Mark Foster built the nonprofit Second Chance. Then Second Chance helped build Mark Foster a million-dollar home.

In 2013, Foster, founder and chief executive of the well-known Baltimore architectural salvage store and workforce training program, bought a painted-brick house near Loch Raven Reservoir in Baltimore County.

“A home with great bones,” the real estate listing boasted.

In the years that followed, Foster tapped Second Chance workers to take apart the original structure. The home there now is five times larger and grander, with a chef’s kitchen, three steam showers, a pool house and a wine cellar. Foster filled it with flooring, lighting, art and furniture that he and his wife hand-picked from Second Chance’s inventory and incoming donations.

Foster calls the property “The Concept House,” and Second Chance publicizes it as a showplace for the nonprofit’s donated wares and the skills of its workers by hosting open houses and charitable functions there. The nonprofit’s website states that the home “incorporates all phases of Second Chance’s efforts” and uses its “salvaged materials in every conceivable way.”

“This project is the story of Second Chance,” Foster said in an interview.

But there’s more to that story.

As Second Chance helped transform Foster’s property, Foster and his wife, Mary Blake Foster, moved in. Then they sold it in 2022 to Second Chance for $1.5 million — far above the $375,000 they had paid. The sale price, the couple said, reflected what they personally spent on the project.

They continue to live there, an arrangement that Mark Foster said he considers to be part of his overall compensation from the nonprofit, without providing details. The nonprofit is advised by legal and tax professionals on such matters, he said.

He argues that he and his wife are in a natural position to be the home’s live-in caretakers.

The transaction and living arrangements for The Concept House raise questions about Mark Foster’s financial ties to the organization he founded more than 20 years ago. Second Chance is a beloved, high-profile local nonprofit with the dual mission of salvaging and reselling donated materials from old homes and training people with employment hurdles.

Former employees are divided on how they view The Concept House’s purpose. Four former Second Chance employees said they felt it was more for the Fosters’ benefit than the nonprofit’s. They asked to remain anonymous out of concern for retaliation and risk to future employment opportunities. Others said they believe the project is in line with the nonprofit’s mission.

The Concept House appeared in a federal lawsuit filed in September by workers who allege that they were underpaid by Second Chance and its founder. Under Foster’s supervision, subcontractors and deconstruction workers provided gardening, landscaping and other services at the house, the complaint states.

Second Chance and Foster deny the claims in the lawsuit.

Foster is eager to recite the provenance of each architectural detail in the home, but he is vague when it comes to its financial details.

He declined to share financial records or minutes from the nonprofit’s board meetings that document those expenses.

Foster said he didn’t make a profit when he sold the home to Second Chance and says he isn’t financially benefiting from it.

“You either believe us or you don’t,” he said.

Showcasing Second Chance

No one wanted to buy the beautiful mahogany doors salvaged from a $20 million Pennsylvania home demolished in the wake of the Great Recession, Foster said. He valued them at $12,500 apiece, and yet they were gathering dust on Second Chance’s showroom floor in its South Baltimore warehouse.

Perhaps, Foster remembered thinking, the only way to sell doors like this is to install them in a home and sell that whole home.

“Then that led on to ‘what else could go into the house in addition to the doors?’ ” Foster said.

The idea led to The Concept House, he said.

The Fosters chose a property on Seminary Avenue in the affluent Baltimore County neighborhood of Hampton and bought it in 2013 with their own money rather than the nonprofit’s.

Like all incorporated nonprofits, Second Chance is required to have a board to oversee its governance. Second Chance names four board members on its website. None of them responded to requests for comment.

He said that he didn’t consult with the board first on the project, but that it has never been a secret.

Soon after Foster’s purchase, Second Chance workers deconstructed parts of the existing building. Foster said he relied on a consulting architect, draftsman and contractors for building construction, plumbing, electrical and installations.

He wouldn’t say how contractor costs were shared with the nonprofit, but acknowledged that Second Chance footed some expenses.

Workers installed the mahogany doors along with 10 different kinds of flooring, light fixtures, fireplace mantels and other architectural materials donated to Second Chance.

Foster said the home was designed to appeal to prospective homebuyers.

“Part of this is practical,” he said. “Someday this house is going to get sold, and so you’re looking to create things that people are going to enjoy and obviously want to buy.”

Still, the property reflects much of the Fosters' personal tastes.

Mark Foster came from a background in the restaurant business. In addition to the upscale kitchen, complete with hammered copper range hood, and temperature-controlled wine cellar that can store 2,500 bottles, the Fosters have built a pool house (though not a pool).

Foster likes to rib that his wife got the larger closet in the primary bedroom.

“Not sure how that happened,” he joked on a tour in November. “She must have some special relationship with a contractor.”

Mary Blake Foster, who is not employed by Second Chance, recalled visiting the warehouse after hours to search the donation trucks for interesting materials and furniture. “I’m very fortunate that I get first pick here,” she said.

Mark Foster said he scrolled through photos of Second Chance’s incoming donations to pull items for The Concept House before they ever made it onto the sales floor.

A salvaging and training mission

Second Chance has grown in scale and ambition since Foster founded it in 2001.

Its model has been heralded nationally as a win-win-win for vulnerable workers, the environment and property owners looking for tax write-offs.

The nonprofit hires people who have barriers to employment, such as a recent incarceration, trains them to strip buildings to the studs, and then deploys them to properties up and down the East Coast to salvage unwanted materials and furniture.

Shoppers can peruse Second Chance’s 250,000-square-foot South Baltimore warehouse, emblazoned with a huge orange sign “WHAT IS AND WHAT CAN BE.” Purchases of the unique, reclaimed items helps finance Second Chance.

Two decades ago, in its early years, the nonprofit reported less than $1 million in revenue. In 2023, its most recent filings with the IRS show, revenue topped $13 million and it employed 232 people.

Second Chance paid Foster $254,000 that year. And he was paid $66,000 more by another nonprofit — Retrain Reclaim Renew Inc. — which he said he set up in 2018 in anticipation of one day expanding Second Chance operations to more cities.

“He’s got long-term vision in a way that lot of people don’t have,” said Pearl Laaveg, who worked as an inventory manager for Second Chance from 2013 to 2017.

Foster is a master at capturing people’s attention, she said. The Concept House makes sense as a way for the organization to impress wealthy donors, she said.

Other former employees said Foster, not the nonprofit, primarily benefits from the home.

“I witnessed people [on staff] roll their eyes when The Concept House came up,” one former employee said. “It’s nothing to them other than where the CEO lives.”

Laaveg said she remembered whispers among Second Chance employees of, “OK, so Mark is building himself a house.”

She said she didn’t see it that way. “People question what they don’t understand,” she said.

Foster said a Second Chance administrator told him around 2018 that some employees were grumbling that The Concept House was for his personal benefit.

He said he believed selling the property to Second Chance would “extinguish that unfortunate and misguided idea.”

A few years later, he did.

Details of the transaction remain murky to those outside of the organization.

The Fosters have given numerous interviews about The Concept House, but none of the articles reviewed by The Banner detail that Second Chance paid him $1.5 million for a property that the nonprofit had already helped refurbish, or that he and his wife live there.

The Fosters sold their longtime Roland Park home and moved into the Concept House around 2019.

Living there makes sense, he said. The Fosters had been sharing duties as the project’s general contractors and designers.

“You are living in basically someone else’s home,” Foster said. “But who would want to live in it under those conditions? Not very many people.”

Price tags and open houses

During an interview with The Banner in October, Foster invited the nonprofit’s comptroller, Bob Preisel, to support his account about how he documented his private expenses to the board ahead of his sale of the home to Second Chance.

“Does that kind of accurately reflect what you did?” Foster asked him.

“That’s pretty much the way things went,” Preisel answered. Preisel said he would have left Second Chance if he had felt uncomfortable with the way The Concept House was financed.

These days, Foster is working to expand Second Chance’s footprint in South Baltimore and establish branches in Philadelphia and other cities. That could one day mean more concept houses and maybe even a houseboat, Foster said.

The expansion hasn’t slowed even as Second Chance is fighting a federal wage theft suit filed by the Baltimore workers.

The plaintiffs claim they were wrongly classified as independent contractors rather than employees, denying them certain wages and provisions under federal and state law.

In court filings, Second Chance and Foster say they classified workers properly.

As for The Concept House, Foster said Second Chance will eventually sell it, but that it’s up to him when that happens. He said he has no immediate plans to move.

At an open house in November, visitors sipped drinks and toured The Concept House’s three stories. Price tags, some dating back to 2016, dangled from nearly every furnishing and fixture. Visitors were told which floorboards came from actress Anne Bancroft’s house and St. Peter’s Basilica.

Despite the price tags, they were told that none of the items were for sale.

“Then I’d have to find something to replace it,” Mary Blake Foster said. “It took like 10 years to accumulate everything.”