Secure Housing for Community Prosperity

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By Karla Amador

Thaddeus Miles is Director of Community Services at MassHousing in Massachusetts, a statewide $20 billion agency dedicated to increasing housing equity for first-time home buyers, lower-income families, and more.

After joining MassHousing in 1995, Thaddeus served as Director of Public Safety for twenty years, focusing on crime prevention, community safety, and addressing social injustices in the neighborhoods in which he worked.

With a vision to help local non-profits, property owners, and tenants work with policy officials to strengthen communities, he serves their desire to build a better future and a legacy.

“Our current and prospective tenants would like to have opportunities for homeownership, employment, a social reentry program for citizens returning from imprisonment, and full access to the City of Boston’s benefits, so their children may have a future where they feel a part of a community,” says Thaddeus.

MassHousing goes above and beyond to provide accessible tools that allow first-time buyers and prospective renters to make homeownership and stability a reality.

On a civic level, he addresses the challenges that prospective and current tenants face when dealing with government programs. He oversees MassHousing initiatives that provide homeownership education and advocate for tenants with mental health needs who struggle to retain housing.

Thaddeus believes “learning about the lives of people in our housing communities means understanding the lives they want to live and being engaged in that transition. It’s about becoming an upstander—not a bystander—and making a [tangible] difference. That’s what makes communities stronger.”

On a humanitarian level, Thaddeus founded HoodFit, a movement that values wellness— financial, spiritual, and mental—as well as resilience, perseverance, determination, vision, and love. The program focuses these values in an annual 5K Run in Roxbury, which began in 2013 with 100 participants and grew to 1000 in 2017, and now includes a community health fair.

MassHousing hosts an annual housing conference for 400 individuals, where they have access to tools, training, and information on MassHousing’s resources and community partners.

“My work is about providing people with tools that will make a difference in their own lives; that’s why I became Boston chapter Chair and Co-chair of Becoming a Man and My Brother’s Keeper. Benjamin Mays states: ‘Every [person] is born into the world to do something unique and distinctive and if [they] don’t do it, it will never be done.’ Let’s make sure our Black and Brown boys fulfill what they were born to do.”