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New Bedford is emerging as a leader in addressing vacant properties.
The city has a dedicated staff member focused on reviving empty homes and a new legal internship program to help resolve legal issues these properties face.
New Bedford’s efforts were featured at Untangling Titles, a conference held at Western New England University in Springfield on Friday. Deputy Director of Development Services Jordan Latham, who oversees the city’s vacant property program, presented New Bedford’s progress alongside property experts from Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C.
Over 250 vacant New Bedford properties have been re-occupied, leading to the collection of $1 million in fines and taxes, since the city started this work in 2024, Latham said. It began as part of the city’s Building New Bedford housing strategy, launched in 2023.
Latham analyzes a wide range of data, including water use, code violations, and death certificates, to identify potentially vacant properties. Then she tries to track down and resolve the specific reasons why each one has fallen out of active use.
The main reason properties become vacant, Latham said, is because the owner died with no will, or no heirs willing to execute their will. That leaves properties in a state of legal limbo that can be difficult and expensive to recover them from. Property law experts call this a “tangled title,” a term referring to situations where ownership of a property is disputed or not fully settled.
Latham announced at Friday’s conference that the city has received a $25,000 grant from the SouthCoast Community Foundation to target title problems. The grant will fund probate court fees that heirs must otherwise pay to help get properties out of legal limbo. It will also support estate planning workshops for older residents to prevent properties from falling into limbo in the first place.
“I wrote the grant thinking, ‘Have they even heard of a tangled title? I don’t know, but I’m gonna go for it,’” Latham said.
The grant will build on the internship program the city launched this year for UMass law students. The program began after UMass Law School Assistant Dean John Quinn and local elder law attorney Lynn Whitney read a 2025 New Bedford Light feature on Latham’s work. They said it inspired them to start a collaboration with the city that would bolster its vacant property work while giving students experience.
Whitney says she has been teaching the interns how to resolve title trouble after someone dies.
“We really are just at the very beginning of this,” she said.
Intern Sara Donahue said she’s enjoyed the work so far because the program has helped her build a deeper relationship with the community she lives in.
“I’m more of a learn-by-doing-type person,” she said. “I’m going to learn a bunch of tools, but I really do want to get out in the community and apply them.”
Latham gave tips at the conference on how other cities could replicate New Bedford’s approach. Artificial intelligence could help them use existing data to identify potentially vacant properties, she said, and the legal system has resources that can help heirs untangle a title.
Most attendees at the conference were lawyers, law students, and public officials from around Massachusetts, mainly the western part of the state.
Before Friday’s conference, New Bedford had already been nationally recognized for its vacant property work with an award from the NewDEAL Forum.
Research shows how tangled titles stand in the way of healthy neighborhoods
There’s rising awareness in the legal community about tangled title issues, said Thomas Mitchell, a professor at Boston College Law School and director of the school’s Initiative on Land, Housing, and Property Rights. One upcoming study is expected to show that nationally, $35 billion in property is tied up with tangled titles, he said.
Elise Rapoza, a New Bedford resident and housing researcher at the think tank MassINC, shared new data showing the scale of tangled title issues in New Bedford and Springfield.
About 2% to 3% of properties in New Bedford are likely owned by dead people, she said. Many of those owners died more than a decade ago. Latham, later in the conference, said she recently came across a property whose owner had died in the 1950s.
Properties with a deceased owner are much more likely to be vacant, have code violations, and fall behind on taxes, Rapoza said.
Legal problems facing vacant properties matter because the state is in a housing crisis caused by a shortage of units, she said. Her analysis found that bringing vacant properties online could help the state achieve 25% of its housing production needs.
Leaders from other communities share their approaches
When Springfield studied the properties it had foreclosed on for unpaid taxes, it found 38% of them appeared to have an owner who died or had gone into a nursing home, said Springfield Director of Housing Gerry McCafferty.
Vacant properties in the city tend to be “clustered” in neighborhoods experiencing disinvestment, she said. Those properties become devalued, which contributes to the devaluation of surrounding properties, creating a feedback loop that spirals into further disinvestment.
That’s why the city shifted its strategy over the last year to a “whole block, whole area approach,” McCafferty said. Instead of targeting specific properties in various areas, the city is targeting entire neighborhoods at one time.
“By doing that level of focus,” she said, “you can move from disinvestment to investment.”
Lawyers from Philadelphia presented details on that city’s program providing free legal help and covering some legal fees to resolve tangled titles. A law professor from Howard University in Washington, D.C., discussed the school’s legal clinic providing estate planning education and legal help for heirs.
Who you gonna call?
This week, Latham will send out her annual letters to owners and heirs of vacant properties in New Bedford, notifying them that they are required to pay a fee and register with the city’s vacant building registry.
Those letters can be daunting, Latham has said, because they’re formal documents on city letterhead. But she said on Friday they will look a little different this year because they will also include an attachment about the city’s new legal assistance program. If you get one of those letters…
“Don’t panic,” she said. “Call me!”
Email Grace Ferguson at gferguson@newbedfordlight.org.
