Danielle Meltzer Cassel

Danielle Meltzer Cassel is a trusted attorney with three decades of experience advising clients in transactional real estate, land use law, public incentives, and business licensing matters.

Since 1996, she has guided clients across a broad range of asset classes, including mixed-use projects, office and retail developments, hotels, hospitals, schools and universities, religious institutions, industrial and manufacturing facilities, and residential communities.

Danielle represents purchasers and sellers, developers, lessors and lessees, investors, lenders, and operators in complex real estate transactions. As needed for each given project, her work spans initial phases of due diligence and joint venture structuring to later phases of acquisition, debt and equity financing, design, construction, leasing, and long-term management. She also has extensive experience securing governmental approvals for land use and development projects across urban, suburban, and rural contexts, including planned developments, subdivisions, zoning changes, text amendments, annexations, special uses, variations, building permits, and business licenses.

Danielle’s practice includes significant work in public and private incentive negotiations. She has structured, closed, and restructured incentives for hundreds of projects nationwide, including headquarters relocations, manufacturing and distribution expansions, large-scale retail and mixed-use developments, and affordable housing projects. Her experience covers tax increment financing, sales and property tax abatements, state and federal tax credits, governmental grants and loans, opportunity zones, and other forms of public-private collaboration.

Before joining Vedder, Danielle spent more than a decade with DLA and its legacy firms, where she developed deep experience in complex real estate and land use matters. Prior to beginning her legal career, she pursued formal and practical training in urban economic development and housing policy, conducting research on federal housing legislation and financing mechanisms for affordable housing. She co-taught land use law at Northwestern University and the University of Chicago Law Schools and currently teaches real estate law at Roosevelt University.

Experience

• Serving for more than a decade as a global manufacturer’s exclusive outside real counsel for its 300+ portfolio of operational sites throughout the United States. Most recently, this engagement involved negotiating and closing, in under a month, sale-leaseback transactions involving 14 large-scale manufacturing facilities, in 12 states, with three separate buyers.
• Serving, for more than 25 years, as the exclusive land use counsel for the largest open-air mall in the continental U.S. (2.2M sf), currently owned by Brookfield. Representation has included numerous planned developments, e.g., for RH Gallery, Lifetime Fitness, and an AMC Theater, as well as multiple text amendments to re-write the local zoning ordinances and liquor codes governing allowable uses and improvements for the asset.
• Serving as transactional, incentives, zoning, landmarking, and liquor licensing counsel to many of Chicago’s most historic and iconic businesses and institutions, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the University of Chicago, the Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago, Crate & Barrel, Walgreens, Berghoff, C.D. Peacock, Giordano’s, and Portillo's.
• Serving for a decade as Target’s exclusive outside incentives counsel and supporting more than 130 distribution center and retail store construction projects in more than 30 States.
• Negotiating and closing a state-level economic development incentive for one of the largest banks in the United States and then administering a decade of annual compliance reporting and restructuring negotiations across multiple state administrations.
• Advising numerous developers, small businesses, and non-profit institutions with public and private real estate acquisitions, financing, redevelopment, and business licensing. For example, advising an independent recycling company through a surplus land acquisition from the City of Chicago, successful efforts to obtain expanded City and State licenses, and then the recent sale of its recycling operations to a private equity firm.