Robert Poznanski

About Robert

Bob represents business and nonprofit clients, specifically in managing innovative and complex incentive and project finance transactions. He concentrates his practice on using federal, state and local economic development incentives to provide lower cost project and working capital financing to his clients.

Bob has over three decades of experience in community and economic development finance, beginning in the late 1980s with organizing his neighborhood association in Portland, Oregon. For over 15 years, he managed the New Markets Tax Credits (NMTC) activity of the Local Initiatives Support Company (LISC), a nonprofit that revitalizes distressed communities across the country. Bob secured more than $1 billion in federal and state NMTC awards for LISC to finance more than 100 high-impact community development transactions.

Before managing its NMTC program, Bob provided funding and technical assistance to nonprofit, community development corporations, initially in Kalamazoo and later in mid-western rural communities.

Bob began his legal career practicing corporate and real estate law in the Pacific Northwest after clerking for a federal district court judge in Memphis, Tennessee. He also served as an assistant attorney general for the Oregon Department of Justice, engaged in impact litigation for Michigan Legal Services, taught community economic development law as an adjunct professor for the University of Michigan Law School, and supervised law students providing legal services to community development corporations in Detroit through the Program for Legal Assistance to Urban Communities.

In addition to practicing law, Bob has worked on the low-income housing tax credit program for the Oregon Housing and Community Services Department and has provided project development consulting services.