PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — Philadelphia has a new program aimed at helping families get out of the city's increasing number of tangled property titles.
"A tangled title is when a person may have some legal interest in a property, but it's still in a dead person’s name," said Philadelphia Register of Wills Tracey Gordon.
She has spent most of her career as a community advocate working on behalf of the city's hardest-hit communities.
Now in her current role, she is creating programs that help families generate and pass down generational wealth.
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"I need them to get out of these tangled titles, because they can’t do anything legal. You can’t buy insurance for the house, you can’t sell the house, (and) you can't pass the house down," Gordon explained about those titles which are mainly in low-income areas.
"I see it as a crisis, because we have all these tangled titles, 17,000 of them."
She described how these tangled titles create an inability to accumulate wealth that can be passed down.
Her team created the Probate Deferment Initiative as a solution.
"Lawyers doing community legal assistance say one of the barriers is that the probate fees were too high," Gordon said.
The office is deferring the fees to a time when the families can better afford them, after the home’s title is untangled.
"Deferment means that if you sell the house, then we come for the fees," Gordon explained.
"Never sell the house, and it stays in the family name. We won't come after you for the fees."
Gordon said that her office has chosen to defer fees because probate fees are legislated and cannot be waived, but they can be deferred.
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