Page 18 - Georgia Forestry - Summer 2019

“If you don’t have that clear title, it makes it impossible for you to manage your land as though it were an asset, rather than a liability.” — Delene Porter
a private forest or use it for financial growth — even if the family is honest and diligent and pays all of its taxes. Cleanup and recovery services, offered by the government after a natural disas- ter, are regularly denied to owners of heirs property. Timber companies tend to avoid working or collecting wood from private forests without a clear title holder. Leasing is also trickier since most pro- spective tenants would rather avoid the confusion created by multiple landlords.
Heirs property can be expensive to maintain, and lenders are reluctant to accept it as collateral, which means it can’t really be used to pay for school, start a business or build a house. As a result, even the biggest, most valuable pieces of this forestland are out of reach as a source of income, and can remain that way indefinitely.
“It’s like a glass box of money,” one expert explained. “You can see the pile of cash, but you can’t get to it.”
$34 Billion in
Frozen Capital
Heirs-property owners often feel as though their family’s history — their authentic connections to the land — are being called into question. Many would rather not talk about it. No heirs-property owners could be reached for comment for this article. No one knows exactly how much land in Georgia exists in this category — which, by definition, has not been fully accounted for in probate courts. Looking at tax com- mission records from around the state, however, researchers have at least been able to reveal the scope of the problem: a 2013 study by the Georgia Appleseed Center for Law and Justice found 1,620 holdings in five counties had a “very high probability” of being heirs property, totaling 5,215 acres, and worth over $58.6 million. A 10-county report from 2017, by the U.S. Forest Service and the Carl Vinson Institute of Government, identified 72,583 acres that fit this description and placed their value at $2.15 billion.
STEPHEN B. MORTON
“Scale that to 159 counties, and we’re looking at $34 billion in acreage that is essentially frozen capital,” said Delene Porter, chief operating officer at the Georgia Heirs Property Law Center (GHPLC). “If you don’t have that clear title, it makes it impossible for you to manage your land as though it were an asset, rather than a liability.”
The problem tends to be particu- larly serious among Georgia’s African Americans, a group for whom stable land ownership has never been easy or straightforward. Before the Civil War, the state prohibited even free persons of color from purchasing real property and, during Reconstruction, former slaves and their descendants in the timber industry were faced with formal discrimination, threats of violence and limited access to credit. Though their holdings reached about 1.1 million acres in Georgia between 1910 and 1920, this number has been declining ever since. In recent years, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has declared heirs property to be the leading cause
16 | GEORGIA FORESTRY