Initiative on Land, Housing and Property Rights

Initiative on Land, Housing & Property Rights

The Initiative on Land, Housing & Property Rights (ILHPR) seeks to preserve and expand property rights for disadvantaged communities across the United States by producing research, devising legal reform and policy solutions, engaging in community outreach, training law students, and drawing on other complementary strategies. The Initiative encompasses a wide range of matters, including but not limited to rural land loss among socially and economically disadvantaged families; the past and present of the destabilization of urban neighborhoods due to redlining, urban renewal, and rising markets; the role of law and policy in ameliorating housing inequality and housing insecurity; and the issues rural and urban so-called heirs’ property owners face in retaining their properties and realizing the potential of their ownership. The communities the Initiative seeks to assist are disproportionately but not exclusively communities of color. By helping communities of color preserve and expand their property rights, the Initiative seeks to help narrow the racial wealth gap. The initiative also strives to reform or create laws and policies to increase property and housing access, efficiency, and equity.

Professor Thomas W. Mitchell serves as the ILHPR Director. David Price serves as the Special Projects Manager. Professor Lisa T. Alexander serves as the Faculty Director for Housing and Property Rights Programs. The program encompasses four pillars of work:

Training Law Students

The ILHPR aims to develop a generation of real estate and land use attorneys with expertise in community development, estate planning, and defending and enhancing property rights. The Initiative seeks to guide these students toward successful career paths that also help them use their legal skills to benefit disadvantaged communities with property-related challenges. The program is developing a recommended real estate curriculum and will encourage students to access the rich experiential learning opportunities BC Law makes available to its students, including ones the Initiative is creating.

Legislative and Policy Laboratory

The ILHPR helps develop legislative and policy solutions at the local, state, and federal level to advance the property rights of disadvantaged communities. The program supports the ongoing legislative work of Professor Thomas Mitchell, lead author of the Uniform Partition of Heirs Property Act, adopted by 23 states and other jurisdictions at this time, with several other states considering it, making it the most successful uniform real property act the Uniform Law Commission (ULC) has promulgated in the past 30 years. Professor Mitchell also developed a proposal the ULC approved for a second uniform act to help enable heirs’ property owners to escape the gridlock that has prevented many such owners from being able to better manage their properties and to use these properties for wealth-generating and other valuable purposes. That uniform act project is nearing final approval by the ULC. In Massachusetts and beyond, the ILHPR hopes to build support for community-informed legislative and municipal proposals to stabilize property rights in disadvantaged communities.

Research

The ILHPR spurs theoretical and applied research into critical property issues affecting disadvantaged communities, sponsoring conferences, symposia, seminars, workshops, and other gatherings. Some of the research is mostly intended to advance the knowledge in property- and community development-related areas of the law. Other research is designed to help advance the development of legal reform and policy solutions to certain property-related issues various communities face. The Initiative embraces a law and society approach to property research by using and combining many methodologies. In addition to academics, many of these gatherings are open to other constituencies, including students, those in government, and the public. The program’s inaugural convening is the 2023 Land Loss, Reparations and Housing Policy conference.

Continuing Legal Education & Community Engagement

The ILHPR seeks to promote the professional development of both attorneys and community practitioners by strengthening their expertise in estate planning, property-related matters, and community development on behalf of disadvantaged communities. In addition, the ILHPR seeks to engage with communities both to learn from them in order to inform the work of the Initiative and to be of service to them. That service includes sponsoring events such as community legal education programs designed to help community members better understand the laws that impact the property challenges they face.

Contact The Team

617-552-0215
lhprights@bc.edu

Samantha Ghelli
Administrative Assistant

Director

Thomas W. Mitchell

Robert Drinan, S.J., Professor

ILHPR on LinkedIn

Events
Our Staff

Heirs' Property and the Racial Wealth Gap Conference
March 21 & 22, 2024 | 300 Hammond Pond Parkway - Boston College

Property in the form of homes and land represents the cornerstone of wealth for Black and brown communities. Too often, this ownership is unstable, second-class, so-called 'heirs property' ownership, which has exacerbated the racial wealth gap. This conference discussed a wide range of rural and urban heirs' property problems, including owners who lack clear title (tangled title), and addressed proposed solutions, including the widely enacted Uniform Partition of Heirs Property Act.

Includes a screening of the award-winning major documentary 'Gaining Ground: The Fight for Black Land' by Al Roker Entertainment.

WATCH VIDEO FROM EVENT>>

2023 Conference: Land Loss, Reparations & Housing Policy
March 23: Harvard Law School | March 24: Boston College Law School

Black farm families lost at least $326 billion in generational wealth. Urban families lost stable housing. Learn about potential solutions.

Keynote: Speaker: George C. Fatheree III, attorney in Bruce's Beach case

WATCH VIDEO FROM EVENT>>

Contact:
thomas.w.mitchell@bc.edu
617-552-1415

Founder & Director

Thomas W. Mitchell holds the Robert F. Drinan, S.J. Endowed Chair at BC Law and serves as the Director of the Initiative on Land, Housing & Property Rights, which seeks to help disadvantaged people and communities acquire and secure important property rights. Prior to joining Boston College in 2022, he served as a tenured professor on the faculties of the University of Wisconsin Law School (2000-2016) and Texas A&M University School of Law (2016-2022). In 2017-2018, he served as interim Dean of Texas A&M School of Law.

Professor Mitchell is a national expert on property issues facing disadvantaged families and communities, and has published leading scholarly works addressing these matters in academic journals, government publications, and publications for trade associations such as the American Bar Association. He has been interviewed by numerous media outlets including the New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Today, NPR, ProPublica, The Nation, Politico, Mother Jones, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, VICE, and many more.

Full Faculty Profile

Contact:
lisa.t.alexander@bc.edu
617-552-4375

Faculty Director, Housing and Property Rights Programs

Lisa Alexander's scholarship focuses on U.S. housing law and policy, and the law’s role in making housing markets more efficient and more equitable. She has conducted extensive research in legal and extra-legal rights to property, housing, and urban space, most recently including the study of tiny houses. Her scholarship and teaching illuminate the challenges of equitably allocating housing rights and opportunities, and provide insights to policymakers on how to reimagine housing options and property rights for today’s world. She teaches corporations, housing law and policy, and local government law at Boston College Law School.

Alexander received her B.A. from Wesleyan University and her J.D. from Columbia University. She was a professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School from 2006 to 2017 before moving to Texas A&M University School of Law. At Texas A&M, she held a joint appointment as a professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning. She was also Co-Founder and Co-Director of Texas A&M’s Program in Real Estate and Community Development Law, programming that she will continue at Boston College Law School.

Full Faculty Profile

Contact:
abigail.wronkowski@bc.edu
617-552-0203

Finance and Operations Manager

Abigail Wronkowski is the Finance and Operations Manager for the Initiative on Land, Housing & Property Rights at Boston College Law School. In this role, Abi will be advancing the Initiative's strategic priorities and managing the Initiative's budget and fiscal resources.

Prior to joining BC Law, Abi was the Program Manager of the Housing Stability Counseling Program (HSCP) at NeighborWorks America. HSCP was a $100 million grant program funded through the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) to support housing counseling agencies providing services to households facing housing instability, such as eviction, default, foreclosure, loss of income or homelessness.

Abigail has held policy positions at Housing Partnership Network (HPN), Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) and the City of San Diego. Her experience in public policy started in 2010 as Deputy Field Director for a San Diego City Council campaign and in 2011 as a Congressional intern (CA-51).

Abigail is a graduate of San Diego State University (2014, MPA) and University of California San Diego (2010, BA).

Contact:
priceda@bc.edu
617-552-2279

Special Projects Manager

David Price is the Special Projects Manager for the Initiative on Land, Housing & Property Rights at Boston College Law School. In this role he manages these program components, which collectively help advance community development, estate planning, and property rights defense on behalf of disadvantaged communities:

A community legal education program, the Homeownership Estate Planning Project;
The Real Estate and Community Development Law degree concentration;
Creating opportunities for law student internships and externships in the community development, estate planning, and real property fields.

Prior to joining BC Law, David worked for 27 years helping build strong local development organizations in Boston, including most recently over thirteen years as the Executive Director of Nuestra Comunidad Development Corporation in Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood, where he departed in 2022. Two transformative developments are Bartlett Station in Roxbury’s Nubian Square and The Loop at Mattapan Station. At Nuestra he co-founded Homes for Equity, a research and advocacy coalition dedicated to the adoption of race-conscious homeownership policies to counter redlining and other forms of institutional racism.

Prior to joining Nuestra, David served as Deputy Director and General Counsel for Madison Park Development Corporation and as Executive Director for Tent City Corporation. David’s community organizing experience began as a volunteer with Mel King’s campaigns for Mayor of Boston in 1979 and 1983.

David is a graduate of Harvard College (1977) and Boston College Law School (1991). He clerked for Hon. Francis O’Connor at the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court and was a real estate attorney at Goulston & Storrs in Boston prior to joining the community development field.

Contact:
lian.blake@bc.edu
617-552-1312

Estate Planning Fellow

Lian Blake is the Estate Planning Fellow for the Initiative on Land, Housing & Property Rights. She will be working on the Homeownership Estate Planning Project. The project will provide estate planning classes combined with legal assistance to create estate plans for disadvantaged homeowners.

Lian is a graduate of Suffolk University Law School (2024) and earned her bachelor’s degree from the University of Massachusetts Boston (2018).

Prior to working at the ILHPR, Lian served as the Chief Comment Editor of Suffolk University's Journal of Health and Biomedical Law. She also worked as a Summer Law Clerk at CannonMurrayLaw, an estate planning firm, and interned at Volunteer Lawyers Project in the Bankruptcy and Consumer units.

Contact:
ghelli@bc.edu
617-552-1415

Administrative Assistant

Samantha Ghelli serves as the Administrative Assistant for the Initiative on Land, Housing & Property Rights. She is an alumna of Louisiana State University (2022), where she studied International Law & Politics alongside Arabic and Middle Eastern Studies. Prior to her work with Boston College Law School, Samantha worked in industrial agriculture production. Please send all inquiries to the email or phone number listed to the left.

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