The ground rent on the little Baltimore house was an Evans family heirloom, passed through generations like a small jewel. Under an old practice that separated land ownership from the ownership of the house, their Cliftview Avenue lot paid the family $90 a year.
Kathleen O'Hanlon found the deed, rolled and faded in a tiny zipper purse, before her mother, Margaret Evans Feeley, died in 2008. It passed to another Evans descendant on his 18th birthday the following year.
But under Maryland's 2007 ground-rent reform, the paper became worthless on Sept. 30, 2010. That was the deadline for ground-rent owners to register their titles with the authorities. The O'Hanlons and probably many others missed it.
It didn't matter if landlords didn't know about the change. It didn't matter if, like the O'Hanlons, they were distracted by illness, death and the everyday rush. Ownership stakes of many decades' standing were abolished simply because they weren't inscribed in the great book of government.
Terrible abuse of property rights had moved the legislature to clean up the ground rent mess. The Baltimore Sun chronicled instances in which ground rent owners seized homes or shook down homeowners for thousands of dollars in legal fees when they owed only a few hundred dollars in rent.
But that doesn't justify what happened to O'Hanlon's family and to other landlords who didn't sign up in time. For sure, a statewide registry is a sensible way for tenants to see exactly what they owe, when and to whom. Canceling ground rents because of missing paperwork, however, amounts to hitting the landlords with the same injustice once visited on the tenants.
"The fact that they lose a property interest if they don't comply … seem[s] to be pretty severe," Court of Appeals Judge Joseph F. Murphy Jr. said last week at a hearing considering the constitutionality of the law.
Don't be surprised if Murphy and other judges on Maryland's highest court rule against the ground rent law and set the stage for more reasonable enforcement. Under any sensible understanding of principles that have stood the test of centuries, the Court of Appeals must reinstate the rights of the Evans descendants and other ground renters who missed the deadline.
The government can't take your car just because you forgot to renew the tags. It doesn't let banks keep money from depositors who lost track of their accounts. And it shouldn't wipe out the property of ground rent owners whose only fault was not paying attention.
Charles J. Muskin, a lawyer whose family owns hundreds of ground rents, challenged reform attempts from the start and sued the state after the General Assembly acted. The Muskin rents generated a total of between $5,000 and $10,000 a year, and perhaps a third weren't registered in time, he says. The Court of Appeals heard arguments in the case last week.
Muskin is litigating on a budget, representing himself. But he's doing a favor for the O'Hanlons and other small holders who have fewer resources and, by virtue of their tiny stakes, little motivation to start an expensive lawsuit. The state registered 85,000 ground rents by the deadline, but Maryland authorities have estimated that more than 100,000 exist.
Muskin said he has heard from about a dozen ground rent owners who missed the deadline.
"Almost without exception, those letters contain a line like, 'I didn't understand I lived in a communist country where they could take my property,'" he said in an interview.
Given the abuses chronicled by The Sun, Kathleen O'Hanlon said, there were plenty of reasons to change how the law put vulnerable ground rent tenants at risk.
"I totally cannot see the fairness that somebody who has a ground rent has the right to evict somebody from their home," the Parkville woman said. But she "just didn't realize the repercussions" of the reforms for ground rent owners.
Her mother became gravely ill in 2007, when ground rent changes were being discussed. Then her father declined and died last year. Michael O'Hanlon, her husband, is a retired IRS agent. He consulted government authorities to make sure the ground rent was properly transferred to the heir. Kathleen O'Hanlon said the family thought it had done everything by the book but added, "I was clueless to this."
Maryland could have given ground rent owners plenty of incentive to register without confiscating their assets. Don't let landlords collect rent until they sign up, for example. Don't let them sue tenants. Don't allow ownership transfers.
Landlords make a less sympathetic group of victims than people paying the rent. But the "extinguishment" of a ground rent is no less an extreme penalty for inattentiveness than the "ejectment" of a ground rent tenant.