Across the country, low-income communities face threats of displacement, predatory investment activity and limited wealth-building opportunities. One often-overlooked contributor to these dynamics: a lack of formal estate planning. When a homeowner passes away without an estate plan, their home often becomes an “heirs’ property,” a property with no clear title. Without a clear title, homeowners face immense barriers–they cannot access the equity in the home, sell the home for a fair market price, obtain loans for repairs or purchase insurance, among other challenges. For low-income families, this situation can lead to significant home value depreciation, forced sales and even homelessness.

Unfortunately, heirs’ properties are widespread, particularly among low-income communities. A conservative analysis estimates that heirs’ properties nationwide have an assessed value of over $32 billion.

If communities nationwide could identify households at risk, help address’ estate planning issues and ensure clear transfers of property title, they could stabilize neighborhoods, reduce home loss and protect immense amounts of wealth for low-income residents.

Fortunately, a program in Jacksonville, Florida, is showing the way.

Heirs’ properties are widespread in Jacksonville and the surrounding area in Duval County, with an estimated 10,000 heirs’ properties in the region. Emerging from a process of deep community engagement, LISC Jacksonville launched its Heirs’ Property Program in 2020 and has since engaged hundreds of households with estate planning services.

In this sponsored episode produced in partnership with Results for America, learn more about the immense impact of addressing heirs’ properties and how the model developed in Jacksonville might inspire your community.

Download the complete Results for America toolkit on replicating this model by visiting https://results4america.co/heirs-property

Highlighting our recent coverage on nonprofit and alternative grocery models in Kentucky, this event would look at how communities—from urban Lexington to rural areas—are addressing food insecurity through creative, equitable approaches to food access.

Explore how communities in Altadena are rebuilding after devastating wildfires, with a focus on inclusive, community-led design and architecture. It would spotlight the role of Black architects and collaborations like AfroLA, emphasizing environmental justice and equitable recovery.

Even though housing is a crisis in every American city, we hear over and over that telling the story effectively is a big challenge. Today, we’re taking lessons on how to tell the story from the filmmakers of four different documentaries. 

New models of collective power are emerging in neighborhoods where residents have always found ways to support one another, even as economic systems excluded and extracted. 

In this sponsored episode with the Center for Cultural Innovation and its AmbitioUS initiative, which commissioned a report by the Urban Institute, local leaders share models from Atlanta and New Orleans that bring financial freedom and self-determination to artists and their communities. 

“This work is to provide proof of concept that new worlds are possible, that new economic systems are possible, and that they already exist,” said Christopher Audain, Program Officer at AmbitioUS. 

In an example from Atlanta, The Guild founder Nikishka Iyengar describes a hybrid land-trust and community-stewardship model that’s keeping housing and commercial space affordable while allowing residents to invest collectively. 

“This is not a stepping stone to become an extractive investor,” said Iyengar. “This is a stepping stone to reorient our relationship to land, to each other, to finance, to all of that.”

Meanwhile, Cooperation New Orleans organizers Toya Ex and Tamah Yisrael are part of a network of worker cooperatives formalizing long-standing traditions of mutual aid into a solidarity economy. 

“There is a large idea that the capitalist economy is the only way, and time after time history has proven to us that it is not,” said Yisrael, who helped establish Cooperation New Orleans’ loan fund to support small businesses.

“People often do a lot of different things to make a way, even when the capitalist system don’t allow us to make a way,” says Ex, who is also the founder of Project Hustle.

The report on community ownership and self-determination strategies also includes lessons on democratic investment from Boston Ujima Project and on land stewardship from the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust in Lisjan Territory, showing why shared values and ownership are powerful counters to a disempowering economic system.

After a year marked by the undermining of public resources, community development is adapting by finding ways to make progress more resilient.
In this episode, Next City Senior Economic Justice Correspondent Oscar Perry Abello looks back at some of the biggest stories from a turbulent year on his beat and draws on what he heard during a national book tour for “The Banks We Deserve.”
It’s not all bad news, as Abello looks for signs of a response to the disruptions.
“I think maybe just maybe we are entering an uptick in the wave—the up and down waves of community power in community and economic development,” said Abello.
Abello highlights the examples of Philadelphia’s Kensington Corridor Trust, the Kingsbridge Armory in the Bronx, and Denver’s Tierra Colectiva, showing how each model for community-led ownership is evolving the sector. Plus, Abello outlines where community development leaders are exploring new sources of funding beyond Washington.

nextcity.org Next City’s Top Stories on Economic Justice in 2025

Catch up on this year’s most-read reporting on inclusive finance, community development and economic empowerment.

https://nextcity.org/urbanist-news/next-citys-top-stories-on-economic-justice-in-2025

nextcity.org

The Banks We Deserve

Oscar Perry Abello’s new book shows how banks’ money-creation power can be democratized. Helping communities tap into that power could address our climate, housing and economic crises.

 Live recording in November in partnership with the Small Business Anti-Displacement Network. Lucas interviews in fireside chat with Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Sponsored Episode with the Culture & Community Power Fund and Kresge Foundation

Residents teamed up with university students to slow the demolition of an affordable housing community and reshape redevelopment in West Philadelphia.

Philadelphians have a history of banding together and organizing when faced by powerful and monied development that has threatened their displacement. From professional sports venues to ever-expanding “eds and meds,” all across Philadelphia, working-class communities of color have pushed back, sometimes winning, sometimes losing, sometimes ending up somewhere in between. In this panel discussion, we’ll hear from neighborhood leaders who share their stories and lessons learned for others when these projects arise.

As rapid development reshapes neighborhoods like Kensington, residents and business owners face displacement and loss of local control. The Kensington Corridor Trust and Women’s Community Revitalization Project offer models of community ownership—using neighborhood and land trusts to preserve affordability, reinvest profits locally, and align development with community priorities. This episode explores how these approaches center equity and empower residents to shape their own futures.