My mom wanted me to be a minister. I wanted to be a doctor. I get to ninth grade high school chemistry and the sulfur gets me. And I’m thinking what’s next? The ministry? Or the law? Sulfur smells too much like Hell, which we lawyers really are afraid of.
I grew up in North Carolina, and my grandfather was a farmer. And when I was maybe three, he took me down to the area of the African-American community. This is back in the early ’50s, so he was the only merchant that would sell to them. So I got to meet the African-American community before I met the white community of Winston- Salem, North Carolina. As a result, I’ve always had a certain sense of community and diversity, and that resonates with the fact of how friendly they were to him and how friendly he was to them. They were feeding our family, and we were feeding their family, literally.
I met my wife when I was walking down the hall in high school and I saw this gorgeous creature walk by with a football player. I thought, ‘I’ll never get to meet her. She’s with the best football player here.’ Two months later, one of our friends introduced us. At the beginning of senior year, we all had to give a three-minute speech and she gave one on posture. She had all us guys sitting up straight, and I’ve been paying attention and sitting up straight ever since.
My wife was a bank teller and made $95 a week. Harvard Law School tuition was $3,000. We lived on the rest. That differential was the delicious 39-cent Kraft macaroni and cheese, which is what we could afford.
With a huge real estate deal like the 5,000 acres of Trinity, which is on the Hillsborough and Pasco and Pinellas County borders, it goes before all three governments. So you’re going to be eating the elephant one county commissioner at a time. You have to deal with all the issues of transportation, access, congestion. We did it over about 12 months.
I’m for all forms of transportation. I’m not overly focused on the mass transit niche. I’m really not a true mass transit advocate. I’m an absolute transportation funding courage advocate — the right stuff at the right time.
With affordable housing and workforce housing and attainable housing, it’s very hard to get the 9% federal tax credit. It’s unbelievable. The competition is extreme. There’s a 200-point system, and you have to get all 200 points, and you have to beat out somebody else who also got 200 points with a better way of describing how you’re only half a mile from a grocery and a pharmacy, and there are two or more bus routes that go by.
In 2008, I’m sitting around with my eight senior statesmen and we’re having sort of a crying breakfast because everything’s collapsing around us and Lehman has failed a week before. The stock market’s gone down 30%. There are 30,000 people being laid off in real estate, and I looked around and I said, ‘What are we going to do?’
We got together again in a couple of weeks and I said, ‘What are WE going to do?’ And they said, ‘You mean it?’ and I said, ‘I do mean it. Let’s figure it out among us.’ … It was about getting folks back to work by whatever means we had at our disposal, and counseling them and providing phone banks and resume help and job leads — and emotional support.
When it came to the second organizational meeting, this was the price of admission: You must bring a victim of these layoffs, or don’t come.
One title company had a lady who was on the job for two weeks. I felt so sorry for her. We looked around, we said, ‘What can she do? Nanny. We get all kinds of calls for nannies every day.’ And sure enough, she went from the title company to being a nanny. It paid the same.
I have three kids and four grandkids. One of my kids is a professor at the University of Central Florida, and he offered to do the graphics for Real Estate Lives, which is now called Career Rebound. He heard about it, and he said, ‘Dad, can I do the graphics?’
Something people don’t understand about land-use laws is the relationship to the neighbors. The enormity of figuring out what the neighborhood really, really needs — not what they might think they want, but what they really, really, really need — versus what the developer really, really needs, and seeing if they can be rendered amazingly, miraculously compatible.
I believe in doing what you fear. In 1994, I’m watching a guy at a statewide seminar for 400 lawyers as he gets up there in a hazmat suit and gives an environmental talk. He’s got a gimmick, and it’s got us all in rapt attention. And then the next guy does balloons. The next guy! So I adapt the words of a rock opera by Meatloaf, ‘I would do anything for love,’ and next year I sing the words to my presentation. One of my competitors says, ‘You used to give dull, dumb speeches, and now you’re giving vibrant, meaningful speeches.’… and then I did that for about 20 years.
I teach a class about the 50 most interesting Tampa people who have changed the world — George Steinbrenner, Norman Schwarzkopf, Tommy Franks, Kiran and Pallavi Patel. I also teach courses on Vladimir Putin and Robert Oppenheimer and Samuel Adams — not John, but Samuel. Samuel is the more interesting because Jefferson said he was the truest of the revolutionaries. He’d go shabby to the Continental Congress. He was the poor one in the corner, but when he spoke, he spoke from the experience of the streets.
I encourage young lawyers to start with the impossible, or what seems impossible, during their career or in their life, and to do it with a lot of forgiveness of self and others. I encourage them to forgive themselves for whatever it is they think they may not have or may have done … and then it’s not just ‘find your passion,’ it’s ‘find your purpose,’ where you can make a difference.
I believe in the system. I believe that if you go and find it, however you find it, that the courts are open to hear and almost anxious to hear the real story, if you know what I mean. I believe in the system.