News
CLEANING UP
July 27, 2011
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| The recession left us with a big mess, and now land use lawyers are starting to help pick it up, says Drinker Biddle & Reath's Tina Dalman, here with colleagues Richard Blessen and Mike Mermall. Tina recently rejoined Drinker Biddle after a six-year hiatus working in-house with KB Home and then Daspin & Aument. Working for a corporate homebuilder client helped her understand the developer mentality. Now, she's unwinding some of the sites that were overbuilt, like a planned subdivision in west Aurora that was sold back to the original landowner and will probably go back to being farmland. Tina says the bigger problems are often in far-out 'burbs without an urban link where land wasn't always fully developed before projects stalled. | |
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| The real estate land use group at Drinker Biddle (and the alien looking in through the window) says they've seen a significant increase in activity over the last six months and expect at least a 25% jump this year. Most of the firm's work in the last few years has involved education and institutional clients, as well as public-private partnerships. Tina predicts the recession will cause many developers to rethink using land that doesn't have established public transportation and infrastructure in this next phase of development, which she hopes will include higher capacity infrastructure. |
