In a Commercial Observer op-ed, the Tredway founder argues that keeping existing affordable homes affordable may be the country’s most overlooked tool
Roughly seven million affordable rental homes have disappeared across the United States since 2014, according to the 2026 State of the Nation’s Housing report from Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies. Some were converted to higher rents when their affordability agreements expired. Others were lost to years of underinvestment. Many simply aged out of the affordable market, with too little new construction coming online to take their place.
Will Blodgett, the founder and CEO of Tredway, a national affordable and workforce housing investment and development firm, thinks that number deserves more attention than it gets. In an op-ed published Sept. 24 in Commercial Observer, Blodgett argued that the national housing debate has focused so heavily on building new homes that it has neglected the homes already standing.
Protecting existing affordable housing, he wrote, “may be the single most overlooked lever the country has.”
A shortage measured in states
Blodgett opened the piece with the scale of the gap. Citing the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, he noted that the country remains 4.7 million homes short and that nearly a third of households are cost-burdened. He then put the shortfall in perspective: 26 states have fewer than 4.7 million residents.
Other measures point in the same direction. Roughly half of the country’s renter households spend more than 30 percent of their income on rent, according to 2024 American Community Survey data, and about one in four spend more than half. The number of renter households reached roughly 44.1 million in 2024, an all-time high.
Blodgett warned that the trajectory, if it continues, will prove damaging to the broader American economy. His argument is that housing underpins financial, physical, and emotional well-being, and that a country unable to house its workers affordably will feel it well beyond the rental market.
Why replacement is so slow
The case for preservation starts with the difficulty of replacement. Building new affordable housing is expensive and time-consuming, Blodgett wrote, and it is often slowed by regulatory requirements, permitting, financing hurdles, and community opposition. Each affordable home that disappears has to be rebuilt through that same process before the country can make net progress.
That arithmetic is what leads Blodgett to describe the crisis as a preservation problem as well as a production problem. He was clear that he isn’t arguing against new construction. Increasing supply remains essential, he wrote. But protecting and reinvesting in the homes that already exist is just as critical if the country is going to keep pace with demand.
Preservation has practical advantages. The buildings already exist, and so do the residents. A preservation deal doesn’t require assembling land, winning a rezoning, or waiting years for construction. It requires financing a renovation and locking in affordability for decades to come.
The toolkit already exists
Blodgett’s central claim is that the tools to do this at scale are already available. He listed them: low-income housing tax credits, tax-exempt bonds, project-based Section 8, payment-in-lieu-of-taxes agreements, tax abatements, grants, and other public incentives.
Combined with private capital, those programs allow a developer to acquire an aging affordable property, renovate it, and extend its affordability for another 30 or 40 years.
“No single program can solve the housing crisis alone,” he wrote. “But, together, these tools demonstrate what is possible when public policy and private capital align around a common goal.”
He also identified a bottleneck. In many states, including New York, demand for tax-exempt bonds far exceeds the available volume cap, so preservation projects compete with new construction for the same scarce resource. Blodgett urged policymakers to keep finding ways to stretch bond allocations further, building on a recent federal change that permanently lowered the share of a project that must be bond-financed to qualify for the 4 percent credit, from 50 percent to 25 percent.
Tredway’s portfolio as evidence
Tredway’s own acquisitions show how the model works on the ground. The firm 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.
The Coney Island portfolio, acquired in 2025, includes 1,096 affordable apartments. Renovations there cover electrical, plumbing, security, and accessibility upgrades, and resident services range from nursing care and nutritional counseling to personal-finance and life-skills education. In Texas, a 16-property portfolio acquired this year brings more than 1,200 apartments, more than $10 million in capital improvements, and extended long-term affordability for all residents.
In New Orleans, Tredway acquired more than 1,600 affordable homes from the Archdiocese, spread across 10 properties in five parishes and 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.
In the op-ed, Blodgett wrote that Tredway is on track to own approximately 20,000 apartments across more than 35 states by the end of the year, “with the vast majority focused on preservation rather than ground-up development.”
City land as a second lever
The op-ed also pointed to publicly owned property as an underused resource. Blodgett described vacant Class B offices, parking lots in crowded neighborhoods, and municipal buildings no longer fit for their purpose as sites that could hold affordable housing, particularly in areas where land costs would otherwise make it impossible. Through ground leases or sales, he wrote, governments can set affordability requirements and ask for public benefits such as health care facilities or libraries.
A partnership business
Throughout the piece, Blodgett returned to the idea that neither government nor private developers can solve the problem alone. Public housing authorities face structural constraints, and private capital left to market forces isn’t built to keep homes affordable indefinitely.
“At the end of the day, successfully developing affordable housing requires the understanding that this is a partnership business,” he wrote.
The Harvard figure offers a way to measure whether that approach is working. Seven million homes lost over a little more than a decade is the backlog the country is trying to climb out of. If preservation deals scale the way Blodgett expects, the next report’s count of vanished affordable homes should begin to slow.
