By Michael Blanding
While pursuing his Master’s of Public Administration degree at Suffolk, Tony Richards, MPA ’21, was in a unique position—he was also serving as a senior official in the administration of then-Governor Charlie Baker. “I’d be with the governor traveling around the state all day, and then attending class at night,” he says. “I could stress-test strategy at Suffolk and talk with my peers about it, and then implement it in real time.”
Today Richards is vice president of equitable business development at the Massachusetts Housing Finance Agency—otherwise known as MassHousing—a quasi-public agency that works to make housing affordable to low-income buyers. Governor Maura Healey has also tapped him to co-chair her Advisory Council on Black Empowerment. He also serves on the Suffolk University Black Alumni Network Leadership Committee.
Richards grew up in Dorchester, where he helped his ironworker father with the community basketball program he created, No Books No Ball. Later, he worked in nonprofits, including Action for Boston Community Development (ABCD, Inc.), a community service organization providing everything from childcare to senior services, and as executive director of Youth Design, which helps place talented students with design and architecture firms.
It was at a fundraiser for that organization that he met Baker, talking with him earnestly about what he thought the state could do to increase diversity and inclusion. “He said, ‘Have you ever thought about working for state government?’” Richards recalls. Soon after he joined the administration, first as director of community affairs and then deputy chief of staff, leading the state Office of Access and Opportunity.
“From day one, the governor charged me to be a positive disruptor,” he says, focusing on revamping state spending to make it more equitable. Richards used a project at Suffolk to create a dashboard to break spending down by race and ethnicity—the only state in the country to do so—in order to ensure funds were spent equitably. “You can’t manage what you don’t measure,” he says.
Now at MassHousing, Richards helped to create a standing $50 million predevelopment equity fund, which will make loans to minority developers to help them plan projects before they are able to get funding from banks. He’s also in charge of ensuring the agency meets “ambitious yet attainable” goals around inclusion, such as ensuring 50% of homeowner loans go to people of color, 15% of agency expenditures go to minority business enterprises, and 5% of portfolio balances go to minority-owned principal borrowers.
“That’s the hardest one,” he says, given decades of systemic racism and government redlining. “We’re planting a sequoia seed now, for shade in 10 or 20 years.”
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Tony Richards onsite at a new MassHousing complex in Nubian Square, Roxbury. Photograph by Adam DeTour
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