Why FEMA is denying disaster aid to Black families that have lived for generations in the Deep South
This story was in Sunday's print edition.
‘The real damage’
Why FEMA is denying disaster aid to Black families that have lived for generations in the Deep South.
By Hannah Dreier
July 11, 2021 | Updated yesterday at 11:34 a.m. EDT
HALE COUNTY, Ala. — Not enough people were signing up for help after a series of tornadoes ripped through rural Alabama, so the government sent Chris Baker to figure out why. He had driven past the spot where a tornado threw a 13-year-old girl high into a tree, past where injured cows had to be shot one by one, and past where a family was crushed to death in their bathtub. And now, as another day began in this patchwork of destruction, he grabbed a stack of fliers with a picture of an outstretched hand and headed to his car to let people know Washington had assistance to offer.
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Baker was new to the agency, and this was his second deployment to a disaster zone. His supervisors had asked him to spread the word that people who lost homes to the March 25 tornadoes still had time to apply for grants of up to $72,000. But as he canvassed the area, a different message was spreading much faster: That people here were in fact not eligible for anything, because of how they had inherited their land. Because of the way Black people have always inherited land in Hale County.
More than a third of Black-owned land in the South is passed down informally, rather than through deeds and wills, according to land use experts. It’s a custom that dates to the Jim Crow era, when Black people were excluded from the Southern legal system. When land is handed down like this, it becomes heirs’ property, a form of ownership in which families hold property collectively, without clear title.
People believed this protected their land, but the Department of Agriculture has found that heirs’ property is “the leading cause of Black involuntary land loss.” Without formal deeds, families are cut off from federal loans and grants, including from FEMA, which requires that disaster survivors prove they own their property before they can get help rebuilding.
Nationally, FEMA denies requests for help from about 2 percent of applicants for disaster aid because of title issues. In majority-Black counties, the rate is twice as high, according to a Washington Post analysis, in large part because Black people are twice as likely to pass down property informally. But in parts of the Deep South, FEMA has rejected up to a quarter of applicants because they can’t document ownership, according to the Post analysis. In Hale County, FEMA has denied 35 percent of disaster aid applicants for this reason since March.
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About this story: The Post reviewed more than 9.5 million applications to FEMA’s Individuals and Households Program since 2010 to determine rejection rates based on land title issues. Details on the Post’s methodology and summarized data can be found on GitHub.
By Hannah Dreier
Hannah Dreier is a national reporter at The Washington Post. She previously worked at ProPublica, where she won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing for a year-long series on immigrants, gangs and mishandled law enforcement investigations. Before that, she was based in Venezuela for the Associated Press. Twitter https://twitter.com/hannahdreier
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establish their occupation and use of their lands.
This should have been solved long before now, since many people lose their proof of ownership through home and document destruction from weather. It appears to be a passive form of "disaster redlining."
The reason it hasn't is that racist policies at state levels allowed this ("we didn't know!"
inertia and instability to exist for black families.
Real estate laws even allow for informal claims of land ownership that, for example, comes from what is called "encroachment;" if that encroachment has existed for a certain number of years, the land can be surveyed and acquired by the encroacher.
Black families across disaster areas cannot be unduly burdened with proof of ownership by using forms in county systems that never wanted them to access those forms to begin with. The DOJ can assign lawyers to establish clear title standards for title companies, which create titles as proof of ownership for those families, which then qualify them for all FEMA assistance.
