David Abromowitz had plans to be a litigator, the type of lawyer you see in movies and TV shows spending most of their time in a courtroom arguing a case. It wasn’t until his third year at Harvard Law School working with a legal services clinic that he started to think about affordable housing.
During his tenure there, Abromowitz had a client who was a poor immigrant tenant living in a substandard apartment, unable to pay her rent. Her landlord, who had recently immigrated to the United States, had scraped money together to buy a three-family house. Abromowitz, who is now of counsel at Boston-based Goulston & Storrs, realized the effects of his client’s inability to pay: If his client couldn’t pay her rent, the landlord couldn’t pay his mortgage.
