Time to end this relief mandate
When disaster strikes, as it has regularly in recent years in the form of hurricanes, tornadoes, floods and ice storms, it should be all but automatic that residents in areas with significant property damage will get government assistance if needed.
The Washington Post website, however, reported Sunday that sometimes applications for assistance are rejected. The denial of help from the Federal Emergency Management Agency is especially pronounced among Black residents in the South, largely because of the way property is transferred to heirs.
“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,” the Post reported. “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.”
The U.S. Department of Agriculture has said that such property ownership transfers, without a clear title, is the leading cause of involuntary land loss among Black residents. Without specific titles to property, residents are not eligible for federal loans and grants, including FEMA disaster assistance.
The Post analyzed a decade’s worth of FEMA applications for individual and household assistance — 9.5 million total — and reported that the agency denies requests for help when an individual or family cannot prove title to their property. In majority-Black counties, the national denial rate is twice as high, but in some parts of the South, especially western Alabama, the rejections are much more frequent.
The Post based its story in Hale County, Ala., population 15,500, where it said 35% of requests for disaster assistance after tornadoes touched down in March got denied because of land ownership questions.
FEMA has been discussing this issue since at least 2005, when Hurricane Katrina barreled through Mississippi, Louisiana and several other states. After that storm, 20,000 property owners did not get federal help. And in 2017, after Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico, 80,000 requests for assistance there were denied.
The story noted that there is no legal basis for requiring disaster victims to prove property ownership. FEMA, the Post said, created that mandate on its own in an attempt to weed out scammers who get away with up to 1% of the agency’s relief money.
The story makes it clear that FEMA should consider exceptions to its property title rule while figuring out how to solve this problem for the long term.
As the Post observed, this informal transfer of property between generations developed because Black people did not have access to the legal system in Southern states.
This is not just a western Alabama problem. The story included a map of Southern states from Louisiana to South Carolina. Virtually all counties in the five states had applications rejected for FEMA assistance since 2010 because of title issues. The map indicated a rejection rate of about 10% in every Southwest Mississippi county. These rejections can be avoided.
A true disaster, one that badly damages a home, is a statistical rarity — until it actually happens. It is shameful that a vestige of Jim Crow has an effect on federal aid today.