Wallace Blackwood

Wallace Blackwood heads the firm's Real Estate practice. His work concentrates on commercial development, mixed-use projects, and waterfront land-use matters across Connecticut and southern New England. He represents developers through the full arc of a project — assembly and acquisition, entitlement and permitting, construction-loan and mezzanine financing, and long-tail leasing — and regularly counsels institutional owners on refinancings and disposition strategy. Shoreline work is a particular niche. He has handled permitting under the Connecticut Coastal Management Act and DEEP tidal-wetlands review on more than two dozen projects since joining the firm, and he is one of a handful of Connecticut practitioners who take those matters from preliminary consistency review through construction. Blackwood earned his J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center in 2004 and his B.A. from Wesleyan University in 2001. He joined Oak, Elm & Birch as an associate in 2005 and made partner in 2013. Before law school he spent two years working in real estate acquisitions at a Washington, D.C. development firm, which continues to inform how he reads a term sheet: he has been on the principal's side of the table, and he does not forget what that side cared about. He is a past chair of the Connecticut Bar Association's Real Property Section and has served on its Executive Committee continuously since 2011. Within the firm, he runs the Real Estate practice's weekly deal meeting, oversees the department's three associates and two paralegals, and personally takes the lead on the group's largest mixed-use and waterfront engagements. He has been named to *Best Lawyers in America* for Real Estate Law since 2020 and is listed in *Connecticut Super Lawyers* each year since 2019. ## Representative Matters - Lead counsel to the developer of a 340-unit mixed-use waterfront project in New London, including local zoning approvals, Connecticut Coastal Management Act consistency review, and a $62M construction loan, closed March 2023. - Represented a Hartford-based institutional owner in the disposition of a seven-building suburban office portfolio to a New York private equity buyer, 2022. - Counsel to a Meridian Maritime Services LLC affiliate in the acquisition and redevelopment of a former industrial parcel in Bridgeport, including DEEP Voluntary Remediation Program coordination and negotiation of a brownfield liability-relief agreement. - Represented the owner of a historic downtown Hartford office tower in a ground-up conversion to 180 residential units, including historic tax credit structuring and municipal PILOT negotiation, closed February 2024. ## Publications - "Coastal Jurisdiction Lines and the Developer's Timeline: Sequencing Connecticut Shoreline Permitting," *Connecticut Bar Journal*, Vol. 91 (2017). - "Adaptive Reuse of the Class-B Office Building: A Hartford Case Study," *The Real Estate Review*, Fall 2023. ## Speaking & CLE - Co-chair and presenter, CBA Real Property Section Annual Meeting, 2022 and 2024. - Panelist, "Construction Financing After the Rate Reset," Connecticut Commercial Real Estate Forum, Hartford, June 2023. - Faculty, "Permitting the Shoreline Project," CBA-CLE, recurring presenter 2018–present. Blackwood is admitted in Connecticut. He lives in Glastonbury with his family and is a member of the International Council of Shopping Centers and the NAIOP Connecticut chapter.