As you read this, there's a brick house on Union Boulevard with no lights on. It's a one-story home with a wide front porch and a sycamore twisting over the backyard. Like many houses in Wells-Goodfellow, it's officially vacant. This one was purchased decades ago hy the Foster family. In 2018, one of its members. Nyree Foster, realized, as she grieved the loss of her mother, that no one in her family lived there anymore, so she needed to do something with the place. She didn't know exactly what. Nor did she yet know the term “tangled title.” a situation where a homeowner dies and the title to the property. or the legal right to possess it, becomes murky—a situation, by the way, that blocks the transfer of intergenerational wealth and leads to vacancy: a situation that researchers have called “an insidiously invisible but pervasive issue.” the tackling off which would help close the racial homeownership gap: a situation that, according to interviews and an SLM data analysis, plagues certain Black neighborhoods and probably other parts of St. Louis, but that our local governments are doing little to quantify or address.
Nyree didn't yet know about this wider context. She just knew that there was a problem with the title to her family's house. And that merely thinking about the place made her hurt.
Her paternal grandparents, James and Odell, labored for long hours to acquire it. They'd left rural Mississippi at midcentury, during the Great Migration, and found jobs in St. Louis: he as a trucker for a railroad, and she as a presser in the Garment District downtown. They bought the house in 1956, joining a wave of Black families moving into North City neighborhoods that, just a few years earlier, had been almost exclusively white. Banks in those days could still legally “redline,” or discriminate against African Americans seeking mortgages; the Fosters’ purchase was financed
