We help clients deal with the environmental risks inherent in real estate ownership and management. Those risks can arise anywhere along the spectrum of owning, developing, and operating property and can affect owners, developers, lenders, sellers, buyers and tenants. Our clients range from international commercial developers to local neighborhood shopping center owners.

For summary information concerning representative real estate projects, please click the related link on the right hand side of the page. To see what Legal 500.com has to say about our firm’s real estate-related work, see the following link.

Brownfields Redevelopment
We have established a particular expertise in redevelopment projects, working with clients to bring contaminated property back into productive use. Our attorneys were working with clients' contaminated sites long before these properties were given the name "brownfields". As a result, we are intimately familiar with the federal, state and local programs used to address brownfields.

A significant portion of our work focuses on creating strategies that combine site remediation with site redevelopment. We also advise clients on a regular basis regarding the use of private environmental insurance and other contractual risk allocation mechanisms for liability protection in connection with brownfield properties.

Redevelopment of contaminated property requires regulatory corrective action. In working through the regulatory process, clients need professional expertise and experience. Our firm can interface with the regulatory authorities and with the technical consultants and remediation contractors working on the in-the-field issues presented by a contaminated site.

Redevelopment also presents various issues that extend beyond the legal and regulatory counseling provided by our firm. Our firm also coordinates with professionals from various disciplines to deal with the full range of expertise needed to deal with all phases of projects for redeveloping, repositioning, and reusing impacted properties. Those services may include:

• Environmental assessment and other technical and scientific expertise
• Site remediation
• Risk management and transfer
• Real estate positioning and transactions
• Entitlements and implementation of economic development incentives
• Public/private development partnerships
• Media and public relations

Municipal Setting Designations
While there is no way around the increased transactional costs and time involved with deals involving contaminated properties, a Municipal Setting Designation (“MSD”) for a contaminated site has the potential for both lowering the cost of site assessment and remediation and also speeding up the timeline to get a closure determination from the State of Texas, so deals can be completed. MSDs provide an important tool for property owners needing an exit strategy for environmentally-impacted properties, and for purchasers and developers dealing with the challenges of redeveloping contaminated property. As a result MSDs are impacting, in a very positive way, the market for urban infill properties in Texas.

The Municipal Setting Designation statute was adopted by the Texas Legislature in 2003. It created a new remediation tool that is changing strategies for cleaning up and redeveloping contaminated sites. The MSD is of particular use for properties that have been stuck in the Voluntary Cleanup Program or other State of Texas corrective action programs with no resolution in sight.

Two 2007 developments insure that the impact of MSDs will continue to expand throughout the State. The City of Houston adopted a procedural ordinance similar to the one that has been in place in Dallas since 2005.  Additionally, the Texas Legislature has removed the requirement that a municipality have a minimum population of 20,000 in order to utilize an MSD, which makes MSDs available to small cities across Texas.

GSF had the good fortune to get significant early experience with the MSD process. In October of 2004 we obtained MSD 001 (and later the first VCP final certificate of completion based upon an MSD) for the Goodwill site in West Dallas. We represented a client on the buy side in the transaction for a site on Motor Street in Dallas that received MSD 002. In 2005 we successfully obtained the first Fort Worth MSD ordinance (MSD 004) for the Montgomery Plaza development. We have participated in the development of MSD programs for the cities of Fort Worth, Dallas, Grapevine, and Plano, and obtained the first TCEQ-certified multi-siteowner MSD.

Our firm has been involved with a significant number of the MSDs certified to date by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. Those MSDs have made possible hundreds of millions of dollars in new real estate development.

Please feel free to contact any of us to discuss how we might assist you.