It started with a single column of smoke. The stream of gray connected the floor of Rist Canyon with the wide Colorado sky. Three weeks later, the 2012 High Park fire finally extinguished after burning more than 87,000 acres of land, destroying more than 250 homes and claiming one life.

By the time Candace was allowed to return to her neighborhood, there was nothing left to salvage. Heaps of ash and bent metal marked where her house once stood. In the months that followed, Candace, her three children Chase, Jackson and Adele and their dog, Cooper, jumped from place to place, couch to couch. While the insurance process dragged on, Candace, a preschool teacher, continued to make mortgage payments on a home that didn’t exist. “We were going to have to walk away from everything — from this place that we loved, our life here,” she says.

Then, on Mother’s Day 2013, almost a year after losing everything, Candace received a call from Fort Collins Habitat. She learned that she would be going home again — her community would be helping her build a new house on her land in the canyon. “It was the best Mother’s Day gift I could ever get because it was the best gift I could give my kids,” Candace says.

As construction began, crews of volunteers as well as friends and family joined Candace as she invested hundreds of sweat equity hours into the work. She was eager because, despite all that was lost in the fire, Candace felt like she was gaining so much more. An affordable mortgage that she would no longer struggle to cover. A newfound appreciation among her family for life and for each other. A community that caught her when she felt like her family was falling. The foundation of a stable and safe home to lift them back up as they started anew.

“They built more than our home,” Candace says, sitting in the living room of her now-finished Habitat home. “They helped us rebuild our lives.”

A quarter of the people in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, live below the poverty line — the highest rate of any American city. Compared to other East Coast cities, however, Philadelphia boasts a high homeownership rate, even among low-income families, due to the mass production of row homes for working-class families prior to World War II.

The convergence of these two realities leaves many Philadelphians unable to afford the upkeep of their homes, and deferred maintenance often snowballs into more expensive and serious issues. Dilapidated porches lead to injuries from falls. Leaking roofs spur mold, then asthma. Broken pipes cause unsafe water or no running water at all.

In 2010, Habitat Philadelphia began a home repair program to address the growing issue. Working alongside homeowners and volunteers, they complete the critical repairs that help preserve affordable homeownership while improving health and safety. In order to apply for the program, residents must provide proof of homeownership to ensure that Habitat’s work is permitted and benefits the intended recipient. This, it turns out, is a hurdle for the more than 14,000 Philadelphians with “tangled titles.”

These residents live in homes that they cannot prove they own on paper.

“There are many reasons for tangled titles,” says KC Roney, Habitat Philadelphia’s senior director of programs. Lack of a will is the main one. “In many neighborhoods in Philadelphia, there is a lot of multigenerational homeownership. And so much of this inability to establish ownership stems from an unclear line of succession of the house between family members.”

In 2018, to help applicants navigate the legal process of untangling, Habitat Philadelphia began to refer homeowners to Drexel University’s Andy and Gwen Stern Community Lawyering Clinic. Each year, a new class of law students serves the clinic by working with and advocating for local residents on a number of legal topics, including property deeds. The law students assist residents in tracking down heirs to resolve disputes and filing petitions in court. Then they help put more permanent solutions in place.

“We assist community members with their individual cases, but we also try to identify holistic and systemic solutions that can resolve issues before they become entrenched legal problems,” says Rachel López, associate professor of law and director of the Community Lawyering Clinic. “Community legal education and will creation, in this instance, are critical to that.”

To the homeowners, the impact of the clinic’s work goes beyond a piece of paper. In addition to Habitat Philadelphia’s repair program, the home’s title also unlocks homestead exemptions on property taxes, payment assistance plans, utility relief programs and equity. “Getting the title resolved provides a clean slate. Giving homeowners broad access to resources and programs, even outside of Habitat, to help them stay in their homes, to age in place,” Roney says.

With each streetlight that went out in the Canaan community north of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Ruthiana felt less and less safe. There were simply no qualified workers in the neighborhood to repair the lamps, so the once well-lit streets became pitch dark at nightfall.

The residents of Canaan, an informal settlement of families displaced by the deadly 2010 earthquake, live in difficult conditions, often with no running water, electricity or access to basic infrastructure. The solar-powered streetlamps were originally installed through a partnership between Habitat Haiti and the national and local governments. In all, Habitat installed 200 energy-efficient streetlamps in capital-area neighborhoods and now is working to create a pool of qualified residents in each neighborhood to maintain them.

This summer, Habitat began conducting trainings in conjunction with a local partner. Ruthiana, who is studying to be a civil engineer, was among the first 19 participants. Each participant received hands-on training and a toolkit to test electrical currents; neighborhood clusters were supplied with ladders. Habitat plans to duplicate the project in Simon Pele, Port-de-Paix, Saint Louis du Nord, Gros Morne and in the Grand’ Anse area.

In Canaan, street vendors report that they now feel comfortable doing business after nightfall. Public transportation drivers, meanwhile, are able to start their shifts before dawn and continue after sunset. Children gather beneath the lights, some of them studying in their glow. “It is important for me to understand how these solar streetlights work because they help my whole neighborhood,” Ruthiana says. “If one of them breaks down, I can help my community by fixing it.”