Heir property is land held communally by family members of a landowner who has died intestate. Because this informal arrangement does not fit neatly into the individualist‐centered, integrated property rights system of the United States, it is viewed by most as a hindrance to economic development and capitalism. We present an alternative framework for analyzing the significance of heir property in the African American community and its constraints. While the consequences of owning land with clouded title are clear‐ineligibility for housing programs, inability to secure a mortgage or sell timber, and vulnerability to land loss through partition and tax sales‐we argue that a culturally‐based understanding of heir property provides insight to why it persists among rural African Americans. Based on personal interviews with heir property owners, lawyers, housing counselors, and county officials, the authors illustrate how heir property is supportive of certain cultural values and meets the needs of a subset of rural populations in ways that other forms of property ownership cannot.

In the past decade ownership of the corporate forestry sector in the USA has undergone remarkable transformation. Corporate consolidation, separation of processing capacity ownership from timberland ownership, and disinvestment from timberland ownership altogether have occurred rapidly and on a global scale. Vertically-integrated forest products companies, once the standard model for publically-traded corporations, have all but disappeared. A new class of timberland investors now dominates the timberland estate. These new owners can be viewed as the most recent manifestation of capital from the core seeking rent in the distant periphery. While in this respect they resemble their industrial forestry predecessors, they differ markedly with regard to landholding objectives, time horizons, management capacities and other characteristics. This transformation has created new challenges and opportunities for other forest owners and for rural communities. Many timber processing mills have closed, restricting markets for smallholder wood. While much former industrial timberland remains in industrial-style timber management, some has been subdivided for 'highest and best use,' and conservation buyers have assumed control of a few large blocks. Further fragmentation of the industrial forest estate is anticipated, presenting both challenges and opportunities to small-scale forest owners and rural communities. This paper outlines the dynamics of forest ownership restructuring, posits alternative future scenarios for small-scale forestry, and points to potentially useful future research.

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