Robert Cowan

Mr. Robert Francisco Cowan is a partner in Bocarsly Emden, working primarily in the firm’s federal and state tax credit practice, with emphasis on the New Markets Tax Credit and Historic Rehabilitation Tax Credit, as well as the Low Income Housing Tax Credit and the Renewable Energy Tax Credit. Robert represents clients that include nonprofit social service and healthcare providers, affordable housing and community development developers, for-profit hotel, entertainment and retail developers and operators, cities, counties, housing authorities, community development entity lenders, and institutional tax credit investors and syndicators.

Mr. Cowan’s federal and state New Markets Tax Credits practice spans the country and includes representing developers, owners, CDEs, equity investors and leverage lenders, in closing source loans, leverage loans, qualified equity investments and qualified low income community investments. Robert represents federally qualified health centers, commercial developers, hospitals, universities, mission-oriented nonprofits, and some of Los Angeles’ premiere cultural arts and science institutions in Exposition Park, Inglewood, and all the spaces in between. These transactions include funding new construction or rehabilitation of existing facilities, as well as obtaining working capital to fund organizational operating expenses.  

Mr. Cowan also represents qualified community development lending entities in all aspects of NMTC-related matters, from application to the CDFI Fund, receipt of awards, structuring and closing transactions, to the unwinding of financing years later. Robert has also advised one of the country’s most prolific institutional tax credit investors in matters utilizing not just the NMTC, but also the Historic Rehabilitation Tax Credit and Renewable Energy Tax Credit. Robert also has extensive experience incorporating new nonprofit entities and guiding them through the tax exempt application process with the IRS. 

Mr. Cowan has represented developers with historic projects such as hotels, residential property and theaters that include in their capital sources the Historic Rehabilitation Tax Credit, institutional senior debt, mezzanine debt, state and federal grants, short term bridge financing, and property assessed clean energy (or PACE) financing. 

Robert’s experience also includes structuring “twin” transactions that take advantage of HTCs and NMTCs, and mixed-use residential and commercial developments that utilize ground leases, condominiums, air rights subdivision, reciprocal easement agreements and other structures as a means of successfully leveraging NMTCs and LIHTCs.

Mr. Cowan joined the firm as an associate in 2007 and is fluent in Spanish. Mr. Cowan received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Southern California, his juris doctor from Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, and is currently admitted to practice law in the State of California. He is also a guest speaker at industry conferences and has on multiple occasions represented projects receiving the Novogradac Journal of Tax Credits QLICI of the Year Award, for exceptional and innovative NMTC financing. Mr. Cowan is active in philanthropy, in particular those related to children’s causes, and in 2021 founded a nonprofit foundation with his wife to raise awareness around and funds for research for rare disease, in honor of his daughter, who suffers from a rare genetic condition.