Vedder

• Transactional Real Estate
• Land Use Law
• Public Incentives
• Business Licensing

Shareholder

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.

• Illinois International Port District Board Member (Mayor Lori Lightfoot Appointee) 

• Opportunity Zones Working Group, Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity 

• Primo Center for Women and Children (Executive Committee and Board of Directors)

• Yale Club of Chicago (Director)

• International Council of Shopping Centers (Member)

• Urban Land Institute (Associate Member)

• Lambda Alpha International, the Honorary Society for the Advancement of Land Economics (Member, Ely Chapter)

• Harvard Law School, J.D., 1996, cum laude

• John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, M.A., 1996

• Yale University, B.A., 1992, summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa