Abundance Starts at Home: Will Blodgett, Tredway and the Affordable Homes New York Already Has

Ocean Park Apartments occupies two 26-story towers at the edge of the Atlantic in Far Rockaway, Queens. The property has a swimming pool, playgrounds, a community room and more than 9,000 square feet of retail space, including a pharmacy and a physical therapy center. The complex opened in 1972, and five decades of salt spray have taken a toll on the buildings.

In May 2025, Tredway, a national affordable and workforce housing investment and development firm based in New York City, bought the property. Renovation began that month, with work spanning structural repairs, a new roof, a replacement parking deck, waterproofing and window weatherization. Facade work was also required under Local Law 11, the city rule that requires regular inspections of the exterior walls of buildings taller than six stories.

Tredway plans to install LED lighting, Energy Star appliances, low-flow fixtures and expanded food and nutrition services through City Harvest, a nonprofit that collects surplus food and delivers it for free to food pantries and other community organizations across New York City.” Tredway also plans to continue Ocean Park’s partnership with the nonprofit Rising Tide, which provides residents with swim and water-safety lessons.

“We are pleased to take on the stewardship of Ocean Park and to execute a preservation that significantly strengthens the property’s affordability while providing for critical capital repairs, energy-efficiency improvements, and expanded social services,” Will Blodgett, founder and CEO of Tredway, said in a statement. “The institution of rent stabilization at Ocean Park will protect current and future residents from rapidly rising rental prices and maintain the property as a beacon of opportunity for the entire Far Rockaway community.”

Ocean Park was built under Mitchell-Lama, a program New York state created in 1955 to house middle-income families. Developers received low-interest public mortgages and property tax exemptions, and in exchange their annual dividend was capped at 6% and rents were regulated for a 20 year time span before owners were allowed to leave the program.

According to the city's 2026 housing plan, Block by Block, Mitchell-Lama produced more than 130,000 homes in New York City, with roughly 92,000 homes remaining in the program. The city oversees approximately 44,000 of them, and the state supervises about 48,000. Block by Block counts about 365,000 city-financed homes governed by long-term regulatory agreements like the one Tredway signed for Ocean Park.

At Ocean Park, a bank acquisition loan helped finance the purchase and provided capital for the necessary repairs, and HPD’s agreement set the rents and income limits that apply going forward. Blodgett describes the approach as a public-private partnership, but many older affordable buildings in New York don’t have this luxury. Enterprise Community Partners and National Equity Fund reviewed 428 affordable properties in their New York portfolios and found that the share with negative cash flow rose approximately 35% between 2017 and 2024. Over the same years, insurance costs per apartment more than doubled, now sitting at a whopping $1,495.

Blodgett told Commercial Observer in January that Tredway was spending $25 million on work at Ocean Park. He noted that older buildings on the ocean often have to contend with saltwater and hurricanes, and they plan to extend their experience with Tredway’s properties on Coney Island to Ocean Park’s upgrades. Affordable Housing Finance ranked Tredway the nation's 10th most active developer in acquiring and preserving affordable housing in 2025, the year it bought Ocean Park. Tredway operates in 11 states, and it expects to own over 20,000 affordable homes across more than 35 states by the end of 2026.

In a September Commercial Observer op-ed, Blodgett wrote that the vast majority of that work is preservation rather than ground-up development.

"When we talk about the housing crisis, most conversations revolve around building new homes, but not enough is said about preserving the affordable housing we already have – and it may be the single most overlooked lever the country has," he wrote.

In their 2025 best selling book Abundance, authors Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson argue for a reevaluation of government accomplishments. The crux of the book is that it has become far too difficult to build in the United States, and that the success of a government should be determined by what it tangibly completes rather than by the dollars it authorizes that may or may not meaningfully manifest.

Blodgett has made a similar point about New York, remarking that much of the cost of building new affordable housing in the city comes from bureaucracy. Because construction is so expensive, he said, New York’s limited supply of tax-exempt bonds goes to new buildings, leaving little to finance repairs at existing ones. In May 2026, New York City’s Housing Development Corporation approved financing for multiple new housing developments and a major housing rehabilitation project in Brooklyn, and the new builds ultimately cost nearly double that of the rehab projects. Continued investment in existing affordable housing will free up an excess of public dollars to be put to other citywide projects.

A city task force report on speeding up housing production, released in May 2026, found that a project can take five to 10 years from conception to the day tenants move in. Approving applicants for lottery buildings alone took a median of 210 days in fiscal 2025. Families were already living in Ocean Park apartments when Tredway bought the property, so they were able to avoid much of the slow-moving bureaucratic process that costs time and resources like environmental reviews that are largely unnecessary for existing buildings.

When asked by Commercial Observer what he hoped to see from the city's new administration, Blodgett said simply "Speed." He also understands that adding supply and reinvesting in existing affordable homes are equally important, writing "Everybody's focusing on new affordable housing, which is also important. We have to build."

New York City preserved 16,116 affordable homes in 2025, 18% more than the year before, according to the New York Housing Conference's annual tracker. Block by Block sets a goal of preserving 200,000 affordable homes over 10 years, alongside 200,000 new ones, and commits more than $2 billion to HPD's preservation programs in fiscal years 2027 and 2028. At Ocean Park, where work began in May 2025, repairs are expected to be finished in 2026. By the city's own count, a new affordable project can take five to 10 years to get from conception to move-in day.