Real Estate Industry Reps On Boston's Rent Stabilization Cmte.-Pt. 5

Another member of the Boston mayor’s “Stalling Rent Stabilization Advisory Committee” with a special economic interest in the Massachusetts for-profit real estate deal-making industry--that continues to oppose the restoration of rent control in Boston in 2022--is Accordia Partners, LLC Managing Director Kirk Sykes.

According to the Accordia Partners, LLC website, for example, Rent Stabilization Advisory Committee Member Sykes’s for-profit firm is “a Boston based real estate investment and development company.” The website also recalls that Accordia Partners, LLC was formed in September 2014 “with the intent of pursuing large, complex, urban real estate development projects within Boston” and is “led by partners Kirk Sykes and Richard Galvin,” who have “a combined 60 years of development experience in the Boston market.”

Prior to establishing Accordia Partners, LLC, Rent Stabilization Advisory Committee Member Sykes’s business partner, Richard Galvin, also was the president of another Boston-based real estate development and investment firm, CV Properties, LLC—which Galvin founded in 2003.

Coincidentally, the Boston Real Estate Times website noted on Feb. 14, 2019 that the board of trustees of the publicly-funded UMass and the UMass Building Authority [UMBA] was involved in a real estate deal with Accordia Partners to lease UMass’s 19.94-acre Bayside property of public land at 180 Mount Vernon St. in the Dorchester neighborhood to the for-profit firm of “veteran Boston real estate executives and financiers Richard Galvin and Kirk Sykes.”

The 19.94-acre Bayside property was acquired by UMass and the UMBA in 2010; and, in addition to selecting Rent Stabilization Advisory Committee Member Sykes’s firm to be involved in the Bayside real estate deal, the UMass Board of Trustees also selected an affiliate of the real estate group of Ares Management Corporation to be involved in the real estate deal.

A month after Accordia Partners was also allowed, in June 2019, to purchase the nearby 2 Morrissey Blvd. property (which was fully leased to Santander Bank under a long-term lease), UMBA then reached final lease terms with Accordia Partners and Ares Management for the Bayside property in July 2019.

On the Bayside property site at 180 Mount Vernon, Rent Stabilization Advisory Committee Member Sykes’s Accordia Partners and Ares Management Corporation are proposing to construct 1,657 residential units. And on the 2 Morrissey Blvd. property site, the two real estate deal-making firms are proposing to construct 313 residential units.

Yet 1,674 of the residential units that Rent Stabilization Advisory Committee Member Sykes’s firm and Ares Management Corporation are proposing to construct on its “Dorchester Bay City” 180 Mount Vernon/2 Morrissey Blvd. combined project site will be non-rent stabilized market rate apartments; and the remaining 296 proposed “affordable” residential units will be mostly unaffordable to low-income tenants now living in Dorchester and other Boston neighborhoods.

So, not surprisingly, as Daniel Sheehan noted in an Apr. 22, 2021 article, titled “Anti-gentrification group assails Dot Bay City housing plans,” that was posted on the Dorchester Reporter website:

“The UMass Boston Coalition Against Gentrification – a group composed of campus union and student organization members – hosted a virtual campus community `Teach-In’.…in protest of the negative economic, racial, and environmental impacts they say the current Dorchester Bay City (DBC) development proposal would have on neighboring communities… Ken Reardon… decried the `wholly inadequate’ number of affordable housing units provided for in the proposal, warning of a `ripple effect’ of gentrification that could spread from the site into nearby Dorchester communities”

And, as Jennifer Smith, reported in a May 10, 2022 article that was also posted on the Dorchester Reporter website:

“Activists who object to the proposed Dorchester Bay City project…delivered a petition to Mayor Michelle Wu’s office...The online petition, circulated by the group Dorchester Not For Sale (DN4S), was signed by more than 700 people…The petition…criticizes the affordability level proposed – 15 percent of all units made affordable at 60 percent Area Median Income – as `not truly affordable for Dorchester; it excludes most Dorchester residents…and paves the way for displacement’…About half of the project is on land owned by the University of Massachusetts but controlled by Accordia through a $235 million, 99-year lease. `We believe that public land should be for public good,’ said Dorchester resident and DN4S organizer Stephanie Nakajima in a statement.”

Ares Management Corporation, with whom Rent Stabilization Advisory Committee Member Sykes’s firm is partnering on its real estate deal to construct unaffordable housing on public land in Dorchester, is a publicly traded asset management firm with around $137 billion of assets under management. And, according to the Ares Management Corporation’s website, “Ares launched its Real Estate Group in 2010 with the objective of extending its… investment experience to…address the…need for financing solutions in middle-market commercial real estate”—not to address the emergency need to finance the construction of housing for low-income Boston residents.

And, coincidentally, in the 21st-century between 5 and 10 percent of Ares’s stock has been owned by the Boston-based Wellington Management firm that, according to Wellington Management’s website “is one of the world’s largest independent investment management firms” which “manages more than US$1.4 trillion for pensions, endowments and foundations, insurers, family offices, fund sponsors, global wealth managers, and other clients”—but has still apparently also failed to use very much of the $1.4 trillion it manages to increase the supply of new affordable housing for Boston’s low-income tenants in the 21st-century.

Also coincidentally, Accordia Partners Managing Director and Rent Stabilization Advisory Committee Member Sykes and his Accordia Partners, LLC business partner gave contributions to Boston Mayor Wu’s campaign committee in 2021. Between Feb. 26, 2021 and Oct. 8, 2021, Rent Stabilization Advisory Committee Member Sykes made two contributions, totaling $1,000, to the current Boston mayor’s campaign committee; and on Oct. 14, 2021 his real estate industry business partner, Richard Galvin, gave a $500 contribution to Mayor Wu’s 2021 mayoral election campaign committee.

So don’t be surprised if the Boston mayor’s “Stalling Rent Stabilization Advisory Committee” neither prevents your landlord from yet again increasing your Boston market rate apartment rent in 2022 nor recommends that ALL of the 1,970 residential units that Rent Stabilization Advisory Committee Member Sykes’s firm proposes to construct on its “Dorchester Bay City” project site be rent-stabilized and affordable to most low-income Boston tenants. (end of part 5)