The end of the 5800 block of Lena St., intersecting the unit block of E. Rittenhouse St. (Photo: Rasheed Z. Ajamu)

This story was produced as part of Next City’s joint Equitable Cities Reporting Fellowship with Resolve Philly’s Germantown Info Hub.

Germantown native Cathy Brown lived in her grandmother’s home throughout her childhood. So when her grandmother passed, she and her mother expected it to be straightforward for Brown to take ownership of the property left behind.

Then, in 2001, Brown learned that the city was planning to knock down their family home as part of its blight-finding Neighborhood Transformation Initiative.

The property had sat vacant for six years, had accumulated significant roof damage, and had thousands of dollars in back taxes that accumulated on the home, presenting issues that Brown couldn’t get resolved as long as the deed was still in her late grandmother’s name.

“Anytime you think you have an investment that you’re going to lose, and you have several ways you feel like you’re losing it, it’s nerve wracking,” she says.

Brown found herself trapped in a complicated legal limbo known as a tangled title, which occurs when a home’s deed remains in the name of a deceased relative. Without having legal ownership, the actual residents face challenges taking out home loans, paying the mortgage and bills, receiving repair services and getting homeowner’s insurance – leaving the property vulnerable to foreclosure or inhabitability.

It’s a major problem in Philadelphia, which has one of the highest homeownership rates amongst major U.S. Cities. But in 2020, an analysis by the group Philadelphia VIP found at least 14,000 tangled titles; the following year, a Pew Research Center study estimated the city had at least 10,407 homes with tangled titles. The issue is most prevalent in predominantly Black neighborhoods, researchers say.

But the past four years have brought a surge of collaboration and resources among Philadelphia’s legal groups, community organizations and the city’s Register of Wills to tackle the issue. Through a robust network of initiatives, they’re helping clear titles, protecting residents from displacement, and helping at-risk residents build generational wealth through homeownership – and they’re even seeing some success.

“You’ve got a lot of energy and people swimming in the same direction to try to tackle this,” says Rachel Gallegos of Community Legal Service, one of the leading organizations working on the issue. “The bottom line is that we’re building and preserving intergenerational wealth.”

Inside Philadelphia’s Title Clearance Unit

When Brown began working to clear the tangled title on her family home, she and her mother consulted with multiple lawyers and visited city hall every week for three months in an attempt to figure out how to legally make the transfer. They knocked on doors at the Registry of Wills, the department of records, and the tax department, in a long process that involved opening the estate, examining taxes and eventually transferring the deed. 

Back then, she says, the city and Register of Wills didn’t work directly with residents to guide them through resolving tangled titles. But much has changed since then. 

About two decades later, in 2020, then-Register of Wills Tracy Gordon undertook a major effort to assist residents. And in early 2024, shortly after current Register of Wills John Sabatina Sr. began his term, the government office began an effort to centralize and combat the city-wide issue by launching its Title Clearance Unit.

In its first year in 2025, the unit has successfully cleared the titles of 91 homes throughout the city, says Myasia Williams, the Title Clearance Unit’s director.

That’s a drop in the bucket compared to the number of tangled titles in Philly — a problem the office is still working to understand the full extent of. The office has been working with the state to comb through death records from 2014 to the present to see which properties may have a tangled title or may just need a property title cleared. 

“It’s something our team is actively working on, trying to find that exact number,” Williams says. She believes there could be even more than 10,000 homes with tangled titles. “I’m going through 22,000 [property records] right now. We’re at 8,000 and we’ve identified 3,000 [tangled titles] out of that.”

Still, Williams says, the progress in clearing homes represents a better system for tackling Philly’s tangled titles problem. 

Now nearly two years old, the Title Clearance Unit was designed to replace the previous administration’s PDI program. Under that program, the Register of Wills used to assist citizens with putting liens on properties to cover the probate costs for people to complete a deed transfer. It would then refer them to groups like Community Legal Services and Philadelphia VIP for further assistance.

Williams says her unit now helps residents through the full legal process of clearing a property title from start to finish, without referring them to legal services that may be less affordable.

“Our goal is to actually help the working-class citizens of the city with planning property titles, because there’s no resources available out there for them outside of hiring their own attorney to handle the matter,” Williams says.

The Title Clearance Unit assists with providing the necessary documents that help them open the estate, navigate the probate process, search for other possible heirs, and prepare for a new deed which enables the legal transfer of property ownership.

It’s also taking a more proactive approach through direct mail outreach to vulnerable homeowners, “really tackling and assisting citizens that definitely would not have done anything unless there was a dire need,” Williams says.

In addition to looking at death records, a large part of the unit’s current work is going through the probate system and identifying the estates with deeds that have not been transferred over. That also helps them identify residents to reach out to via mail to see if they may be in need of assistance.

That outreach and intake process showed Williams just how few people knew to register their wills: “People did not know that there was a process, and some of them had wills just sitting there that they never came in to register with the Register of Wills,” she says. 

Now, if residents call the unit or walk into room 183 of City Hall, a clerk can assist them with providing the necessary documents.

Of the 91 homes that the Title Clearance Unit recently cleared, 17 are in the 8th district, which houses Germantown, Chestnut Hill, Mt. Airy, Logan, and parts of Olney, West Oak Lane, and parts of North Philadelphia.

“In specific districts, it’s higher than others, and the 8th District is one of them,” Williams says. “There are tons of properties in that district that need titles cleared.”

Proactive planning and partnerships

Years after resolving her own tangled title, Brown is working to ensure that other families don’t have to deal with the same costly headache.

“Your wealth is within your property. Don’t let what your people work so hard for go down the drain. Fight for it,” says Brown, now the director of the West Oak Lane Senior Center. There, she’s begun a new program called “Get Your House in Order,” where she helps older adults set up their will properly and make sure their deed is accessible in order to prevent distress for future generations.

“You gotta leave somebody the key. People got to be able to get to it. Because if [they] don’t get at it, the state will,” she tells them. “You need to check titles and make sure there’s no liens on it … even if you’re not planning on [clearing a title], get the deeds to your house. You can actually get that from City Hall, it’s $2 a page. Get your paperwork in your hand.”

The West Oak Lane Senior Center is one of more than 100 local and neighborhood-based organizations that have hosted title clearing and estate planning webinars, bringing experts from legal aid groups including Community Legal Services, VIP, and the Senior Law Center to assist their community members.

These partnerships have been instrumental to Community Legal Service’s efforts. “It’s far more effective, it’s more efficient, it’s better for clients,” says Gallegos, a divisional supervising attorney in Community Legal Service’s homeowner and consumer rights unit.

In 2019, her unit formed a team to provide free, direct legal representation on tangled title issues. Three attorneys and five paralegals focus on assisting residents with collecting the necessary documents to clear their titles.

In 2022, Community Legal Services partnered with the Affordable Housing Centers of Pennsylvania​ and began assisting residents with estate planning through its Will Power program. That program has helped complete over 1,000 wills for vulnerable Philadelphians.

“We want to solve the ones we can and then prevent it going forward, and the way you prevent it is through estate planning,” Gallegos says. Their efforts have focused on lower-income Black and Brown residents, she adds: “We also know in doing this work, that they are the community that is most affected by tangled titles.”

Another of Community Legal Services’s neighborhood partners is Germantown United CDC, a nonprofit working to strengthen Germantown — one of the areas that has a disproportionately high rate of tangled titles  — through economic development. 

Almost as soon as Sheirce White began working as Germantown United’s Resident Services Coordinator in 2023, her work helping locals navigate tangled titles began. The organization came across the issue repeatedly when homeowners it was assisting were blocked from certain city services because of a tangled title.

“As long as there’s homeowners, there needs to be tangled title information,” she says. “[And] based on the questions that are being asked at the workshops, it is very much needed. A lot of people don’t realize that there’s help out there.”

If “not handled properly, you can end up where the mortgage doesn’t get paid, the property taxes don’t get paid,” White says. “Repairs aren’t being done in the house.”

Germantown United has also taken a proactive approach to its tangled title programming. To help it identify the homes in the neighborhood that had unresolved deeds or were backed up on payments, it partnered with the Philadelphia Housing Development Corporation, which produces a monthly list of homes where the name on the deed reflected a deceased, previous owner and needed to be updated. White regularly mails these addresses with information on legal resources and grants for back mortgage payments or property taxes.

Since Germantown United began to hold its tangled title clinics in 2024, more than 270 people have signed up to attend. The average attendance has grown from about 10 people to over 50 attendees, many of whom are receiving direct probate services from the CDC’s legal aid partners.

Still, community members are eager for more information and assistance.

“There’s a high demand for me to come back with this information again,” says GUCDC operations manager Desiree Thompson. “I have people that follow up with me the next day, the next week, to fully go in detail about their stories and things that they need done.”

Sustained funding is key

Clearing a tangled title isn’t cheap. In Philadelphia, it costs about $278.75 to record a deed and $43.75 to record a deed on a home that was in the name of a deceased relative, with a deed transfer tax that is 4.578% of a person’s property value. Legal assistance can cost much more. In all, Pew’s analysis found that resolving a tangled title costs an estimated $9,200 for a property valued at the median of $88,800.

“It was recognized very early that if we are going to help people resolve their tangled title issues, we have to have a pot of money to pay the cost,” says Kelly Gasley, managing attorney of the nonprofit legal agency Philadelphia VIP.

Since 2002, VIP has managed the Tangled Title Fund, which is primarily funded by the City of Philadelphia’s Division of Housing and Community Development and helps residents cover the administrative and legal costs of resolving a deed. 

Eligible residents — households earning no more than 80% of the area median income — seeking to clear the title of their homes can receive up to $6,500 to cover these costs, with an additional $3,500 available on a case-by-case basis to help fund transfer tax payments.

“I regularly speak with folks in other states and other cities who are trying to get something like the Tangle Title Fund started in their area because they know how much it’s needed to resolve these issues,” Gasley says. “I really feel fortunate that this is an item in [the city’s] budget. They know that if we are going to prevent and resolve tangled title issues in the city, there has to be money.”

The city has kept the Tangled Title Fund as a priority in its budget over the years: The budget was about $10,000 more than two decades ago, and today, the budget sits at over $550,000.

In 2024, VIP dispersed more than $460,000 in grants to 340 Philadelphians, 232 of whom were first-time recipients. Last year, all of those figures went up, though the nonprofit is still crunching the numbers.

In 2022, the city made a $7.6 million investment through the Neighborhood Preservation Initiative, dedicated towards combating tangled titles in the city. This helped boost VIP and other Philadelphia legal assistance groups, including such as Community Legal Services and Philadelphia Legal Assistance, in their efforts around resolving deeds.

“Now with Community Legal Services and Philadelphia Legal Assistance also providing direct representation on tangled title issues, it has really exploded the number of folks who we are collectively able to help as a legal services community,” Gasley says.

Reparations and repair

Last fall, the Philadelphia Bar Association honored Germantown’s Green Street Monthly Meeting of Friends with its “Good Deed Award” for members’ efforts to untangle the titles of Germantown residents. 

The Quaker-based faith group’s reparations committee, formed in May 2021, aims to examine systematic disadvantages facing Black residents in Germantown, then invest and plan programs that can uplift intergenerational Black wealth and property ownership.

In 2022, the reparations committee decided to take on the tangled title problem after noticing the same pattern Germantown United had: Tangled titles were blocking many locals, mostly Black residents, from accessing city services — including financial aid for homeowners who needed major repairs.

“Residents in Germantown were finding that when they went to apply for this money, they had trouble because the title to their properties — that may have been in their families for generations — were under the name of a great-grandma [for example] who had passed away,” says reparations committee member Sharon Mullally. “If they wanted to sell the house, they wouldn’t be able to until the title is cleared.”

To resolve their titles, many residents had to contact several possible heirs before even beginning the process of transferring ownership. Many families had to reach out to relatives that they had never spoken to, Mullally says.

“There was a need,” Mullally says. “We could see a direct benefit to Black homeowners in Germantown if those titles could get cleared and they were able to access the resources to do the big maintenance projects on their homes.”

In the reparations committee’s first year of programming in 2022, it connected 81 Black Germantown residents with pro bono legal services. It’s also been involved in preventative work through estate planning clinics to help create wills for Black Germantown homeowners. 

That year, the group helped protect properties worth, in total, upwards of $11.3 million.

“[We helped people] do their wills and all of their end-of-life documents, so that [someone] doesn’t have to go through the whole process again of clearing the title,” Mullally says. About 45 people attended one estate planning clinic held last year in collaboration with VIP and Community Legal Services.

In addition to connecting residents with services, Green Street Friends Meeting also directly helps pay for legal services, deed transfer fees and other costs that come with fighting tangled titles through its wealth redistribution program. 

The group has pledged to spend $5,000 from its own reserves every year from 2021 to 2030 in order to help Black neighbors avoid displacement and access needed services – part of its commitment to reparations to Black residents of Germantown.

“We paid for people’s back taxes,” Mullally says, noting that individual donors have also supplemented that reparations fund. “Sometimes there were huge utility bills that needed to be taken care of before they could actually move on to either sell the property or get repairs made.”

Taken together, the work of nonprofit legal and community groups, as well as the city’s response, represents what organizers hope is a durable shift in how the city addresses a problem that has cost Black families wealth for generations.

Pryce Jamison is Germantown Info Hub’s community engagement reporter and a Next City Equitable Cities Reporting Fellow. He covers Germantown and Philadelphia, with reporting that includes features, news, solution-focused and community-focused stories.