Back taxes and clear title

In my Environmental Planning class I find myself using slightly shaded descriptions of things that sound factual. I might describe how, after you pay off your mortgage, you usually have a clear and unencumbered title. "Why is he hedging?" Well, I don't want to mention unusual things like an upaid liens, which seem pretty uncommon after 30 years of mortgage payments.

But I also know that there are some unusually unusual problems that I can't possibly imagine. Still, I was really surprised to read about a Louisiana couple who had a property tax exemption on a house they had paid off long ago and still have been forced through a terrifyingly complex legal ordeal to keep it:

In 2000, the Atwoods learned their four-bedroom home had been sold in a tax sale three years earlier for the $1.63 in unpaid taxes, plus 10 cents interest and $125 in sale costs.

As the Washington Post reports, the courts overturned the sale (they never received the notice of the taxes due because the house was readdressed for 911) but it came too late to clear the title, which remains contested today. It is a painful lesson in the complications of property ownership and how a little, temporary SNAFU by the local government can force people into a FEMA trailer and very possibly force them to give up their only asset. It also demonstrates one more little way that Hurricane Katrina crashed into the lives of gulf coast residents. As hard as recovery has been for people that were already in a good place, think how many people were living in complicated and difficult situations the day before Katrina; many of them are truly lost now.

The Times-Picayune has a very emotional video of an interview Ms. Atwood. At this point you would think that some people -- like Jamie Land who is suing for their rights to the property or St. Tammany Parish sheriff's office who never delivered the tax notice to the couple -- would be shamed into making it up to the couple that has been forced to live separately.