Speaker Bios:

Paul D. Selver, a graduate of Harvard University and Harvard Law School, is a Partner at Kramer Levin and Co-Chair of the firm’s Land Use department. Entering private practice in 1972, Mr. Selver’s practice encompasses all aspects of land use and development law, with a special emphasis on environmental, zoning and historic preservation. He has extensive experience counseling clients in the public and environmental review of complex and large scale projects. Over the past 15 years, he has successfully overseen the land use aspects of, or coordinated the public approval and environmental review process for, developments containing more than 8 million square feet of office space, more than 9,000 apartments, hundreds of thousands of square feet of retail and entertainment space, hundreds of hotel rooms and new institutional buildings. Among his current projects are the New York City land use approvals required for the construction of a new Hudson River railroad tunnel and an addition to Penn Station located under West 34th Street in Manhattan, and rezonings for the development of approximately 4,000 apartments on Coney Island, 700 apartments and a waterfront esplanade along the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, and 2,500 apartments and 200,000 square feet of commercial space on Manhattan's West Side. He has also supervised the negotiation of documentation for scores of development rights acquisitions, including the first acquisitions of "floating" development rights from Broadway theaters. He has performed land use and environmental due diligence in connection with numerous purchases and financings of real estate; he has served as special counsel in litigation defending challenges to land use-related permits and approvals; and he has advised such public sector clients as NJ Transit, the Battery Park City Authority, the Empire State Development Corporation and the Villages of Garden City and Lawrence, New York.

Mr. Selver is the co-author of the New York Practice Guide: Real Property, Volume II: Land Use Regulation (Matthew Bender & Co., 1986). He has also contributed articles to The New York Times, the National Law Journal, the New York Law Journal, Manhattan Lawyer and Car and Driver magazine. He is listed in Who's Who in America,Chambers USA: America's Leading Business Lawyers and Best Lawyers in America and has been recognized by his peers for the past two years as one of New York City's top 100 lawyers. He has been a Lecturer in Law at Columbia University Law School and was formerly an Adjunct Associate Professor of Urban Planning at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation of Columbia University.
 

Elise Wagner, a graduate of Wesleyan University and New York University School of Law, is a Partner at Kramer Levin. Ms. Wagner concentrates her practice in land use, zoning, environmental and historic preservation law. She is currently coordinating Kramer Levin’s participation in a legal team representing the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey on its Access to the Region’s Core project, which would build a new rail tunnel under the Hudson River leading to a new station in Manhattan. She is also representing General Growth Properties on its redevelopment of the South Street Seaport, and Silverstein Properties on several major development projects in Manhattan. She has for many years counseled New York University on land use matters, including its physical master plan, its acquisition of development sites and new buildings and its use and development of properties which are subject to special zoning, urban renewal and historic designation constraints. She has negotiated numerous multi-party transactions for the transfer of development rights, and has performed due diligence on the purchase and financing of major properties.