An estate-planning seminar Wednesday at the St. Croix Educational Complex will help property owners avoid confusion and disputes among their heirs.
Confused and multiple ownership of buildings is a major obstacle to the work of territorial tax assessors, longtime residents and local civic organizations such as Our Town Frederiksted that are trying to clean up blighted buildings.
"In some cases, properties may be owned by 10 or 15 people," said Alphonso Franklin of Our Town Frederiksted in 2007, discussing the problem of blighted buildings on St. Croix.
If a property owner has several children, perhaps from more than one marriage, and dies without a will, title may be divided among all the children and any decision about what to do with the property requires all of the heirs to agree. Often, six or seven owners will agree on what to do with a property, but one or two either won’t go along or sometimes can’t be located. If there is no resolution and some of those heirs pass away without a will, too, then yet more individuals have yet more complicated potential claims to partial title to the land.
Dotted all around the island of St. Croix are abandoned houses and buildings falling into decay, some because of irreparable storm damage or the prohibitive cost of restoring historic structures. But in many cases, properties sit derelict and crumbling because several individuals either have or believe they have a partial stake in the property and cannot agree on how to proceed.
As a result, even as affordable housing is hard to find, there are at a minimum dozens and perhaps hundreds of existing homes that sit unoccupied and decaying, generating no rental income, housing no one and slowly losing their value.
If a property owner has their estate planned properly, some of the family tensions, disputes and fallings out that occur when ownership is unclear might be avoided and more properties could be generating rental income and tax revenue and going up in value rather than down.
Christiansted attorney Maxwell McIntosh will lead the talk, giving advice on estate planning and how to ensure your property winds up in the right hands. The Enterprise Zone Commission, a division of the Economic Development Authority, organized and paid for the seminar, which will take place from 6 to 8 p.m. Wednesday in the Education Complex library.
To find out more about the seminar, call Nadine Marchena-Kean, director of the Enterprise Zone Commission, at 340-774-8104.
