A fast-growing affordable housing investment firm has begun treating health, food, and financial stability as part of what it means to preserve affordable housing, not just as amenities layered on top.
In some of Tredway’s senior communities, the community room has been reconfigured around a single, unglamorous idea: that people should be able to eat together. The rooms now support meal programs and resident gatherings. The reasoning behind these dining rooms has less to do with hospitality and more to do with health. Older adults who live alone are among the most isolated people in the country, and isolation, research increasingly shows, is not merely a matter of loneliness; it carries real health consequences.
The meal programs are one piece of a broader resident-services strategy emerging across Tredway, the national affordable and workforce housing investment and development firm founded in 2021 by Will Blodgett. As the firm has scaled — it was ranked the tenth most active affordable housing developer in the country for 2025 by Affordable Housing Finance — it has begun integrating resident services into the communities it preserves, with a focus on helping residents remain healthy, stable, and connected to opportunity. Health, food, education, financial stability: the premise is simple. A preserved home is the foundation, and once that foundation is established, residents are better positioned to access the resources and opportunities that support their broader well-being.
Blodgett has described the logic in terms of what he calls the three pillars of the American dream. “The American dream is about upward socioeconomic mobility,” he said in a recent interview. “And there are three key pillars to that: healthcare, education, and housing. Without a clean, safe, quality, well-located home where you have access to infrastructure and transit to get to work — can education and healthcare really matter that much? If you don’t have a home, are you really thinking about the next book you’re going to read?”
Housing comes first because it’s the foundation. But in Blodgett’s framing, it is also the platform that enables the other two — and a preservation-led investment philosophy should extend beyond the physical buildings to consider the people and communities they are meant to serve.
The services in Tredway’s buildings are not designed at a central headquarters. Renovation and programming decisions tend to start with the residents themselves. “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 the firm’s senior communities, standard tubs have since been replaced with walk-in or roll-in showers, after residents reported falls and mobility challenges getting in and out of the originals. Lighting is often upgraded to dimmable fixtures to better accommodate older residents, who can be more sensitive to harsh, fixed light.
The health pillar is being built the same way — community by community rather than all at once. In some senior communities, Tredway has begun working with resident-services partners, including Ounce of Care, which helps connect residents of affordable housing with healthcare benefits, care coordination, and other resources that can otherwise be difficult to navigate. The partnership is early. It runs at one Tredway community today, with plans to expand to roughly 30 by the end of the year. Blodgett has been careful not to overstate it: the model is being tested and scaled deliberately.
The focus on health in senior communities reflects how closely health and housing stability are intertwined for older adults. “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. Preserving an affordable home provides stability around the first; the resident-services strategy is intended to help residents better navigate the second.
Isolation sits underneath both. “A big issue, especially in our elderly buildings, is the isolation residents face,” Blodgett has said. “You’re alone, you’re super lonely.” In 2023, the U.S. Surgeon General identified loneliness and social isolation as a significant public health concern, particularly among older adults. Tredway’s response has been deliberately low-tech. “What’s the best way to bring people together?” Blodgett has said. “It’s over food.” Hence the community rooms, and the meals.
In family communities, the resident-services idea takes a different shape, oriented toward mobility rather than aging in place. “For our family communities, it’s about what resources and experiences we can provide to help you start to climb that socioeconomic ladder,” Blodgett has said. In some communities that has meant before- and after-school programming and daycare partnerships. In others, it has meant financial tools — including, at select properties, a partnership with Esusu, a fintech platform that reports residents’ on-time rent payments to the major credit bureaus, so that years of reliable payments begin to count toward a credit history. Rent, for most American renters, builds no credit at all. At the properties where this partnership runs, it does.
What links the pieces is scale, and the specific communities behind it. Tredway acquired 1,917 affordable homes in 2025 and has added another 3,428 in 2026 to date, nearly all through preservation — the acquisition and recapitalization of existing affordable housing at risk of being lost. The 2025 total included the 1,096-apartment Coney Island portfolio, where the resident-services program already ranges from nursing care and nutritional counseling to personal-finance and life-skills education. The 2026 additions include roughly 1,602 affordable homes across ten properties and five parishes in the greater New Orleans area, occupied exclusively by older and disabled residents, and Restore Housing in Bed-Stuy, a 138-home property where Tredway has paired a 99-year affordability commitment with a resident-services program spanning food and health.
Blodgett has framed the services not as charity but as a feature of the business. “The number one stakeholder we have are the people who call all these buildings home,” he has said. In his telling, that ordering is the point: the services exist because the residents are the reason the buildings exist.
The resident-services layer is still being built, and Tredway has been clear that it is not everywhere yet. It is in place at some communities and growing toward more. By the end of 2026, the firm expects to own more than 20,000 affordable homes across more than 35 states. The units and their affordability will be rehabbed and thus preserved. The harder, slower work — the shared meals, the health partnerships, the credit that a decade of on-time rent can finally earn — will follow, community by community as Tredway learns from its residents.
