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UB Law School clinic locates financing for affordable housing throughout Buffalo Niagara.

When Buffalo City Mission executive director Thomas McLaughlin read a story in the Buffalo News about how the Olmsted Center for the Visually Impaired worked with the UB Law School’s Affordable Housing Clinic to arrange financing for special-needs housing in the Riverside section of Buffalo, he called George M. Hezel who codirects the clinic and said, “Let’s work together.”

That was in 2002. Four years later, the product of McLaughlin’s partnership with the clinic is the 122-unit Cornerstone Manor Transitional Housing facility on North Street in Buffalo. The building shelters some of the city’s neediest women and their children. It also will bring approximately $3 million to the City of Buffalo’s treasury over the next 15 years through a creative tax plan negotiated by the clinic.

The UB clinic uses real projects—not just case studies—to teach the legal aspects of developing affordable housing. Students and faculty work with nonprofit and community agencies to put together project financing. In all, the clinic’s work is now responsible for more than $165 million in completed projects in Western New York.

The Cornerstone Manor project was ambitious. McLaughlin’s original intention was to expand the existing Cornerstone facility. Then the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus expressed interest in the site and the plan changed to a new building on a new, nearby site. The clinic eventually secured a total of $10.7 million in financing, including an operating fund from proceeds of the sale of Cornerstone’s original site, tax credits that yield cash to build the project, a payment in lieu of tax agreement that yields revenue for the city, and Department of Housing and Urban Development funds that required delicate negotiation to release.

Real-estate-development financing is a legal specialty. When the real-estate development benefits the poor or the helpless, the practice is even more specialized. For clients like the Buffalo City Mission, lawyers trained in this kind of work can make a project happen.

By partnering with UB’s Affordable Housing Clinic, McLaughlin not only got his project built—he provided UB Law students with specialized problems to solve. Some of them will pursue the practice. And the world will be better for the lessons they have learned.

A pioneering clinic

"Affordable housing is for students looking for more substantial elements of law beyond the flash of litigation," explains George Hezel. "These students learn to negotiate sensitive issues, plan and advocate for people, which is really 90 percent of what lawyers do -- they don't spend all their time litigating."

Created in 1987, the UB clinic is the granddaddy of affordable housing clinics at U.S. law schools. Its national prominence is why the clinic was selected as the home base for the American Bar Association's Journal of Affordable Housing & Community Development Law.

Today there about two dozen affordable-housing clinics in operation nationwide, but in the late '80s clinics at UB, Yale and Seton Hall University pioneered the field, championing a movement to bring practical work experience into the classroom, while providing students with meaningful ways to improve their communities. The UB Law School also offers several other clinics, including ones addressing family violence, the environment, elder law and securities law.

"UB's Affordable Housing clinic has long been recognized as an innovator and a leader, with a record of outstanding accomplishments," says Robert Solomon, director of clinical studies at the Yale Law School. "I had the pleasure several years ago of visiting with the clinic and I was incredibly impressed and inspired by the clinic's work."

Cornerstone’s challenge

The new Cornerstone Manor was officially unveiled last July, providing a state-of-the-art facility for women and children seeking emergency shelter or a transitional housing program. It proved to be the "most challenging and ambitious project" in its history, according to Hezel.

"I like that this project removes an obstacle to economic development in Buffalo, while providing something better for Cornerstone Manor and Buffalo City Mission," he says.

"Getting approval for this project involved a fairly sophisticated bit of persuasion," says Hezel, who personally pitched the project to state housing agencies in Albany. "It's taken a couple of years to put all the pieces together and convince the political power in Western New York and Albany that this should be a priority.

"This project reflects the clinic's appetite for more and more interesting and difficult projects," he adds. "And it's a great teaching event for students."

Because of the UB clinic's national reputation, many UB law graduates move easily into careers in affordable-housing practice with law firms and real-estate development companies throughout the state and around the country. UB Law School graduate Juila Solo, for example, is an associate at New York City's Nixon Peabody LLP, which has a large national affordable-housing practice, representing nonprofits, developers, and investors.

"For me, studying law was only an option if I could use it to improve the status quo," Solo says. "Housing is very basic. If people can afford safe and sanitary housing, many other aspects of their lives can improve too. It's a building block to a better life, a better society."