Paul Selver is Co-Chair of the Land Use department. Mr. Selver has been engaged in the private practice of law in New York City since 1972. His practice encompasses all aspects of land use and development law, with a special emphasis on environmental, zoning and historic preservation. He has extensive experience counseling clients in the public and environmental review of complex and large scale projects. Over the past 15 years, he has successfully coordinated the public approval and environmental review process for more than three million square feet of office space, more than 7,500 apartments, hundreds of thousands of square feet of retail and entertainment space, hundreds of hotel rooms, and new institutional buildings. Among his current projects are four large scale, mixed use developments with up to two million square feet of floor area on the waterfront in Queens and Brooklyn and zoning changes around Manhattan for the creation of almost 3,000 apartments. He has overseen scores of transactions involving the purchase and sale of unused development rights for use in new buildings around Manhattan and Brooklyn; he has supervised land use and environmental due diligence in connection with numerous purchases and financings of real estate; he has served as special counsel in litigation defending challenges to land use-related permits and approvals; and he has advised such public sector clients as the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, New Jersey Transit, the Battery Park City Authority, the Empire State Development Corporation and the Villages of Garden City and Lawrence, New York.

Mr. Selver is the co-author of the New York Practice Guide: Real Property, Volume II: Land Use Regulation (Matthew Bender & Co., 1986). He has also contributed articles to The New York Times, the National Law Journal, the New York Law Journal, Manhattan Lawyer and Car and Driver magazine. He is listed in Who’s Who in America, in Chambers USA: America’s Leading Business Lawyers and in Best Lawyers in America, and he has been named one of New York City’s 100 top lawyers in the annual Superlawyers survey. He has been a Lecturer in Law at Columbia University Law School and was formerly an Adjunct Associate Professor of Urban Planning at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation of Columbia University.

J.D., Harvard Law School, 1972
B.A., magna cum laude, Harvard University, 1969

New York

Real Estate Board of New York - Chairman, Zoning Committee, Member, Land Use and Environmental Committee
Mountain Lakes, New Jersey Planning Board
Director, Citizens Housing and Planning Council
Advisory Board, Cityland