Practices
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Value-Added Services
Developing innovative pricing structures and alternative fee agreement models that deliver additional value for our clients.
Advancing professional knowledge and offering credits for attorneys, staff and other professionals.
Helping clients respond correctly when a crisis occurs.
Providing our clients with legal, strategic, and practical advice to make transformational changes in their organizations.
Leveraging law and technology to deliver sound solutions.
Delivering seamless service through partnerships across the globe.
Leveraging leading-edge technology to guide change and create seamless, collaborative experiences for clients and attorneys.
Industry-leading conferences focused on affordable housing, tax credits, and more.
Providing actionable information to support strategic decision-making.
Teaming with clients to advance sustainable projects, mitigate the effects of climate change, and protect our planet.
Offering a range of investment management and fiduciary services.
Bringing together companies and investors for tomorrow’s new deals.
Offering fresh insights on cases that are delayed, over budget, or off-target from the desired resolution.
Courtroom-ready lawyers who can resolve disputes early on clients’ terms or prevail at trial before a judge or jury.
Creating positive impact in our communities through increasing equity, access, and opportunity.
Partner / Chief Innovation Officer
Aaron Yowell helps to create and preserve affordable and transitional housing, advising both for profit and nonprofit developers, private equity investors, and family offices, with a particular focus on novel and unconventional structures. Aaron works regularly with a wide range of tax credits (including state and federal low-income housing and historic tax credits) and real property tax incentive programs (including Article XI, 420-c and 420-a in New York and a range of other exemption models in jurisdictions around the country). He advises clients in all aspects of project development, new construction, rehabilitation, and operation, including acquisitions, dispositions, regulatory matters, public and private financings, joint ventures, and investments.
Aaron works on transactions nationwide, with work on recent projects located in New York, New Jersey, California, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Minnesota, Louisiana, Virginia, New Hampshire, and Maine. Aaron has led top teams in a wide range of high-profile affordable housing transactions in New York City and State, including preservation transactions through the New York City Housing Authority PACT (Permanent Affordability Commitment Together) program and the Mitchell Lama Housing Program, as well complex new construction projects relying on inclusionary housing, HPD’s Senior Affordable Rental Apartments (SARA), and Supportive Housing Loan Program (SHLP), and operating subsidy like 15/15, contracts from the Department of Homeless Services (DHS). Aaron has also advised institutional owners and investors in some of the largest recent affordable housing transactions include the acquisition and refinancing of Spring Creek Towers, the largest HUD-subsidized property in the country, and several large affordable housing portfolio recapitalizations and dispositions.
In his capacity as Chief Innovation Officer, Aaron leads Nixon Peabody’s innovation team, spearheading the firm’s efforts with respect to artificial intelligence including larger language models. He has built leading-edge collaboration and other technology to deliver efficient and high-quality legal services across the firm’s diverse client base, including its housing clients.
Building new affordable housing and preserving housing requires marshaling diverse sets of government agencies and debt and equity partners within an ever more complex set of programs and incentives. We guide developers and investors in building transactions on the foundation of our broad and deep experience. For example, we recently helped a for-profit developer and a nonprofit operator acquire and finance a hybrid supportive housing and transitional housing project. The project was financed with a mix of subsidy, credit tenant lease financing, a Freddie Mac loan, and brownfields equity. Getting to closing required us to harmonize the interests of each of these sources while protecting our clients’ core interests.
Up-to-the-minute deal awareness is essential. We rely on strong project management to ensure that all members of our team, our clients, and other transactional partners are aligned and directed. Affordable housing transactions, which often involve upwards of five or six different sources of debt financing, tax credit equity, and state and local tax exemptions, present a unique opportunity to create value through efficiency and we work hard to seize that opportunity on every transaction. During my time as Chief Innovation Officer, our team has developed several approaches that reduce friction.
However, our innovation initiatives are not only focused on increasing transactional efficiency but also on helping clients identify opportunities for existing assets and unlock new lines of business. We work closely with our clients, investors, lenders, and regulatory agencies to develop new models to create much-needed housing, including using new sources and regulatory approaches. We relish the opportunity to help with the newest approaches, the most challenging transactions, and the most difficult problems.
Our team does the work we do for a key reason. We think housing is critically important. Our work reflects that commitment, and we truly relish contributions we can make to housing projects that have the most impact on the residents—including senior and supportive housing and transitional housing shelters. I am gratified by my long-running relationship with the Furman Center for Real Estate & Urban Policy at NYU, which conducts cutting-edge research on urban development and affordable housing. In addition to affordable housing, sustainability and green building are very important to me. I was a founding board member of GreenHomeNYC, a nonprofit offering sustainability resources for small- and medium-sized buildings in New York City.
The New York City and State governments continue to try to outdo each other in housing production and regulatory complexity, increasingly insisting upon a substantial mix of incomes, set asides, regulatory restrictions, and other programmatic priorities. At the same time, with tax-exempt bond volume cap constrained not only in traditionally starved New York City and State but other jurisdictions around the country, opportunities abound for less conventional structures and more creative players. State and local governments at all levels are going to have to find new ways to build housing and this presents opportunities for traditional affordable housing developers, market-rate developers, and players new to the affordable market to expand in both size and scope. At the same time, on a nationwide basis, portfolios from the early phases of the low-income housing tax credit program are reaching the end of their regulatory restrictions. The developers of these portfolios will be looking to recapitalize and reposition. We will all have to adapt their approaches to accommodate this volume.
Our work in this area will not just be substantive. Through our legal technology initiatives, we continue to improve our efficiency and productivity, reduce transactional pain points, and find new areas where we can help our clients. The last several years have seen tremendous growth in this area, with new tools, including artificial intelligence, becoming an essential part of our practice in a matter of months.
Chief Innovation Officer Aaron Yowell is quoted in this article, which discusses how generative artificial intelligence tools can produce poor results when they aren’t adequately grounded in the law. Aaron discusses that NP is currently in a “trust but verify” stage with the use of generative AI, and mentions how the firm is supporting lawyers in developing skills to effectively use these tools.
Chief Innovation Officer Aaron Yowell is quoted in this article, which discusses what law firms are doing to develop policies and training around the use of generative AI. Aaron explains how NP is training attorneys to independently verify the work of generative AI tools, noting that the firm would not use such tools to generate court filings.
Chief Innovation Officer Aaron Yowell is quoted in this article, which explores how AmLaw 100 firms are using artificial intelligence to make operations more efficient. Aaron discusses NP’s pilot of AI platform Harvey, which is intended to supplement the traditional process of lawyering. He also discusses how firms need to carefully consider how AI tools will factor into the pricing of services.
This article highlights NP for negotiating a 40-year real estate tax exemption with New York City’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development on behalf of client Clipper Realty Inc. for its 2,500-unit Flatbush Gardens apartment complex in Brooklyn. The article mentions partner and Chief Innovation Officer Aaron Yowell and counsel Abigail Patterson, both of the Affordable Housing & Real Estate practice and New York City office, for representing Clipper Realty in the deal.
In this roundup of promotions to partner and firm management positions, 14 attorneys from Nixon Peabody are highlighted. The 11 attorneys promoted to partner are Ellie Altshuler, Mark Beaudoin, Erik Birkeneder, Hannah Bornstein, Chris Browning, Barry Carrigan, Keri McWilliams, Matt Mullen, Steven Richard, Charles Tamuleviz and Alison Torbitt. In addition, Kenneth C. Lind was promoted to leader of the firms’ public finance practice group, Justin Thompson was promoted to office managing partner in LA, and Aaron Yowell was promoted to chief innovation officer.
New York
New York University School of Law, J.D., Order of the Coif; Environmental Law Journal
Wesleyan University, B.A.
Press Release
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