Will Blodgett on Essential Housing Preservation: Saving Affordable Housing Before It’s Gone

The affordable housing crisis Blodgett is trying to solve began, in his own biography, with a Chicago demolition. The firm he founded is trying to make sure that doesn’t happen again.

Will Blodgett’s affordable housing career began, in a sense, with a demolition.

He grew up in Chicago in a family that didn’t have much money, with a stutter he still has, and among friends that lived in the Chicago Housing Authority housing. During his childhood, the CHA high-rise developments where many of his friends lived started coming down. “My friends were there on a Tuesday,” Blodgett said in a recent interview. “They were gone the next week on a Thursday. And that really never sat very well with me. Still doesn’t.”

Two decades later, the firm Blodgett founded is built around trying to make sure that does not happen again.

Tredway, the national affordable and workforce housing investment and development firm Blodgett founded in 2021, was ranked the tenth most active affordable housing developer in the country for 2025 by Affordable Housing Finance. It is on track to own more than 20,000 affordable homes by the end of 2026, across 11 states and counting.  The firm acquired 2,184 affordable homes in 2025 and has already added another 3,388 in 2026 to date. Nearly all of those transactions were preservation deals: the acquisition and recapitalization of existing affordable housing at risk of becoming non-affordable.

The path from that Chicago upbringing to a national affordable housing platform did not run in a straight line. Blodgett has described himself as an angry kid. He was getting into fights, doing poorly in school, and, in his own account, a fish out of water in Chicago. His family decided it was time to leave. His grandfather had a house in Laguna Beach, California, and was moving out into an elderly community. The family took the house.

He was a fish out of water in Laguna Beach too. The anger got worse. His first month at Laguna Beach High School, he got straight F’s. He was called into the office alongside the school’s biggest disciplinary cases, and the administrator told him high school was not for everybody.

Blodgett has described what he told the administrator next as the turning point of his adolescence.

“Well, you can be angry at the world and get straight F’s, or be in the world and get straight A’s, become athlete of the year, go play football in the Ivy League at Yale.”

That is what he did. He was athlete of the year. He got into Yale. He played football there for four years. He has since called it “an incredibly average football career at Yale, but a great experience.”

When he graduated, most of his classmates went into banks and funds. Blodgett wanted housing.

He took the only housing job he could get, a brief stint at a Massachusetts firm, and then landed at a company that owned about 5,000 units in the Bronx. The Great Financial Recession hit. His boss told him to start looking for a new job; the firm was going to hand back the keys. Blodgett spent the last stretch of that job learning the tools of affordable housing.

The next stop was the New York City Housing Authority. Blodgett’s friend John B. Rhea, an investment banker, had just been appointed NYCHA Chairman by Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Rhea did not have a deep operations background; Blodgett did. He became Rhea’s first hire and spent roughly a year and a half helping run the country’s largest public housing authority.

From NYCHA, Will Blodgett went to MIT for his MBA. From MIT, he identified Stephen Ross’s Related Companies as the country’s most consequential affordable housing developer and set out to work there. He called. He emailed. He called again. He got an internship, then a job.

At Related, in his own telling, he learned the real tools of the trade: the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit, tax-exempt bonds, and project-based Section 8. “The folks in our buildings never pay more than 30 percent of their income in rent,” he has said, describing the design of project-based Section 8 as an affordability tool. Those three financing mechanisms would, several years later, become the financial substrate of Tredway.

The Fairstead chapter came next. An attorney named Jeff Goldberg introduced Blodgett to Stuart Feldman, a hedge fund principal who told Blodgett he would put him into business. Blodgett built Fairstead into one of the country’s most active affordable housing developers. Then he asked to make the company his. Feldman terminated him for cause with one sheet of paper.

“He asked for 35 percent of my top line into perpetuity,” Blodgett has said, describing the terms of the exit offer. “So 35 percent, we don’t even make margins at 35 percent, so I would always be underwater. For him, it was a real control thing.”

Blodgett did not take the offer. He started Tredway in 2021 instead. “That was a very dark, dark time in my life,” he has said. “Really difficult to start over after having just built something great.”

The name is a tell about what Blodgett built. He anchored the company to Alfred Tredway White, the 19th-century Brooklyn philanthropist who built the first model tenements in America. In 1877, on Hicks Street in what is now Cobble Hill, White opened a six-building complex called the Home Buildings. Every apartment had its own private toilet, an unheard-of amenity in tenement housing at the time. The buildings wrapped around a courtyard engineered so that every apartment could open a window to cross-ventilated air. White financed the whole project on what he called “philanthropy plus 5 percent,” a deliberate cap on his own return. Jacob Riis, the muckraking journalist who documented tenement conditions in How the Other Half Lives, described White’s buildings as among the most advanced in America.

“He came back and started to build these beautiful buildings, saying that you can invest in the poor, not exploit the poor,” Blodgett said, referring to White. “You could invest in the poor and make money. And it was his money plus 5 percent.”

Blodgett could have picked a family name or a place name. He picked a philanthropist who ran the numbers, capped his own upside, and proved the thesis Tredway has been running at national scale since 2021.

Blodgett has a name for the strategy. He calls it essential housing preservation. He also has a case for it. In an American housing conversation that has been dominated for two decades by debates over new construction, zoning reform, and supply, preservation is often left out entirely. In Blodgett’s argument, it is the single most efficient way to keep the affordable homes the country already has from disappearing.

The operational thesis is preservation, and it is rooted in a hard piece of arithmetic. Affordable homes in the United States are being lost from the market faster than new ones can be built. Whether through the expiration of Low-Income Housing Tax Credit affordability restrictions, unaddressed deferred maintenance, or conversion to market-rate rents, the country continues to lose the affordable homes it already has. Every affordable apartment preserved is one less affordable apartment lost from an already constrained market.

The largest single Tredway acquisition of 2025 was the Coney Island portfolio: 1,096 affordable apartments now undergoing substantial rehabilitation. New electrical and plumbing systems. Upgraded security infrastructure. Accessibility improvements. And at the Coney Island properties, a resident-services program that ranges from nursing care and nutritional counseling to personal-finance and life-skills education.

The mechanic Tredway runs at Coney Island is what Blodgett calls, in industry shorthand, act rehab, or acquisition rehab. “We buy existing affordable housing that’s at risk of becoming non-affordable,” he has said, “and we make sure that we’re the good guys on that side of the table. We further entrench the buildings into affordability and rebuild them.”

The Ocean Park Apartments acquisition, also in 2025, illustrates how the mechanic runs in practice. Tredway acquired the 602-apartment family-designated property in Far Rockaway and, concurrent with the closing, entered into a new regulatory agreement with the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development. The agreement extended the affordability of 423 homes at 60 percent of area median income and 179 homes at 80 percent AMI, and brought all apartments into rent stabilization. A substantial rehabilitation program is now under way at the site, including structural repairs, replacement of the parking deck, roof replacement, and extensive waterproofing.

The preservation footprint has widened. In New Orleans, Tredway acquired approximately 1,602 affordable homes across ten properties and five parishes, preserving the housing portfolio of the Archdiocese of New Orleans. The buildings are exclusively occupied by older and disabled residents. Tredway committed to maintaining the properties’ affordability for at least the next forty years and plans to invest tens of millions of dollars in resiliency and building-wide improvements. In Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, the firm acquired Restore Housing, a 138-home multifamily property, extending affordability for 99 years and committing $10 million in capital improvements alongside a resident-services program that includes food and health programming. In Texas, Tredway acquired a sixteen-property Section 8 portfolio of more than 1,200 apartments across El Paso and beyond, with $10 million-plus in committed capital improvements and extended long-term affordability for all residents.

Blodgett has framed the mission in terms of what he calls the three pillars of the American dream: healthcare, education, and housing. “Without a clean, safe, quality, well-located home where you have access to infrastructure and transit to get to work,” he has said, “can education and healthcare really matter that much? If you don’t have a home, are you really thinking about the next book you’re going to read?”

“Our work across these projects demonstrates how developers and localities can protect the most vulnerable populations and keep longstanding communities together,” Blodgett said in a June statement announcing the AHF ranking. “It shows the true power of the public-private partnership.”

The phrase “keep longstanding communities together” is deliberate. The unit of value for Blodgett is not the transaction. It is the community that was already there.

The philanthropy runs on the same logic. Blodgett is a board member of the American Institute for Stuttering, which recently honored him, and of New Heights Youth, the Manhattan-based basketball program whose alumni include Lance Thomas, the Duke NCAA champion who went on to serve as New York Knicks team captain during the 2017-18 and 2018-19 seasons. In 2026, Blodgett founded WYSE, the Westchester Youth Sports Empowerment, a new nonprofit that has already raised approximately $6 million and acquired a building on terms that require any team using the space to offer financial aid. He also serves on the board of the Children’s Museum of Manhattan, which is constructing a new home on 96th Street and Central Park West.

“Sports in a weird way saved my life,” he has said of the WYSE work, “and I’m not sure a kid like me today would have access to it because it’s so expensive.”

The Chicago Housing Authority buildings where Blodgett’s childhood friends lived came down decades ago and are not coming back. What Tredway is trying to do, at scale, is make sure the affordable homes still standing tomorrow are the ones that were standing today.

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