Biography
Nahuel is an Argentine-American attorney, professor, and writer dedicated to building more functional and democratic political and economic systems. He currently serves as an attorney for the City of St. Louis and teaches as an adjunct professor at Washington University School of Law. As Executive Director of the City of St. Louis Community Development Administration (CDA) from 2022 to 2025, he led a team of forty professionals managing over $400 million in federal grant funds. Under his leadership CDA tripled the City's housing production and home repair pipelines, and launched new programs to support health clinics, childcare centers, urban agriculture, neighborhood plan implementation, the arts and more. He also served as Director of Policy for Mayor Tishaura Jones, and as a Special Assistant to Mayor Slay. In these roles he drafted and passed various budget, tax, charter, and other bills. Mr. Fefer is a graduate of Washington University in St. Louis and New York University School of Law. After law school, Mr. Fefer spent a year as a Justice Catalyst Fellow with ArchCity Defenders, a non-profit law firm dedicated to fighting the criminalization of poverty in St. Louis. Mr. Fefer was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, grew up outside of Boston, lived in St. Louis, and recently moved back to Boston.
My Story
My name is Nahuel Sebastian Fefer. I am an Argentine-American attorney, professor, and writer dedicated to building more functional and democratic political and economic systems. My work focuses on the distribution of power and resources, with a particular emphasis on housing development, tax policy, and constitutional law.
I was born in Buenos Aires to wonderful parents, an artist and a surgeon, who moved our family to Boston when I was five. It took me a few years to learn English, and I mostly hid in my books until then, but by the time I hit third grade I was largely integrated. Between Jon Stewart, history class, debate team, and living through the Iraq War and Great Recession, I gradually developed a working model of the world and came to realize that something was deeply broken in the United States.
When I moved to St. Louis for college, I started to get a clearer idea of what was broken: entrenched inequalities which were fueling cycles of trauma, violence and poverty, and undermining democratic processes premised on political equality. This all came into stark focus when Mike Brown was killed on August 9th, 2014. As Executive Director of the Political Review, I was preparing to lead a pre-orientation for freshmen at the time and was out in Ferguson the following night. In the months that followed, we dedicated an issue to the question of Justice, hosted Ta-Nehisi Coates on campus, and pressured the administration to adopt need-blind admissions policies. None of it felt like enough - I wrote at the time that "it's hard to prosecute a system."
In the years that followed I turned my attention to changing the system. When I graduated, I went to work for Mayor Slay, where I fought to raise the minimum wage, negotiate fair development deals, and expand funding for public transit. When Mayor Slay decided not to run for a historic fifth term, I took the opportunity to go to law school at New York University. I knew I wanted to remain in the public sector, and spent my first summer in Liberia, working with brilliant attorneys at the Ministry of Health on a new public health code in the wake of Ebola. While I served as a decent scrivener, and enjoyed incorporating input from legislators and other stakeholders, I also came to realize that I did not have the requisite local knowledge to make a more meaningful contribution.
Instead, I resolved to invest in the community around me. Back in New York, I started an externship with the City Law Department and helped staff the City's Property Tax Reform Commission. Watching the well-intentioned and extremely impressive Commission struggle against deeply entrenched interests to reform a clearly broken system was an eye-opening experience. It helped me realize how difficult it was to implement structural change and how lucky I had been in St. Louis. It helped me appreciate that St. Louis' smaller scale could - at least in theory - enable deeper coordination and more holistic interventions.
I loved New York, I met Kaila, the love of my life, when our best friends started a band together and started practicing in my living room. But despite my work with the Commission and some attempts with DSA to push for needed tax reform at the state level, I didn't feel that I could make a real difference. Instead, I felt myself getting drawn back towards St. Louis. An article I wrote explaining how an ill-conceived city-county merger proposal would undermine democracy and bankrupt the city helped bring down the initiative. I connected with Starsky Wilson, who had co-chaired the Ferguson Commission and also opposed the merger, and spent the summer working with a wide array of stakeholders on an equitable alternative. This ultimately became the Equitable Unification report, and the basis of my Justice Catalyst Fellowship at ArchCity Defenders.
I graduated in the midst of Covid, and spent lockdown studying for finals and the bar. Over the past five years, I have had the privilege of carrying out an economic justice policy program from grassroots formulation to legislative adoption and executive implementation. As a Justice Catalyst Fellow at ArchCity Defenders, I coordinated stakeholder engagement to help draft the "People's Plan", a framework which won the support of over fifty local nonprofits and then-candidate Tishaura Jones. As Director of Policy for Mayor Jones, I translated the "People's Plan" into police oversight, tax incentive and charter reform bills, as well as the city's comprehensive "Economic Justice Action Plan" and over a dozen bills appropriating hundreds of millions in funds toward housing, transit, violence prevention, community-driven development and neighborhood transformation initiatives. As Executive Director of the City's Community Development Administration, our team of over forty housing analysts, grants administrators, accountants, planners, attorneys and engineers led implementation of many of these initiatives, tripling the city's housing construction and home repair programs, and awarding the City's first-ever grants to support federally qualified health centers, free public Wi-Fi, urban agriculture and more.
Kaila and I recently moved back home to Boston. She's a Nieman Fellow at Harvard and I'm still working remotely as an attorney for the City of St. Louis. We're enjoying spending more time with our families, lots of reading and writing, and playing with our two wonderful pups, Frida & Ixmel.
