An endowment is a fund, admistered under the terms of state and local law, that allows the cemetery operators to pay groundskeepers, administrators, and others responsible for the upkeep of a cemetery, the so-called "perpetual care". When you buy a cemetery plot, you pay into this fund when the cemetery is endowed. The keepers, in turn, keep the lawn trimmed and the headstones turned upright as long as the money holds out.

Not all cemeteries are endowed and not all plots in a cemetery may be endowed, either. Non-endowed cemeteries leave to the good will of the descendants and local governments the upkeep of the cemetery. Some states have laws that require municipal governments and townships to take care of non-endowed cemeteries within their jurisdiction. This is not always the case and some cemeteries either fall to ruin or are adopted by the local historical society.

Non-endowed plots pop up in some cemeteries that desire to offer consumers a bargain. At Colma, California's Greenlawn Cemetery, for example, there is a strip of land beyond the main cemetery tat is unendowed. It is very easy to spot because no grass grows there, the leaves are not raked up, etc. There are a few tombstones that family members have erected. Care of the graves belongs to the family: the cemetery operators only trim back the weeds from time to time so that the plot meets local fire regulations.

Eventually endowments run out. Cemeteries fill up and the operators can no longer keep refilling the endowment fund with sales of new plots. The choice left to operators is either to find a way to reuse the land or abandon the cemetery. Some will take the latter route. Others, however, resort to a certain fact of ownership that applies to a cemetery plot. When you buy your last acreage, you are not the owner in the same sense that you own the land on which your house is built. Instead, you may find in the small print the fact that what you have acquired is an easement, which is the right to use the property of the cemetery to bury your body. Easements are more flexible than property: there is no subdivision of the land. Ownership remains with the cemetery operator. If, at some future time, there is a public need for reusing the land for some other purpose, the easement may be overridden in favor of this greater interest. This is how cemeteries can be covered over to make room for new burials (an ancient practice) or bulldozed to make way for some other kind of development. The law favors the living over the dead. When there is no more endowment, unless there is an intervention by authorities to specifically protect the land, a cemetery is as likely to be redeveloped as any other piece of private property.