Under the "heirs' property" system, land is passed down to descendants without a will or deed, but the Federal Emergency Management Agency requires proof of ownership for relief. There's no legal basis for the policy, but FEMA began requiring it to stave off scammers."In 2018, under pressure to resolve the crisis in Puerto Rico, the agency created a process for people to self-certify homeownership," Dreier reports. "But the fix applied only to islands and tribal areas, and it was not extended to the Deep South, where in internal correspondence, FEMA has recognized heirs’ property as 'a perennial issue.' A FEMA spokesperson said the agency still requires most disaster survivors to prove ownership because 'land ownership is recorded as a standard practice' in all of the continental United States and 'self-certification of ownership increases the agency’s vulnerability' to fraud and improper payments."
And if that wasn't bad enough, FEMA aid is, in general, more often denied to those in poverty, Rebecca Hersher reports for NPR: "FEMA's own analyses show that low-income survivors are less likely than more affluent people to get crucial federal emergency assistance, according to internal documents NPR obtained through a public records request."
NPR's investigation found that impoverished renters were 23% less likely than higher-income renters to get housing aid, and that the poorest homeowners got about half as much money to rebuild their homes as higher-income homeowners; that disparity can't be explained by relative repair costs, researchers said. Also, "FEMA was about twice as likely to deny housing assistance to lower-income disaster survivors because the agency judged the damage to their home to be 'insufficient,'" Hersher reports.
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