The hidden connections behind Portland real estate headlines

A rendering of the five-story residential development planned for the lot currently occupied by El Rayo Taqueria on York St. in Portland. Courtesy City of Portland.

A rendering of the five-story residential development planned for the lot currently occupied by El Rayo Taqueria on York St. in Portland. Courtesy City of Portland.

Three developments in Portland’s cultural and culinary scenes caught my attention this summer: the closure of Videoport, the impending closure of El Rayo Taqueria, and SPACE Gallery’s purchase of its building on Congress Street. All three are notable news in their own right, but what I found especially interesting was the way this news was reported. And more specifically, what was not reported.

Let’s start with Videoport, the beloved movie-rental shop on Middle Street that closed last month. One of my journalistic pet peeves is the tendency of local reporters to treat large companies like faceless entities with no identifiable person responsible for their actions. Videoport had a face, owner Bill Duggan, but the other company central to the story, East Brown Cow Management Inc., remained essentially anonymous in the print media’s coverage of the store’s demise.

For example, on June 5, the Portland Press Herald ran a front-page article in which we learned that Duggan was trying to negotiate a new lease with East Brown Cow. We learned that Videoport had been a “tenant-at-will,” without a lease, since the spring of 2013. And we learned that while these negotiations were taking place, East Brown Cow had a broker advertise Videoport’s space as being available for rent — a not-so-subtle hint that the landlord was kicking the shop to the curb.

What we never learned from the article was who calls the shots at East Brown Cow. That would be its owner and president, Tim Soley, son of notorious Old Port landlord Joe Soley. The younger Soley has roughly a million square feet of commercial real estate in his Greater Portland portfolio. Videoport’s subterranean space accounted for less than 4,000 of those square feet.

I wasn’t privy to the negotiations, so I can’t say whether what happened to Videoport was fair, but I’m certain that it was unfair to allow Tim Soley to remain unnamed in news stories while Duggan was hung out to dry. As far as the Press Herald’s readers could tell, a mysterious brown bovine was hastening the death of a Portland institution.

J.B. Brown & Sons is another major player in Portland’s real estate scene that seems to have dealt a popular tenant a bad hand — in this case, El Rayo, the hip Mexican restaurant on York Street. The Press Herald reported last week that J.B. Brown & Sons has submitted plans to turn the York Street property into a five-story residential and retail building, and then published a follow-up article about El Rayo co-owner Tod Dana’s announcement that, due to the J.B. Brown development, the eatery will close its Portland location at the end of this month.

What neither article bothered to mention is that Dana is a board member and shareholder of J.B. Brown & Sons — it’s his family’s company. Again, I’m not saying anything nefarious is going on, but readers would have been better served had they been informed of that connection. In reality, Dana is one of over 40 shareholders in the privately owned real-estate firm, most of whom are descendants of the 19th-century Portland land baron John Bundy Brown, so he’s only one vote among many charting the company’s course. El Rayo may be the latest local favorite to wither in the heat of the city’s red-hot real estate market, but it’s hard to call Dana a victim.

This brings us to SPACE Gallery, which is also changing hands attached to the same body. As this newspaper and Mainebiz reported in July, the nonprofit arts venue has purchased the building it occupies from “architect and designer” Christopher Campbell. As neither publication reported, Campbell is a past president of SPACE’s board of directors and is currently listed as a member of its board of advisors.

Yet again, that’s not a revelation that implies anything illegal is happening (were Campbell still a board “director,” rather than an “advisor,” things could get sticky). But it is news a reader could’ve used to get some perspective on the deal, which will net Campbell well over a million dollars more than he paid for the property in 1999, and about half a mil more than its taxable value — roughly the same sum SPACE hopes to raise from “major gift solicitations” to cover the cost of the mortgage and a $410,000 down payment.

It’s curious that the connections between Dana and J.B. Brown, and Campbell and SPACE, apparently were not disclosed by the sources quoted in these stories. Reporters and editors in the mainstream print press would be well advised to be more curious themselves.

Chris Busby

About Chris Busby

Chris Busby is editor and publisher of The Bollard, a monthly magazine about Portland. He writes a weekly column for the BDN.