Overview

• Teaching & Sevice Mission
• Role of Community Development Lawyer
• Seminar Curriculum

Projects on Multifamily Housing

Clinic Work at End of Semester

Selection Criteria/
Application Process

Current Students

**SUPPLEMENTAL** APPLICATION

1. Teaching and service mission. The charter purpose of the Harrison Institute is to provide legal services that are essential for political and economic democracy.  The housing and community development clinic works to empower low-income individual and community group clients, and in so doing, provide law students with a broad vision of what lawyers can and should be doing in low-income communities.  We pursue these service and educational goals in the context of transactional projects in which we seek to give clients ownership or control of housing, businesses and social services.

Presently, the housing and community development clinic works principally in tenant acquisition and renovation of multifamily affordable housing.  Since 1990, the Institute has represented more than 50 tenant associations on behalf of more than 7,000 tenants in the Washington metropolitan area.  The Institute has helped clients purchase more than 1,000 housing units and convert them into cooperatives and other forms of resident ownership.  In achieving these results, students have structured more than $50 million in acquisition and rehabilitation financing.  The funding has come through a combination of local, state, federal and private funding sources, including such complex transactions as low income housing tax credits and historic preservation tax credits.  Clinic students also provide ongoing representation to housing cooperatives and nonprofit housing developers on organizational and operational matters.

2. Role of community development lawyer.  We take a very expansive view of the lawyering role. We believe that law alone is not sufficient to address the problems of poverty and powerlessness.  Therefore, we teach students to recognize the existence of significant non-legal factors influencing community conditions and solutions, the need to identify and collaborate with other resources in communities and to take on tasks, when needed, that are not traditionally associated with lawyering.  We teach students to think creatively about problem solving and not to limit themselves to traditional legal methods or techniques.

• Accountability to clients and collaborators. Our clients are primarily comprised of community groups, although we do represent several individual entrepreneurs.  We typically represent tenant groups who are seeking to purchase their buildings or to negotiate with an owner for an element of managerial involvement in building operations.  We are currently representing ten such organizations in various stages of tenant ownership.  In this context, client accountability often involves organizing a board of directors, training that board in both corporate duties and the development process, and managing the potentially conflicting interests of residents with different levels of income and assets.  A successful multifamily project usually includes multiple institutions and professional service providers, and it is the community lawyer’s role to help the group client select and then manage this development team.  A sampling of public and private collaborators in this work includes:

– DC Housing Finance Agency
– DC Department of Housing and Community Development
– DC Housing Authority (public housing)
– Local Initiative Support Corporation
– Washington Area Community Investment Fund
– Community Development Corporations (CDCs)
– Unitarian Universalist Housing Development Corporation
– National Cooperative Bank
– Private lending institutions
– Nonprofit developers
– Community organizers
– Housing counselors

• Strategy and planning. The issues of strategy are addressed on two major levels.  One involves the recognition that poverty is a function not only of the absence of means, but also the absence of power.  Community development and community lawyering are strategic outcomes that evolve from that recognition.  In creating a strategy to combat poverty, students are asked to consider such issues as empowerment, sustainability and collaboration.  
  
  As part of this role, students are asked to collaborate with clients to create strategies to achieve client ends.  These ends, in turn, play a role in the implementation of a broader anti-poverty strategy.  Students meet with clients, supervisors, peers and collaborators and consider theoretical writing on poverty, community and lawyering in their efforts to develop viable case strategies.  They examine the interplay between these strategies and the theories of community development that we have examined, which leads to refinement of both theory and strategy.
  
• Skills. Most of our students’ learning involves organizational and transactional skills such as drafting and training to implement corporate bylaws, negotiating and drafting service contracts, negotiating and drafting real estate sale and conversion documents, and organizing and making presentations to clients, lenders and government agencies.  Communication skills are geared to the lay audience, who must make life-changing decisions based on the information that our students provide.  The lawyer’s role often involves development work such as preparing or managing others who prepare financing documents based on extensive information-gathering from residents.  Students’ work with entrepreneurs involves many of the same skills, including an emphasis on presentation and training skills.
  

3. Seminar curriculum. A multi-day orientation is held the week before classes begin in the fall.  During the year, the clinic seminar meets once per week for three hours.  The materials and discussions are designed to address theoretical questions about the nature of community and poverty and the role of the lawyer, doctrinal issues concerning areas in which we work (such as corporations, taxation, contracts, and finance), and skill areas such as interviewing, planning, negotiation, drafting and presenting.  A sample of the topics we cover is as follows.

Fall semester

Community Development

• History
• Definition

Role of the Lawyer

• Styles of community lawyering
• Working with other disciplines
• Legal and political ethics

Real Estate Development

• Financial concepts
• Basic accounting
• Development process
• Players in development
• Sources of financing
• Maintaining affordability
• Pro formas and spreadsheets

Real Estate Transactions

• Elements of a sale transaction
• Real estate contracts and mortgages
• Real estate closings

Corporate structure

• Forms of organization
• Corporate documents
• Basic taxation
• Tax exemption

Spring semester

Review of Fall and planning for Spring

Land Use and Community Development

• General land use regulation
• Historic Preservation
• Theory of competing “goods”

Power and Community Change

• Theories of empowerment
• Theories of development

Student Presentations

4. Clinic projects and teams. In order to accomplish both education and legal service goals, the Institute expects students to work an average of at least 25 hours per week on all clinic activities.  Students’ projects in the 2012-2013 housing clinic will most likely involve work in one or more of the following three principal areas:  multifamily housing, economic development and microenterprise, and community institution building.

12 unit building on the outskirts of Capitol Hill.  The tenants association in this building has purchased the building. The association is now planning the renovation of the property and seeking construction financing. 

52 unit building in the Brightwood neighborhood.    The tenants have purchased this building and hired a development consultant.  They have formed a limited income cooperative and are currently working on the scope of renovations and the construction financing.

122 unit cluster of buildings in Southeast off Benning Road.  The tenants have contracted to purchase their building and are in the process of obtaining acquisition financing.   They are currently engaged in pre-development activities.

10 unit building in the Lincoln Park neighborhood of Northeast.   The resident association has purchased the building.  The residents are now considering the choice of form for their operation of the property.  The choices before them include condominiums and various forms of cooperatives.

65 unit building in Southeast off East Capitol Street.   The long term cooperative is in the process of planning its re-development.  They are seeking to finalize financing and to select a contractor to implement the architect’s plans.

12 unit cluster of e contiguous buildings on Kansas Avenue. The tenant association is in the early stages of purchasing the property and converting it into a cooperative. They are seeking acquisition and rehabilitation financing.

Mixed use residential and commercial new construction in SE Washington. Our client, a community development corporation is partnering with a developer in creating this project using New Market Tax Credits as a financing tool.

Restructuring and refinancing an 18 unit cooperative in NE Washington. The project requires extensive financial restructuring and physical rehabilitation.