Bringing Real Estate Chops to the Fed

We root for Federal Reserve chairs from every city. (Heck, half of them are on our Fed fantasy team.) But we give a little extra hurrah to Boston's Kirk Sykes—whose tenure concludes at year's end—since he comes from the commercial real estate community.

An architect, developer, and fund manager, Kirk is president of the $190M USA Fund, a division of the New Boston Fund, investing in 15 developments and acquisitions on the East Coast. Recent efforts include Seaside Village in Niantic, Conn. and Olmsted Green at the former Boston State Hospital site in Mattapan. His efforts in real estate and his work at the Fed encourage middle-income household formation in cities by providing housing that average people can afford and places they can work. The tricky part: including the ownership options (for under $300k) that are essential to build stable communities and house those who work the "regular" jobs that support the region's eds/meds bedrock. He says the Fed job gives him a chance to do public service and help the Fed work toward maximum employment and price stability.

Kirk (with USA Fund's Jennifer Bustard) says he's immersed himself in monetary issues of concern to the Fed and shares his expertise in construction starts, sales, and vacancies. The $3 trillion that the Fed has pumped into the economy to aid the recovery has created an "amazing" interest rate environment and opportunity for people to buy. At meetings, Kirk pushes to disaggregate data to better understand the health of the regional economy, including low-moderate income communities. Unemployment for Massachusetts may be 6%, and 3% for downtown Boston, but for Roxbury, Mass. it still hovers at a disturbing 19%. Kirk was raised in New York, Rhode Island, and Switzerland, where he became a pro skier at age 16