Executive Director of the Massachusetts Affordable Housing Alliance
Tom Callahan serves today as executive director of Massachusetts Affordable Housing Alliance (MAHA) discusses the creation of the ONE Mortgage program, as well as his organization’s role in protesting bank mergers, specifically Fleet Financial and Bank Boston in the late 1990s. When the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston released a report in the late 1980’s documenting racial discrimination in the city’s home mortgage market, Tom and his colleagues at MAHA partnered with other local advocates to demand greater investment from financial institutions in minority and low-income areas of the city.
Date Recorded:
March 5, 2021
Interviewed by:
Braelyn Parkman
A native of North Adams, MA and a 1982 graduate of Fairfield University. Tom Callahan has been with the Massachusetts Affordable Housing Alliance since 1987 and its executive director since 1991. He previously served as coalition coordinator at Tenants United for Public Housing Progress and community organizer at Massachusetts Fair Share. MAHA’s signature achievement has been the negotiation, creation, and expansion of the ONE Mortgage program, which resulted from the 1989 Federal Reserve Bank of Boston study on racial disparities in mortgage lending. Callahan serves on the boards of the Massachusetts Property Insurance Underwriting Association (Fair Plan), Massachusetts Community and Banking Council (MCBC), Community Labor United, and is a member of the Milton Fair Housing Committee and Milton Affordable Housing Trust Fund. He also chairs the steering committee of the Community Preservation Coalition. Since 2017, he has served as a consumer representative to the National Association of Insurance Commissioners. Callahan was a member of the Board of Trustees for The Appraisal Foundation from 2010-2015 where he chaired its Consumer Affairs Task Force and was a member of Appraisal Subcommittee Advisory Committee for Development of Regulations as a result of the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation.
