Across 10 properties in five Louisiana parishes, more than 1,600 affordable homes changed hands this year. Tredway, a national affordable and workforce housing investment and development firm, acquired them from the Archdiocese of New Orleans. The homes are occupied by older residents and residents with disabilities, and the deal carries a 40-year affordability commitment along with tens of millions of dollars in resiliency and building-wide improvements.
Will Blodgett, Tredway’s founder and CEO, ended a Sept. 24 op-ed for Commercial Observer with a line about how progress on the housing crisis will come: “building by building and resident by resident,” through public and private partners working toward a common purpose. Much of the op-ed dealt with financing and policy, from tax credits and bond caps to publicly owned land. The closing phrase pointed to the people living in the buildings those tools preserve.
“The biggest fears of the elderly are: one, where am I going to live? And two, I’m worried about my health,” Blodgett has said. In a recent interview, he described housing as one of three pillars of upward mobility, alongside health care and education.
“Before we start work, we speak to the residents of the building,” Blodgett has said. “Things emerge like, ‘Hey, we have these bathtubs here and we’re old and it’s hard for us to step into the bathtubs.'”
At many of Tredway’s senior properties, those conversations have led to walk-in and roll-in shower retrofits, installed in response to reported falls and mobility challenges. Many senior properties have also received dimmable lighting for older residents, who can be more sensitive to harsh light.
In some Tredway senior communities, community rooms have been reconfigured to support meal programs and resident gatherings.
“What’s the best way to bring people together?” Blodgett has said. “It’s over food.”
In 2023, the U.S. Surgeon General identified loneliness and social isolation as a significant public health concern. Approximately one in three older adults report feeling lonely, and about one in four Americans 65 and older are socially isolated.
“For our elderly community, the importance is to age in place with the dignity and respect you deserve,” Blodgett said.
Tredway treats services like these as the second half of preservation, and they look different from one community to the next. At the Coney Island portfolio, acquired in 2025, resident services range from nursing care and nutritional counselling to personal-finance and life-skills education. At Restore Housing in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, where 138 homes carry a 99-year affordability commitment, the resident-services program includes food and health services.
In some senior communities, Tredway has begun working with Ounce of Care, a company that helps embed health and care-coordination services within affordable housing. The rollout is early, at one Tredway community today, with plans to expand toward roughly 30 by the end of 2026.
In the op-ed, Blodgett argued that keeping existing affordable homes affordable deserves the same urgency as building new ones, citing a 2026 Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies report that roughly seven million affordable rental homes have disappeared nationwide since 2014.
Preservation keeps those residents in place. Renovation, done with their input, makes the homes work for the way they live now.
The op-ed also made clear that this work requires partners. Public agencies set affordability terms. Private capital pays for repairs. In the New Orleans deal, a seller with its own mission and obligations had to agree on the outcome as well.
“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,” Blodgett wrote.
He has been specific about whose interests come first in that partnership. Investors are stakeholders, he has said, but not the only ones. “The number one stakeholder we have are the people who call all these buildings home,” Blodgett said.
In a senior building, that ordering is easy to see. A shower a resident can safely step into, a light that can be turned down and a room where neighbours share a meal are minor costs in a large transaction, and they are the parts residents use every day.
New Orleans was one of several large acquisitions this year. By the end of June, Tredway had acquired 3,428 affordable homes in 2026, after 1,917 in 2025, when Affordable Housing Finance ranked it the 10th most active developer in acquiring and preserving affordable housing. The firm operates in 11 states and is on track to own more than 20,000 affordable homes across more than 35 states by the end of 2026, most of them preserved rather than newly built.
In New Orleans, the 40-year commitment means the homes acquired this year will remain affordable into the 2060s, for residents who are there now and for the older adults who move in after them.
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