“I tried to do what I could do to keep the house,” says Veronica, a Pittsburgh woman who grew up in an East End home that had housed six generations of her family. She and her elderly mother had to move in 2012 because the house where they were living required too many costly repairs. It also needed to be made handicapped accessible. The deed was in her grandmother’s name, and she had died in 2002. Veronica’s family’s home had become one of several thousand “heirs’ property” sites in Allegheny County — many with tangled titles and no clear owner.
“Nobody owned the property. There was nobody alive who owned the property, so I couldn’t put ramps, I couldn’t put anything in that house to accommodate that,” Veronica says. She asked for anonymity to discuss sensitive family and legal matters. The name Veronica comes from a favorite book.
Variations on Veronica’s story may be found throughout Pittsburgh and its suburbs. Heirs’ property is a nationwide problem, though, oftentimes it is linked to rural Southern Black families and poverty and not to Northern industrial cities. To understand heirs’ property in Pittsburgh, NEXTpittsburgh spoke with housing justice activists, city officials, attorneys and families affected by tangled title scenarios. We found that it cuts across racial lines and city limits, affecting a wide swath of people from diverse backgrounds.
Heirs’ property is a situation that arises when the people whose names are in a property deed as owners die without leaving wills, a condition called intestate.
The homeowner’s family may have moved into the property to take care of the owner as they “age in place,” but the family does not have clear title to the property, says Kim Cutcher, a Toledo, Ohio-based vice president with the Local Initiatives Support Corp. Also known as LISC, the community development support organization has studied heirs’ property nationally.
Bootlegger, gambler and beer company executive Joe Tito once owned this Uptown house. It began deteriorating after its Texas owner died intestate. In 2020, a community nonprofit filed this photo in its conservatorship petition. Photo courtesy Allegheny County Department of Court Records. [Editor’s note: David S. Rotenstein wrote the 2021 nomination for the Tito-Mecca-Zizza House to become a City of Pittsburgh historic site.]
Heirs’ property is a widespread issue found in rural areas and big cities from coast to coast. “Long overlooked outside the rural southeastern United States, heirs’ property has recently gained broader attention as a critical issue also affecting land tenure and the intergenerational transfer of wealth in urban areas across the country,” wrote the authors of a 2026 study published in Urban Affairs Review, an academic journal.
“We see this heirs’ property issue come up also in the Midwest, in many cities from Cleveland to Cincinnati to Toledo, Pittsburgh or Detroit, on and on,” says Cutcher. “Our Midwestern communities also are experiencing these issues and want to be advocates so that families can inherit and establish generational wealth.”
In Pittsburgh and many other places, heirs’ property situations are called by a catchier name, “tangled titles.” It’s a term coined by Philadelphia attorney Judy Berkman.
“I named it tangled title because not all of the issues are heirs’ property,” Berkman told NEXTpittsburgh.
She rattled off a long list of scenarios in which people living in a home may not have title to the property, i.e., their names don’t appear on deeds. They include lease purchase agreements and adverse possession (sometimes called squatter’s rights).
Berkman says she called it tangled titles because the situation is similar to problems she has run into when she knits. “Sometimes when a ball of yarn or a skein of yarn gets all tangled, it takes a fair amount of patience to unknot it and pull it apart and untangle it. … I named the problem tangled title because they’re so often difficult to handle, and untangling them is like untangling a knotted ball of yarn.”
In Pittsburgh and surrounding Allegheny County, heirs’ property and tangled titles are a real problem for families, neighborhoods and local governments. Houses that end up as heirs’ property frequently become deteriorated, taxes go unpaid and the properties become abandoned. Abandoned houses diminish neighboring property values and increase the potential for criminal activities, from squatting to drugs, prostitution and arson.
“The majority of vacant, blighted property is created because of tangled title issues,” says Catapult Greater Pittsburgh Executive Director Tammy Thompson. “Over time, it ends up on the list of properties that now need to be demolished, that they’re drawing down market value for the remaining homeowners. It is a big problem.”
Neighborhood Legal Services estimates that there are about 4,000 tangled titles in Allegheny County. People who work in the field think the number is significantly higher.
“It honestly might even be double that number,” says Gabrielle DeMarchi, director of equity protection with Catapult Greater Pittsburgh.
Thompson agrees: “I know in my gut that it was low because nobody really knows. … The majority of people who are in it, they don’t know they’re in it yet.”
DeMarchi and Thompson are right about the numbers, says Christine Kirby, Neighborhood Legal Services director of development and communications. The figures are at least six years old, but at the time, they reflected the best known data for Allegheny County.
Kirby told NEXTpittsburgh that a team of researchers from the University of Pittsburgh’s University Center for Social and Urban Research cross-referenced data from the Social Security Death Index with Allegheny County deed records and tax delinquencies to identify heirs’ property.
The number quoted in the Neighborhood Legal Services website and the data need to be updated, says Kirby.
Unlike places like Dallas, Texas, and Philadelphia, researchers haven’t produced a detailed study for Pittsburgh documenting the scale and scope of heirs’ property here. Attorneys and social workers have to rely on an array of data sources, including code enforcement reports, tax lien cases and outdated data like the numbers quoted by Neighborhood Legal Services. The data are so obsolete that Kirby said Pitt removed the website where the data and maps once were available to researchers and the public.
Likewise, there is no centralized organization or clearinghouse for tackling the problem. Neighborhood Legal Services and other organizations like Catapult, Duquesne University’s Urban Development Practicum, and the Pittsburgh Urban Redevelopment Authority work collaboratively. The URA assists city residents through its Legal Assistance Program.
Six generations lived there
Veronica’s case is typical of heirs’ property cases nationwide. Her family came to Pittsburgh from Alabama and Maryland during the Great Migration, between 1900 and 1940, and settled in the Hill District along with many other Black families. Veronica’s grandparents moved into a rented two-and-a-half-story East End home in 1943. The household grew as Veronica’s great-grandmother moved, along with younger generations.
The family home, built around the turn of the 20th century, had an earlier heirs’ property case attached to it. In 1921, a married white woman bought the home. Though her husband’s name appears in the deed because she was married (a typical occurrence at the time), the property’s title was in her name. After she died at age 74 in 1937 without leaving a will, her husband had to go to probate court to get title to the property under Pennsylvania’s 1917 Intestate Act.
Two days after the Allegheny County Orphan’s Court issued a decree vesting title to the property in the widower, he sold it to a white man who managed rental properties throughout Pittsburgh. Veronica’s great-grandparents already were living in the home, along with her grandmother. Veronica’s mother was born while the family lived there. She attended Westinghouse High School and Veronica attended Taylor Allderdice High School.
In 1958, the landlord’s mortgage lender foreclosed on the property and the next year another white landlord, who also owned more than 40 Allegheny County rental properties, bought the East End house. Still living there with their growing family, Veronica’s grandparents bought it in 1970.
“It was years of history. I mean, my great-grandmother died in that house,” Veronica told NEXTpittsburgh. “We had dogs, one was buried in the front yard of that house. So there was a lot of just family history.”
As family members grew up and moved away, older ones died. The house, like its occupants, was aging. It needed help that Veronica’s family couldn’t afford.
The basement had flooded, damaging the heating system and washer and dryer area. Photos in Google Maps taken 20 years ago show boarded-up first-floor windows while the house was still occupied.
“I tried to do what I could do to keep the house, especially when my grandmother was alive,” says Veronica. “My own mother, she’s in a senior high-rise that’s a handicapped accessible building.”
Veronica gave up in 2012 and abandoned the house. Fixing the title, as the previous owner had done in 1937, was financially beyond reach. “All I kept hearing from attorneys, well, it’s going to cost you to do a title search. It’s going to cost you to get all of your relatives, which by that time my aunt’s children … would have had to sign off on it,” Veronica explains.
After leaving the home, Veronica moved to the suburbs. By 2014, according to photos in Google Maps, the house had been demolished. In 2021, a real estate speculator petitioned to become the property’s conservator under Pennsylvania’s 2008 Abandoned and Blighted Property Conservatorship Act and its later amendments. After getting control of the property, settling tax liens and cutting the grass as part of a court-approved abatement plan, the conservator sold the vacant lot in 2025.
Heirs’ property is a suburban problem, too
Nichole Remmert is a white woman who was working in Washington, D.C., as a political consultant when she moved back to Moon Township in 2012 to help her widowed father, William Remmert. Nichole’s mother, Mary, had died in 2003 and her father, a retired Moon Township police officer, was struggling to pay the taxes on the home he and Nichole’s mother bought in 1974. According to Allegheny County land records, they were the third owners of the brick split-level home built in 1962 or 1963; the Remmerts paid $28,500 ($196,522.75 in 2026) for the home.
“My mother was pregnant with me and it’s the home that I was brought home from the hospital to,” says Remmert by phone from her new home in Baltimore. “They had a mortgage, like normal people. My dad was a cop, my mom was a teacher; everything was like normal and fine.”
After Nichole’s mother died, her father got behind on the taxes and the house needed a lot of work. “It became clear that my dad was very overwhelmed,” Nichole says.
William Remmert struggled to make ends meet, even with his pension and other benefits. Between 1992 and 2011, he had taken out several mortgages on the property. He was still paying off a $35,000 home equity loan when Nichole returned to take care of him.
“My dad had fallen behind significantly on his property taxes,” says Remmert. Allegheny County court records show multiple school district and Allegheny County tax liens filed against the property since 2014.
William Remmert ended up in a memory care facility, and Nichole Remmert found herself living alone in the aging house. There was roof damage from a fallen tree limb; the foundation needed to be repaired; and a retaining wall had collapsed.
Nichole’s father died in 2018, and she found herself stuck with a money pit that she didn’t have the resources to repair. As she didn’t have title to the property, she couldn’t even sell it to one of the area’s many “as-is” house flippers.
William Remmert died intestate. “He did not have a will, and he was pretty stubborn about not doing it,” Nichole Remmert says. “It was paperwork he didn’t want to deal with and didn’t think that it really mattered.”
But it did matter. Without title to the property, Nichole Remmert couldn’t get a loan to make the necessary repairs. Though she had been paying her father’s property taxes, she still wasn’t the property owner. She wanted to sell it. She was facing lots of tough choices, none of them pleasant ones. In addition, she was grieving her father’s death.
Nichole Remmert needed legal help navigating the estate process and resolving the many issues with her father’s house. She turned to Catapult Greater Pittsburgh after striking out trying to resolve all of the issues herself.
Her first stumbling block was hiring an attorney. She had begun dealing with her father’s estate right before Covid hit. “The attorney that I hired literally disappeared during Covid,” she says.
Catapult connected her with attorney Irene Clark and with grant funds to help with estate taxes and other expenses. They helped to get the roof and foundation fixed and with replacing the hot water heater.
After clearing the title and completing the repairs, Nichole Remmert sold the property last November. With the house sold and legal problems untangled, Remmert was able to move to Baltimore. It’s close enough to Washington for her political work and it’s affordable.
Solutions
The 2016 Pittsburgh Affordable Housing Task Force report highlighted tangled titles as a significant problem. The report recommended providing residents with tangled title interventions and prevention services.
Catapult is a nonprofit dedicated to creating asset- and wealth-building opportunities for people in poverty. It tackles both ends of the heirs’ property/tangled title continuum: prevention and intervention.
Grants from JP Morgan Chase and MacKenzie Scott’s Yield Giving were a big help toward making Catapult’s programs viable. “We want people to be responsible and sustainable homeowners,” Thompson told NEXTpittsburgh.
Catapult fulfills its mission by providing training to prevent heirs’ property scenarios and services to help people like Nichole Remmert resolve them. The organization performs pre- and post-purchase counseling. Estate planning is part of its Clinic for Legal Equity and Repairs (also known as CLEAR) program.
“The most preventative measure of tangled title and heirs’ property is to have estate planning in place,” says Thompson.
Thompson first learned about tangled titles from Clark, the attorney now working with Catapult. A former Housing Court judge, Clark supervises attorney volunteers and manages cases for the organization.
Clark left the bench in 2003 and was working on a project with low-income homeowners. “I realized one third of them, a solid third of about 250 households that I had connected with, did not have title in their name,” Clark says.
She learned from colleagues how to work through the legal processes to convey titles. Now, Clark is one of Allegheny County’s resident experts on heirs’ property. She and DeMarchi helped Nichole Remmert resolve her issues.
Unlike Veronica’s family, Nichole Remmert had the resources to clear the title to her father’s property. Unfortunately, for many Pittsburgh residents, that’s not the case. Poverty and an aging regional population has been a persistent problem. The pandemic exacerbated things.
Covid was a major turning point in local tangled title cases. Nichole Remmert’s situation was easily remedied: She found legal help through Catapult. But others weren’t so lucky during the pandemic.
“Seniors were passing away. People were realizing, oh my God, there’s no will,” says Thompson. “That sort of gave me the idea that we should look into building a clinic around this, especially as we were getting more and more homeowners into homeownership; we wanted to make sure that they were getting estate planning.”
Resolving heirs’ property and tangled titles takes a long time and lots of legal expertise. One of the most difficult hurdles, however, involves identifying all of the potential heirs and getting all of them onto the same page. That’s harder than it may seem when siblings and cousins have conflicting interests. It’s a similar obstacle that Veronica faced when she learned that the title to her home was in her grandmother’s name.
“We work with all of the heirs of the person who has passed away to get an agreement for them to sign off,” says DeMarchi. In cases with large families, that’s a lot of time and legwork. “We had one participant in Duquesne and there were 12 heirs that had to sign this deed. And it was just tracking them down, finding out where they were.”
Consequences go deeper than home ownership
Heirs’ property is a problem that cuts across racial lines. The different outcomes for Veronica’s family and for Nichole Remmert underscore tenacious legacies of poverty and housing inequities.
Most of the time, heirs’ property situations are resolved out of sight, in courtrooms and law offices. Sometimes, they spill out into public view. Several people interviewed for this story pointed to the 2023 deadly standoff in Garfield involving William Hardison Jr. as an extreme tangled title outcome. Sheriff’s deputies had arrived to evict Hardison, whose brother claimed their late father had vested title in him. Hardison disagreed and refused to leave after the home’s sale. Hardison died in the ensuing gunfire.
Other, more visible examples lie in the multitudes of abandoned buildings throughout the city and its suburbs. For example, many of the homes demolished in Penn Hills’ Community Development Block Grant funded demolitions program are heirs’ properties. After many years of unpaid taxes and code violations, the municipality demolishes the homes without taking title to them to mitigate the nuisances they create.
“I think it is why we see so many vacant properties. People end up walking away because either they don’t know what to do or they do know what to do and they see how much it costs to resolve it and they can’t afford it,” says Thompson.
Conservatorship is one solution to heirs’ property, but critics claim that it’s an easily abused tool used by real estate speculators that contributes to gentrification. Prevention and intervention to preserve the equity that creates intergenerational wealth are the preferred approaches, according to the people who work with these cases.
To learn about local programs that can help avoid an heirs’ property/tangled title situation or to find assistance if you think you are in one, check out these links:
These studies offer more information about heirs’ property and tangled titles:
- How ‘Tangled Titles’ Affect Philadelphia (Pew Charitable Trusts)
- Inherited Homes and Urban Inequality (Urban Affairs Review)
- Beyond Homeownership: Why Title Clearance, Repairs, and Estate Planning Are the Missing Link in Wealth Building (Urban Institute)
- Tangled Titles: How to Navigate a Complex Housing Issue (TD Stories)
- Tangled Title Basics (Philadelphia Legal Assistance)
