Will Blodgetts wish for New York housing

Will Blodgett’s One-Word Wish for New York Housing

October 8, 2026

Asked what he wanted from City Hall, the Tredway founder said “Speed.” His recent op-ed explains why preservation is one of the faster tools New York has.

When Commercial Observer asked Will Blodgett what he hoped to see from New York City’s new administration, he said, “Speed.”

The answer was short, but the city’s own data gives it weight. A city task force report on speeding up housing production, released in May 2026, found that a new affordable project can take five to 10 years to get from conception to the day tenants move in. Approving applicants for lottery buildings alone took a median of 210 days in fiscal 2025.

Blodgett, the founder and CEO of Tredway, a national affordable and workforce housing investment and development firm, has spent much of 2026 arguing that New York, and the country, can move faster by protecting the affordable homes it already has. He made that case at length in a Sept. 24 op-ed for Commercial Observer.

In the op-ed, Blodgett described new affordable construction as expensive and time-consuming, often slowed by regulatory requirements, permitting, financing hurdles and community opposition. He has also said that much of the cost of building new affordable housing in New York comes from bureaucracy. Each affordable home that disappears from the market has to be replaced through that same process.

With preservation, the building is already standing. The residents already live there. A preservation deal doesn’t require assembling a site, winning a rezoning or holding a lottery for a new building. It requires financing a renovation and locking in affordability for decades.

Tredway’s purchase of Ocean Park Apartments in Far Rockaway, Queens, shows the difference in practice. Families were already living in the 602 apartments when Tredway bought the property in May 2025. Renovation began that same month. Under a new regulatory agreement with the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development, every apartment came under rent stabilization, and the repairs are expected to be finished in 2026.

No one at Ocean Park had to wait for a lottery to find out whether they had a home. The protections attached to the homes they were already living in.

Blodgett hasn’t argued that preservation should replace new building. In the op-ed, he wrote that increasing supply remains essential and that the country is still 4.7 million homes short, according to U.S. Chamber of Commerce figures. His argument is that preservation deserves the same urgency, especially when the pipeline for new homes is measured in years.

“I still don’t know what’s more important than a home,” Blodgett said in a recent interview. “The home is your foundation.”

The city has set targets on both fronts. Block by Block, New York City’s 2026 housing plan, sets a goal of preserving 200,000 affordable homes over 10 years alongside 200,000 new ones. It commits more than $2 billion to the city housing agency’s preservation programs in fiscal years 2027 and 2028.

The city preserved 16,116 affordable homes in 2025, 18% more than the year before, according to the New York Housing Conference’s annual tracker.

Speed also depends on money, and in New York, one key source of money is scarce. Blodgett wrote that demand for tax-exempt bonds in the state far exceeds the federal volume cap, so preservation projects compete with new construction for the same limited allocation. Because new construction in the city is so expensive, he has said, much of that bond capacity goes to new buildings, leaving less to repair existing ones. He urged policymakers to keep finding ways to stretch the allocation further, building on a recent federal reform that lowered the bond-financing threshold for the 4% tax credit from 50% to 25%.

The op-ed returned again and again to the idea that neither government nor private firms can do this alone. Public agencies bring regulatory authority and policy goals. Private firms bring capital and the ability to execute at scale.

“In this environment, no single entity can be wholly effective,” Blodgett wrote.

He also pointed to a way of cutting cost on the new-construction side. Cities and states own large real estate portfolios, including vacant Class B offices, parking lots and municipal buildings no longer suited to their original use. Blodgett wrote that scanning those holdings for development sites “can yield amazing results,” particularly in neighborhoods where land costs would otherwise rule out affordable housing. When a city or state already owns the site, the land cost that would otherwise push rents up can be reduced or removed.

Tredway acquired 1,917 affordable homes in 2025, a year in which Affordable Housing Finance ranked it the 10th most active developer in acquiring and preserving affordable housing. It acquired another 3,428 by the end of June 2026. Blodgett wrote that the firm 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.

At Ocean Park, the purchase closed and the repairs began in the same month, May 2025. The city’s task force puts the timeline for a new affordable project, from first idea to move-in day, at five to 10 years.

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