actually it was ACTEC's supporters in Florida helped within the Florida bar, helped turn the tide in our favor. So that's why I say I'm probably talking too long so we can talk later if you want to. So one thing we've talked about is estate planning but we really haven't discussed probate. And for me when I was about to graduate from law school I knew that elder law, estate planning, probate, and air property issues were my jam, that's what I wanted to do. And I wanted to do it in a legal aid setting. And there are lots of legal service providers that will provide estate planning either during clinics or like one day things or in their practice. But aside from LCE, there are really no legal service providers in DC and very few in other places that provide legal representation or advice for probate issues. And there's the assumption that I heard and that we got in terms of pushback that people assume if you do probates because you have money or because people are wealthy but that's not the case particularly for people who are I guess land rich but cash poor. So my question is for people like me who want to do this work but can't really find places or funding or convince people to fund this work where should we go, what should we do? Cause this is what I want to do but finding people who are wanting to do probate assistance either pro bono or an illegal aid setting it's not really popular and it's hard to get people to do it. And probate's expensive and people forget how much it costs even in DC to go through the probate process. Okay, just cause I'm the lawyer up here I don't want to dominate. I feel like I've, I mean I will have an answer for you but I'm going to first defer to my co-panelists. There are folks in the way back who have questions too to make sure as you answer that maybe we can go back there. I mean I think this comes back to what I was saying that I think that the lack of appreciation of the racial will making estate planning gap then has these kind of cascading effects where you don't have the legal infrastructure in place. You know so I've throughout my like 20 year career as a law professor I've gotten calls from individual families but it's been, it became on steroids this year because the convergence of the success of the act, the media attention, I don't say this to brag but I think I've had 32 media interviews in the last year and these families then read about me and they call me and the problem is A I don't have the ability to return all these calls but the point is that they want referrals and there's just not a sufficient infrastructure. So one of the things I've been doing is there are a lot of heirs property issues. So heirs property issues is not just a black issue. It impacts property owners of every race and ethnicity and even has salience across socioeconomic statuses and my evidence of that is in the 15 states that have passed it, yes we have Alabama and Georgia and South Carolina and Texas and Arkansas but we also have Montana, we have Iowa, we have you know Hawaii, New Mexico. Is that the, by letting folks know that there's this kind of this broader issue one of the things I've been trying to like when I highlight the work that Mavis does is that we need to build out that infrastructure, right? So we have had a couple of developments in last year in Georgia. There's an organization called the Georgia Heirs Property Law Center but they're doing tremendous work but they're new. So what I'm hoping is we have more organizations, sorry, I'm gonna go back to Texas. So there's a lot of heirs property it turns out in South Texas in these highly Mexican American communities. And so I had a member of the Texas legislature call me and so we were talking about this and I said well one of the things at the state level is if you had increased funding for legal services including transactional services that would be helpful to your communities. Trying to let various foundations know the importance of this estate panning and probate and how that is linked to being able to build wealth is another kind of issue. So I don't have a magic solution for you if what you're saying is typical that there's not the infrastructure in place. I just think that we need to do whatever we can to make this issue better known. The implications of these families not having access. And the last thing I'll say is that I don't know what DC has but you do have states like Louisiana and other states where you have these small estate probations. I don't know if DC has, you have that here, okay. All right, so let me just stop there. I had a two part question. My first question is is it better to have a will or a trust? And then my second question is or a statement question type is I've noticed that a lot of African Americans don't realize that most homes in DC are over 50,000. So you're gonna have to go to probate but if you have a sibling or auntie or something like that and they wanna fight it that's extra money and that's two extra years. So is it easier to just have a will and put all your assets in the will or is it easier to just have it in a trust and just go with the flow? Even though it will go to probate maybe. Just because I'm the one, I really don't wanna dominate this. And so what I'm gonna do here unless my co-panelists here wanna answer this is I'm gonna delegate this to a non-panelist who has a lot of expertise who used to have a probate and a state planning practice. Mavis or maybe I'll just tell you, Mavis can you raise your hand? Talk to Mavis-Grag afterwards. One thing I would say and I wanna keep this short is that there's not a one size fits all. So that's both in terms of the type of estate planning you have but also in time and what I refer to that there are these options for ownership forms, right? Including what you're talking about but you have to take into account the capacity of these families. So for example, a lot of people default to oh, they should transfer their ownership into an LLC. Maybe, but I think of the LLC as kind of high maintenance and you gotta do all the things that are legally required for an LLC. You gotta have regular meetings, it gotta be minutes and you gotta ask yourself is your family capable of that? And for some subset, yes. An LLC is a great thing. For other families, it's not. And so a solution like what we call a tenancy and common agreement, a tick agreement where you contract around the worst features of tenancy and common ownership is what I think of as low maintenance. And so for those families, that would be a better option. So my point is there's not a one size fits all. We have time for maybe one more question. I have one more. It was about the non-profits. Nagyo, so it wasn't about that. I was just wondering what other non-profits are out there that will be willing to help someone get started even though they may not have access to them. For instance, what if someone just at the moment doesn't have internet but they wanna walk into the office? Like what other non-profits are available to say, hey, we help with this. Yeah, so why don't you just talk to afterwards? All right, last question. I don't see where the microphones are going. Yes, thank you for a great panel. I'm Professor, can you hear me? I'm Professor Carmack from the Art Department. You're like, why am I here in this meeting? I teach interior design and I'm currently working with the Berry Farm Initiative that's currently going on in Ward 8. And we're trying to address building equity in that community. So currently they're going through a historic preservation as one tool to preserve the land and preserve some of the buildings there. But are there other ways that we can think about that these communities can think about building equity? I'm currently looking at how do we look at our building typologies when we're talking about a planned urban development that looks at creating spaces that we can interchange them that they're kind of going through a flexible housing so you can stay in those properties over a span and they can change to possibly being a mixed use. We would have business types maybe on the basement level and then the homeowners would own that property and so you get that residual rental. And so currently with the historical preservation for those students that may have time on tomorrow nine o'clock, Berry Farm is looking for you to be there to support them. Is there other means that we can think about preserving these black spaces? Thank you. I think you stumped the panel on that. One thing I think is interesting and I'm not, I'm gonna take a little piece of your question and just say one of the things I found to be a very interesting development in the last couple of years is that there's been a movement across this country of recognizing and preserving black cemeteries all across this country. In Virginia, the Florida legislature just passed a bill I guess in the last year where they're allocating, you know, I don't know, half a million dollars. There was a federal bill. There is this incredibly just dynamic and important black architect in San Antonio who had won some presidential Medal of Honor when President Obama was president that I work with who has uncovered these incredible black cemeteries in San Antonio and in San Antonio usually the history has been very much framed as kind of European or white history and Mexican-American, but not black. And it turns out there's through unlocking these African-American cemeteries, including one where they found where there was, you know, folks who had been Buffalo soldiers had been buried. So they had a big event on leading up Martin Luther King Day in San Antonio a couple weeks ago where they featured three of these cemeteries and they got tremendous, tremendous media coverage. So that's, like I said, tangential to your question about the historic preservation angle. I just think that this African-American cemetery has become a thing, which I think is just interesting. I think it's not just cemeteries. I think there's a larger movement for African-American historical preservation of places that really mirrors the one that, well, not mirrors, but hopefully is gonna be as impactful as kind of like the movement taken by like the United Daughters of Confederacy, which has walled off quite a bit of places for from investment, from development in the South. And it was a really big wave of preservation. You see in North Carolina and Virginia, you'll see places are preserved for having the first cotton gin in the county. Stuff like that, you know, and movement towards recognizing historical African-American property is actually, it's not just cemeteries, it's thinking about historical houses, homes, places, things were built, historical community schools. Yeah, and that's a really big part of this conversation moving forward. Well, on that note, we're at time, but I just wanted to, again, thank all of the partners who are part of this, Howard University Business School, Law School, New America, and I think this rich conversation really reveals what's possible when people of goodwill and great intellect come together to solve critical problems, so thank you. Thank you.