Alabama’s highest court is being asked to weigh in on whether an 83-year-old woman can be forced to sell the land she’s called home for 60 years to a real estate developer.
Corine Woodson lives in the home she shared with her late husband in Auburn. But the home is located on nearly 41 acres, a single property co-owned by descendants of her late husband’s ancestors and passed down through the family for generations.
The property is under “tenants in common” status, which means the land isn’t divided up by owners with individual parcels, but ownership stakes are instead held as percentages. Woodson owns an 11% share of the land. The property is valued at $3.97 million, according to a court-ordered appraisal.
But some of the family members decided to sell out their shares to Cleveland Brothers, Inc., an Auburn real estate development company that says it wants to build a subdivision on the land.
The company now owns a 49% share of the land — and it’s fighting in court to buy the rest.
“I’d like to ask them why,” Woodson said in an interview with WVTM. “I can’t figure it out. Thinking about it, it’s not easy. I can tell you that.”
Woodson is asking the Alabama Supreme Court to let her buy the entire property, rather than sell her portion.
If Woodson loses, a court would likely order her to leave the property, said her attorney Jacy Fisher of Gregory Varner & Associates in Birmingham.
“I don’t know that she’s willingly going to leave her property,” Fisher told AL.com. “If that happens, they will need to eject her.”
The company first filed a lawsuit in Lee County Circuit Court in 2006 over the issue.
Woodson, who inherited her husband’s share of the land, offered to buy the entire property, but a circuit judge in Lee County ruled last August that she waited too late to make an offer.
In the meantime, while her appeal proceeds, Judge Russell Bush has ordered that Woodson has until Nov. 28 to pay a $3.97 million bond to the Cleveland Brothers. The company told the court that Woodson’s delays to the property’s sale will cause them “financial harm.”
“It’s pretty standard procedure when you have heirs’ property. Everybody owns an undivided interest and nobody can do anything with it,” said Billy Cleveland, a partner at the company, said in an interview with AL.com. “We’re certainly not trying to oust Corine Woodson from the house.”
If Woodson loses the appeal, she gets back the bond but will have to pay for the other party’s costs and expenses. If she wins the appeal, she won’t get back her bond, and then, if she’s permitted, will also have to bid against the Cleveland Brothers, Fisher said.
Fisher, who specializes in heirs’ property and real estate litigation, said many landowners in these situations are land-rich but cash-poor, and lack access to capital compared to real estate developers – especially for people of color. She noted that Woodson is a Black woman.
Woodson’s late husband’s ancestor, Ben W. Woodson, who was a sharecropper, originally owned the property starting in 1911, and left it to his 12 children or their heirs and descendants when he died, per court records.
After her husband, Willie Woodson, died in June of last year, Corine Woodson inherited the land and became a party in the long-running lawsuit.
“Whatever her husband did, her husband’s interests are separate from hers,” Fisher said. “I feel like the judicial system is treating this as whatever Corine’s husband did.”