Will Blodgett has a line he has repeated for years, and he used it again this month in an op-ed for Commercial Observer.
“I’ve long said that a bad deal with good partners can become a good deal, but a good deal with bad partners will always end up a bad deal,” wrote Blodgett, the founder and CEO of Tredway, a national affordable and workforce housing investment and development firm.
The sentence is easy to read as a slogan. Tredway’s recent transactions suggest it is closer to an operating manual. Preservation deals, which keep existing affordable homes affordable, depend on a web of public agencies, private investors, local partners, and residents agreeing on the same outcome. When any one of them pulls away, the deal stalls.
What follows is a look at four Tredway transactions through that lens, and at the argument Blodgett made in the op-ed about why affordable housing is, in his words, “a partnership business.”
New Orleans: an institution and a long commitment
This year, Tredway acquired more than 1,600 affordable homes from the Archdiocese of New Orleans. The portfolio spans 10 properties in five parishes, and it is occupied by older residents and residents with disabilities.
The deal carries a 40-year affordability commitment and tens of millions of dollars in resiliency and building-wide improvements, an important detail in a region where buildings face hurricanes and flooding. For the residents, many of them seniors on fixed incomes, the practical meaning is simple. The homes will stay affordable, and the buildings will be made sturdier.
A transaction of that size involves a seller with its own mission and obligations, public programs that set the affordability terms, and private capital willing to commit for four decades. Each party had to see its own goals reflected in the result.
Far Rockaway: a city agency as co-author
In Queens, Tredway acquired Ocean Park Apartments, a 602-apartment property with 423 apartments at 60 percent of area median income and 179 at 80 percent. The acquisition came with a new regulatory agreement with New York City’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development that brought every apartment into rent stabilization.
A substantial rehabilitation was also funded through the deal, including structural repairs, roof and parking-deck replacement, and waterproofing.
The city set the long-term protections. Private capital paid for the physical work. Each side supplied what the other couldn’t, which is the core of what Blodgett describes in the op-ed.
“The strongest projects are built on aligned incentives, shared goals and trust between public and private stakeholders,” he wrote.
Bedford-Stuyvesant: a century of affordability
At Restore Housing in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, Tredway acquired 138 homes and committed to keeping them affordable for 99 years. The deal includes $10 million in capital improvements and a resident-services program that provides food and health services.
A 99-year commitment is unusual even in affordable housing, where 30- and 40-year terms are more common. It means the building’s affordability is effectively locked in for multiple generations of residents. Getting there required partners willing to plan on a timeline far longer than any single investment cycle.
Coney Island: services beyond the building
The Coney Island portfolio, acquired in 2025, includes 1,096 affordable apartments. The renovation work covers electrical, plumbing, security, and accessibility upgrades.
What stands out is the resident-services side. At that portfolio, services range from nursing care and nutritional counseling to personal-finance and life-skills education. Tredway treats those services as the second half of preservation. Keeping rent affordable protects a family’s housing.
Programs layered into the building can help with health, food, and financial stability.
Delivering those services also depends on partners, from health care providers to community organizations that already know the neighborhood.
Local partners in every market
Tredway’s reliance on partnership extends to how it enters new markets. The firm works with local partners who have deep roots in the communities where it buys property.
“In almost all these states, we have local partners who went to high school there, went to college there,” Blodgett said in an earlier interview. “Their spouses went to high school and college there. They know the nonprofits, they know the vendors, and that gives us a lot of strength and credibility in those markets.”
That local knowledge also shapes renovations. Before work begins, Tredway talks with residents about what they need. In many of its senior communities, that feedback has led to walk-in shower retrofits and dimmable lighting, installed in response to reported falls and mobility challenges and to older residents’ sensitivity to harsh light.
The argument in the op-ed
Blodgett’s Commercial Observer piece put these practices into a national frame. He described two models that have defined American affordable housing for a generation, public housing authorities and private developers, and argued that each has limits when it works alone.
Public housing authorities often struggle to keep pace with repairs, modernization, and expansion under the structural constraints they face. Private capital is good at mobilizing resources and executing at scale, but left to market forces it isn’t designed to preserve affordability indefinitely. The answer, in his view, is a partnership that uses the strengths of both, backed by public financing tools such as low-income housing tax credits, tax-exempt bonds, project-based Section 8, and local tax incentives.
He also made a policy request. In states like New York, demand for tax-exempt bonds far exceeds the available supply, which forces preservation projects to compete with new construction. Blodgett urged policymakers to keep stretching those resources, building on recent federal reforms that lowered the bond-financing threshold needed to access the 4 percent tax credit.
Scale built on relationships
The approach has carried Tredway to a significant size. It was ranked the 10th most active developer in acquiring and preserving affordable housing in 2025 by Affordable Housing Finance, a year in which it acquired 1,917 affordable homes. By the end of June, it had acquired another 3,428 in 2026.
Blodgett closed the op-ed with the same idea he opened on. Progress on the housing crisis, he wrote, will come “building by building and resident by resident,” through public and private partners working toward a common purpose. The four deals above are what that sentence looks like in practice.
