Defying Labels: Jack Soley

Lisa Belisle: Hello, I'm Dr. Lisa Belisle and you are listening to or watching Radio Maine. Today I have with me a man who defies labels, but is well known within the greater Portland and Maine region for many creative pursuits. This is Jack Soley. Thanks for coming in today.

Jack Soley: Thank you so much for having me.

Lisa Belisle: I think when I look down through all of the things that you've done in your life, I can understand why you don't want to be limited to being labeled in one specific way, because you have a lot of interests and you've done a lot of things.

Jack Soley: Yes, I think I have a lot of passion for many things and I treat life as sort of one long continuum rather than having a specific professional pursuit. Many things fit into that continuum. So I try not to segregate my life between, for instance, my swimming, or my real estate development, or my work with nonprofits, or instructing at Outward Bound, whatever it may be. It's all part of the long process.

Lisa Belisle: So for you, what has risen to the top over the course of your life?

Jack Soley: That's an easy one, actually. My work with Outward Bound clearly has risen to the top. I actually discovered Outward Bound when I was 15. I grew up in Camden and mid-coast and was in a small boat with a friend of mine heading out to Swans Island. Got caught in a horrific storm, spent the night bailing the boat, and in the morning we drifted 16 miles off course into Hurricane Island. And that's how I discovered Outward Bound. Went back the next summer and took a course and knew that that was something that would be with me the rest of my life. So literally the day after I graduated from college, I went back, did a staff training with Hurricane Island Outward Bound, and remained with the program while I was pursuing other things for 14 years.

And then had a kid, so my daughter was born, and I had to leave the school because I wanted to spend time with my daughter. But then I rejoined. My daughter just graduated from college. So I found that it was a good Nexus point to actually rejoin the school. Three years ago I rejoined. I wanted to rejoin simply as a staff member, but they said they wouldn't have me as a staff member unless I came as a trustee as well. So it was the ultimatum. So I rejoined and then actually refounded, with lots of help, the sea kayaking program, which had been defunct for 20 years. So I've been training staff and teaching courses these last three or four years. Actually took a year off because of Covid, of course. So yes, that by far is the thing that I always think I'm most proud of of the various things I've done in my life, for sure.

Lisa Belisle: And I know that one of our artists at Portland Art Gallery, Cooper Dragonette, has an Outward Bound connection. Do you know Cooper through Outward Bound?

Jack Soley: Yes, Cooper and I were co-instructors on a sea kayaking course many, many years ago and became fast friends. Outward Bound courses are extraordinarily intense and intimate, and it's sort of like group therapy in a very stressful outdoor environment. We intentionally create that stress by putting our students in very uncomfortable situations, environmentally as well as psychically, and just pulling things out from them. And so Cooper and I had a really wonderful course together, and we've been friends since. I think that was probably sometime in the earlier, mid nineties. I've lost track since then.

Lisa Belisle: So that simultaneously sounds intriguing and also a little terrifying, the idea that you're helping people to do things that they don't feel comfortable with, but they're learning a lot about themselves at the same time. Do those things have to necessarily coexist?

Jack Soley: Well, I think, and when you say other people, it's for myself as well. So putting myself in situations where I am at least mildly uncomfortable, whether it's on an Outward Bound course or the real estate development projects that I do, or any of the many pursuits in my life, I think that's where the most potential for growth is. In the tried and true expression, Outward Bound is pushing our comfort zone, but when we push beyond where we believe our physical or mental limits are, I think is where the ground is ripe for lessons, for wisdom, and for growth. And so that's what I've always felt. At times it's more uncomfortable than I would like it to be, certainly. In Outward Bound courses, I've put myself in those positions and certainly have paid the consequences for that, because things are not always, you can't plan these things.

They happen organically. And you can't plan somebody's response to being put in a situation that they're very uncomfortable with. And that could be an environmental situation, meaning we're in high wind offshore trying to get back to an island, or we're in a group circle having a chat about some deeply personal situation that they have gone through in their life. But of those situations, I think it's important to actually put yourself there and to let your guard down and perhaps put the ego aside and get to the core of what it is that makes us human.

Lisa Belisle: It's interesting for me to hear you talk about people who are willingly, including yourself, putting themselves in places of discomfort, when I think that that's not as common a thing for many people as Outward Bound might suggest. I mean, I'm working in the healthcare field, and most people come to see me because they don't want discomfort and they're trying to avoid it. So what is it about discomfort that somehow continues to be a draw?

Jack Soley: Yes. And I'm also an EMT. I volunteer as an EMT on an ambulance occasionally.

Lisa Belisle: Should I ask you what you don't do? Would that be a shorter list, maybe?

Jack Soley: Well, unfortunately I have a very robust intellectual curiosity that gets me into many situations that I wish I could extract myself from at times. But I think, back to your question, the important thing is that when we are in a place that is unfamiliar ground to us, then the walls that we typically put up, the barriers, we don't have as easy access to that sort of defensive mechanism that we normally would have. And again, that I think is where we have growth. For instance, many of the other things I do, whether it's ultra-marathon long distance swimming, I put myself in a place that is extraordinarily uncomfortable, and then I see how I respond, how I react to that situation. And that's not something you can create a playbook for.

It happens and you work through it. And I think in that process of working through things is where you find what the true, whether folks call it the true metal of a human. But to me, it's how you respond to these things is how you respond in life. It's how you navigate your way through this challenging path of life. So I believe it's important to continually take yourself out of that place, whatever it is that brings you into a place of constant calm, and put yourself into a place that will bring you beyond where you have a level of comfort. So if that answers your question, it's a long-winded way of saying I think there's growth there, so let's try it. Let's do it.

Lisa Belisle: Well, I think the idea in Buddhism is that life is suffering, and it's not something we can avoid. So what you're saying is, if we can't avoid the suffering, then how do we understand ourselves better through suffering, and how do we learn, and how do we interact differently with the world?

Jack Soley: Yes. And in Buddhist theology, sometimes suffering is, to me, almost elevated as a worthy cause. And I'm not necessarily saying we should suffer, other than sort of to drop the ego, the sense of whom we are, and instead to instill ourselves with the potential for all of these other areas of growth that we wouldn't necessarily have opportunities for. Because we wake up in a day, we have a routine, we go through the day, and we sort of know what we want to do. We have our goals and expectations, and then when a curve ball comes, instantly there's this almost reactive impulse where we don't feel comfortable. And so we'll try to redirect. And I say, well, I invite that. It's not necessarily for the suffering, but it's, again, if it's an area where I can somehow expand my understanding of who I am and of the world, that's where I will go. Not all the time, because that makes chaos. But allowing that opportunity I think behooves all of us at some time in our life, when we can bring that discomfort into our lives.

Lisa Belisle: Well, as you're talking, I'm thinking it's a very kind of meta concept that you're observing yourself through a state of discomfort and how you react and what you can learn from it and maybe what you can apply moving forward. So it's almost a kind of practicing that you're engaging in.

Jack Soley: Yes. I had several majors in college, and one of them in fact was theology. And so, practice, I wish there was enough clarity to actually consider it a practice. But certainly there's a path I've chosen, and that path invites that discomfort at different times. Right now I'm developing workforce housing, which is extraordinarily challenging, and probably the least remunerative manner of developing I could have chosen. I've been in the real estate sphere for a long time and I could certainly make a lot of money doing something else. But workforce housing is more rewarding in terms of the client base. And it's rewarding in terms of trying to pioneer a new type of development. So I have the good fortune to be at a place of relative financial comfort where I can make that decision, of course. But certainly I'm putting a lot at risk to do this. And again, I think the reward, hopefully, in terms of personal growth, in terms of professional growth, in terms of seeing folks realize the benefit of that, is important to all of us in my community, especially.

Lisa Belisle: What was it that got you to the place where you thought you wanted to focus on workforce housing?

Jack Soley: Well, focus is a loaded term for me because I'm focused on many things right now, but it's one of the pursuits. I sort of by accident got into real estate. One of my brothers asked me to be involved in an equity position in real estate back in the late eighties, before the first great crash in recent memory. And real estate was probably the furthest thing from my mind at the time. I was teaching at King Middle School, youth at risk, and working at Outward Bound courses, and was designing furniture. That was my thesis in school, modern furniture design. So I got into real estate sort of begrudgingly, I would say, and through the course of many years, realized that it was one thing that gave me the freedom to do many other things that I wanted to pursue.

And it led me, over a bunch of years, to the planning board for the city of Portland. I was on the planning board for several years, and many projects came across my desk when I was on the planning board. But they were all market rate housing, and there was this large cry for the housing crisis and affordable housing, and then this missing middle. The idea is that there's subsidized housing for affordable housing, and the subsidies come from the municipal, the state, the federal level. There's, of course, market rate housing, which is all other housing, expensive housing in Maine at this point, certainly in southern Maine. But the middle, the housing for school teachers, police officers, firemen, everyone in the restaurant industry, there literally was no housing in the city of Portland, or there was a limited amount of housing for folks who didn't qualify for the subsidies and couldn't afford the market rate housing.

And so as I was at the planning board, and there was a lot of discussion on the state level, the municipal level, about this missing middle and the workforce housing, nobody was doing anything about it. And it was extraordinarily frustrating to me. So the city of Portland put out an RFP for some Bayside properties. They were interested in creating workforce housing. I had stepped down from the planning board, and I decided to respond to that RFP and put a proposal in to build 23 condos for workforce housing. Workforce housing is defined nationally as between 100 and 120% of area median income. So in the city of Portland, area median income is roughly 75, 78 thousand dollars. So at 120%, roughly 80, 90 thousand dollars. You take a third of your income, and that's what you can sustainably afford for housing.

So I decided to try to build condos that were affordable. And what that meant under those guidelines was around 215 to 220 thousand dollars. Well, that was 2017 that we put in the RFP. And of course the cost of construction has only gone up, but it was certainly high then. And I said, how in the heck can I make condos for 215 thousand dollars? Even though the land cost was not full value, the city ended up selling me the land for maybe 15, 20% under value. And so the solution, after sort of casting about for a while, was to create micro housing, very small units. And not only that, but to create some market rate units in the same complex that would then subsidize the workforce housing, because I understood that the margins on the workforce housing were going to be little to none.

And so the only way to do it without any subsidies was to actually have some profitable housing in the same complex that would subsidize the rest of the housing. And so we built Paris Terraces. It was sold out well before we got our certificate of occupancy. Twenty-three units altogether. Three were market rate, twenty were workforce. And it created what I would consider an extremely healthy community, because it was a mixed income community all in the same building. And it allowed people that wanted to remain in the city of Portland to do so. I mean, workforce housing, frankly, at that point was called Biddeford or Westbrook. If you lived in Portland, there wasn't enough housing, wasn't enough affordable housing. So people were having to move far afield to continue to work in the restaurant business in Portland, for instance. I think of those 20 workforce housing units, 17 were first time homeowners.

And these were folks that had no opportunities to purchase other homes in Portland. Up until that point, I had built a bunch of high-end market rate condos in Portland. I had built a wide variety of housing. And at those closings, it was typical that I would be across the table from a lawyer who would be representative of the person who was actually buying the property. I might never actually meet the owner at these closings. At the Paris Terraces workforce housing closings, for the first time I actually met the homeowners, and they were more emotionally invested than I had thought they would be. At these closings I was getting hugs, there were people crying, because it was their opportunity. I mean, in America, the most important investment we'll make in our life is usually our home.

And they were closed out from that opportunity, and all of a sudden Paris Terraces allowed them to do that. And so there were no lawyers at the closing. All three market rate housing closings did have lawyers, which again reinforced this idea that I really would like to see the homeowner. I wanted to see the people that would be buying these units. And so that, for me, was the closer. That was the done deal, and this was something I wanted to pursue. And so the question was how to do that efficiently, because my life is full with many other things, and how to do that affordably, because again, there's no margin on the workforce housing until there are subsidies.

There's LD 2003, a state law that if it goes into effect, there will be for the first time subsidies for workforce housing, but there still are not to this day. So I made a call to Dana Totman, who at the time was running Avesta Housing, and said, Dana, I would like to create a community where we can see the full cross section of America in the same community. So we'll create some affordable housing, which he will do through low income tax credits, Maine State Housing, I'll do some workforce housing, and I'll do some market rate housing, all on the same campus. And he and his board liked the idea enough that they agreed, and we put an RFP in for another piece of land in the city of Portland. Unfortunately, we were the runner up.

We didn't actually receive that. And unfortunately, that was over three years ago. Nothing has been built on that property to this day. So that's frustrating to all of us who are housing advocates. But instead I was able to find a similar three and a quarter acre piece of land in Westbrook. And after two years of going through entitlements, we will be breaking ground in July, possibly early August. And we'll be building a total of roughly 198 units on that site. And it will include subsidized 55 plus housing from Avesta, my company, and I've partnered with a gentleman named Tim Hebert who owns Hebert Construction, which is the fourth generation contractor in the state. And so Tim and I are going to be building market rate housing as well as workforce housing on that site.

And we also built another project in Scarborough at the former fire police station, where we built, with Avesta, 31 units of 55 plus subsidized housing. So that's the direction I'm heading right now. And we're actually looking at five more sites as I speak today. So it's regaining momentum, and as a result, a lot of other municipalities are actually calling and asking if we can do similar projects in their towns. So extraordinarily exciting. I just need to find a way to make money. And I think really the only way to do that is to subsidize in-house, to create market rate housing as a component of the bigger picture. And I think that's what we need to do today. We need to say, I'm going to be creating some housing that perhaps has low to no margin, but on the back end I'll create some other housing that will pay for all of this and for my time and energy. Because ultimately we're all capitalists, and we need to figure out a way to make it work. And I think we have a model that is successful at this point. So, long-winded answer to your question, but that's one of the places I'm spending a lot of my energy right now.

Lisa Belisle: Well, I appreciate your doing that, because working in healthcare, one of the things that we struggle with, and I work for a system that's up in the Augusta Waterville area, is even in that area, we're having a hard time bringing people in that can actually find places to live. And so we can't get nurses to come stay, we can't get physical therapists. And so I think that what you're describing is very real, and it's a very real issue even in the non-urban parts of Maine.

Jack Soley: Very much so. And so we're looking as far afield as Lewiston and Augusta, and I have had conversations with the medical center because they own a tremendous amount of land, and I'm hopeful that at some point they'll make decisions about that land. And we could build workforce housing, if even only for the folks within Maine Medical Center, with their own community. But again, there are people that cannot afford housing in the Portland area that want to live and work in the Portland area. And so the medical industry is one prime example, but we're getting calls from a lot of other industries saying, we have land, can you do this? I got a call from the city manager of a community in southern Maine who said, we own lots of land. Can you come down and build workforce housing for us?

I said, I'd love to, but I have a lot on my plate right now, and we'll look at it. So there are a lot of things on the back burner at this point. But yes, I'm hopeful that hospitals, the medical industry, will step up and say that they will help to create this housing for their own employees, really for the sake of their own employees, which will create a healthier community overall. I think there has been a dependency on subsidies, and folks looking towards, whether it's at the state, municipal, federal level, someone else to step in. And again, when I was on the planning board, I got tired of people talking about it, frankly, and talking about these subsidies and what could happen, and said, there's got to be a better way to do this. So that's where we are. So we'll see. I'm hopeful LD 2003 will help create a change. But I do think that there has to be some element of, I'm not even sure if it's altruism, but certainly this is what's best for the community, and we have to find people that will just jump in and do what's right at some point.

Lisa Belisle: On a different topic, tell me about your interest in art.

Jack Soley: So, as I mentioned, I did a thesis on furniture design in college. And so I have had a long interest in art. My stepmother was an artist, and I spent my childhood going from Maine down to the city, down to New York and Soho, and meeting her various artistic friends. And so, when my daughter was born, I tried to do the furniture design route, and it's a pretty exclusive and generally challenging place to get involved. It's often Italian designers that will come to the states and work. But my daughter was born in 2000. I realized that I wanted to be able to stay home with my daughter as much as possible. And so I had some ideas for some products, and I started doing product design. I had the good fortune of being able to license over 90 products over the next eight years, and stay home and work from my kayak.

When my daughter was off with her mom or daycare or somewhere else, I would be designing on the deck of my kayak. And then I had a little prototype shop back then, and ended up designing products for many different industries, and had the good fortune of them selling in quite large numbers. So it provided enough revenue for a bunch of years, and royalties for years after, in fact. So I went from that to, I'd been collecting art at a very local level for a long time, and was always fascinated with, I had Moby Dick as always one of my favorite stories, and so loved the illustration. And so I decided, if I could purchase a Rockwell Kent, and I was able to find someone who actually had many of the original Rockwell Kent drawings, and so started purchasing those.

But it's been sort of a lifelong pursuit. Between the design work I did, it's interesting when people always ask how I was successful designing products. And I said, well, the one thing I didn't do is I didn't indulge in blue sky thinking. So what I would do is find relatively small companies that had revenue between five and 50 million that were based in Maine, that I could actually have access to the owner or president of the company, and I would find a niche in their catalog, in their offerings, that I thought they were missing. And so I designed a product. I ended up designing a whole category of in-window bird feeders, though I knew nothing about birds, and that sold sensationally well. At one point I think I had a product in every national retail catalog in the country, from L.L.Bean to Plow and Hearth to Frontgate to Sharper Image.

And that was a huge amount of fun and satisfaction. I ended up getting from there into the toy industry, designing a lot of wooden kit toys, and many museums in the country would carry them because they were fun toys that kids could put together. And also in the outdoor industry, I designed some things such as a radar reflecting life jacket, which I then licensed to the US government, actually for the Navy. So that interest in design and invention sort of led me into many other avenues that ultimately brought me to the PMA, to Portland Museum of Art, where I spent a bunch of time just because I loved looking at art. And Mark Bessire called one day and asked if I was interested in becoming a trustee.

And so that has been a very fruitful relationship in terms of my access to curators. But of course we're building a massive addition. And so I'm also the chair of the Building and Grounds Committee, and so I've taken an active role in the visioning of that next step. And so that's been an incredibly rewarding process. It's only brought me closer to the art community. So I'm still a piece of that. I should also mention that I was also the chair of the Portland Public Art Committee for many years, which also put me in contact. And then as part of this, my association with a company named East Brown Cow, I have been populating buildings now, with my nephew, with art in public spaces. And so I've been purchasing local art for many years for those spaces.

And that's been really wonderful. That's been a great opportunity. Like, if you walk into Canal Plaza, you'll see Willy Hildreth, her wonderful Meanderings, it's the title of some of her work. And you'll see those, or you'll see Shoshannah White or Tonee Harbert in the Hyatt Place Hotel on Fore Street. I think we purchased 417 photographs from Tonee Harbert, who's a local artist. So incredibly time consuming, but rewarding in many ways. That was the first Hyatt in the country that had exclusively local art, and so we had to get special permission from Hyatt National for that honor. So it's been a great process, and I still, the collecting piece is obviously a very privileged position to be in. And so I am ultimately hoping that the collection I put together will then go to a museum at some point, and it will become back in the public domain, which is ultimately I think what we should do with art that is appreciated by the greater public.

Lisa Belisle: And when you're doing the work on workforce housing, are you thinking about this sort of artistic side of things and the importance of bringing beauty, really, to everyone?

Jack Soley: Very much so. We worked with Kaplan Thompson on Paris Terraces, and it's not simply the integrity of the project, it's the design of the project. So when I say integrity, I want to build passive house standard, incredibly efficient units. We typically build 450 to 500 square foot units, where utility cost is around 50 to 75 dollars a month for heat and air and cooking and everything. So incredibly efficient. But I think it's important, we are creating a legacy of properties. So when you construct a building and it becomes part of the public domain for the next 50 or a hundred years, it's important that we consider how it impacts our community. And the mediocrity, I'll be very candid about it, that I have seen in the construction in the city of Portland detracts tremendously from what has drawn us all to the city of Portland.

And it's incredibly frustrating to me. So I think it is incumbent upon every developer to put extraordinary effort into what we're creating for design. The project I'm doing in Westbrook with Avesta and Tim Hebert, we're working with Scott Simons Architects, and it's the first time that they have done a residential project that's not higher education, some dormitories, so new ground for them, but they have a design aesthetic that I tremendously appreciate and respect. I could certainly have picked an architect that would have cost me a lot less per unit, but ultimately that's part of the integrity of the project. So I go up and down Franklin Street on a daily basis, and I see the new project, and I'm thankful that we have another 55 plus low income project in Portland.

And I look at that building, and I think it's almost criminal that that is in the public way. That building, if you've seen it, I feel like it's almost disrespectful to us that inhabit this place when we look at this building, and the design of it is not in keeping with what we would hope our built environment would look like. And I think that's incredibly important. So I push whatever architect I work with, I push them hard, and I think they enjoy that, frankly. We're working on a project on the West End right now with David Lloyd, who's incredibly talented. We're on our fifth iteration now for some town homes, and I can see some frustration coming out of him, but ultimately I think we'll all be proud of the project that is created.

So yes, absolutely, design is incredibly important. People feel proud of their home when they like what it looks like. People don't want to look, it's almost like affordable housing in the States versus if you go to Holland or other places in the world, it's celebrated, and in the states there's something like, we just need to get it built and we don't care what it looks like. And that's really unfortunate to me.

Lisa Belisle: So you're changing that.

Jack Soley: Well, I can only affect myself, but hopefully setting a model for others to look at, and by creating entire communities, again with Avesta's help. Partnering with Avesta on a site, they have the same motivations I do, which is to create a healthy community. And when we say healthy community, that means it's not just a cross-section socioeconomically, but it's a community that we all can take pride in. We return at the end of the day and we say, this is a place of wonder. It's a place of beauty. And I think that's really important to everybody. I think we all appreciate it. We just forget that in the process. And right now construction costs are over 300 dollars a square foot. It's easy to forget. In fact, it's usually the thing that we call value engineer. We exit out, we're like, we can't afford to do that. And I say, yes you can. You just need to spend more time and energy figuring out how to get there. So important to me.

Lisa Belisle: Well, Jack, it has been a fascinating conversation. I really appreciate you coming in today.

Jack Soley: Well, I appreciate you having me, and I look forward to getting responses and having this dialogue about workforce housing moving forward, and seeing what other people can bring to the table. So thank you very much.

Lisa Belisle: Well, you've heard it from Jack Soley. He's interested in hearing responses to workforce housing and our conversation, so please do reach out to him with your thoughts, because I agree, this is certainly a noble cause. I'm Dr. Lisa Belisle. You have been listening to or watching Radio Maine today, and with me in the studio, Jack Soley. Thank you for joining me.

Jack Soley: Thank you so much.