Products You May Like
A 1986 tax reform financed most of the affordable housing built in America over the past four decades. A preservation-first CEO would like it to get its due — and its next round of expansion — because it is a key policy success story for keeping families housed.
For a resident in an affordable apartment in Coney Island or Far Rockaway, the difference between a home that stays affordable and one that quietly converts to market rate often comes down to a piece of tax policy almost nobody can name. The Low-Income Housing Tax Credit, or LIHTC in industry shorthand, has since 1986 financed the construction or preservation of more than four million affordable homes. Almost nobody who has lived in a LIHTC apartment could name the credit that built it.
Will Blodgett would like to change that — not because the naming matters, but because the reform behind the naming is a rare American policy success that, in his view, deserves both wider recognition and, in specific ways, expansion.
“The most powerful tool that we have in America for affordable housing is the low-income housing tax credit,” Blodgett said in a recent interview. “Strengthening that is very important.”
Blodgett is the founder and CEO of Tredway, the national affordable and workforce housing investment and development firm that was ranked the tenth most active affordable housing developer in the country for 2025 by Affordable Housing Finance. Tredway operates in 11 states and counting and is on track to own more than 20,000 affordable homes across more than 35 states by the end of 2026. Nearly all of them exist inside the LIHTC framework.
The mechanics of the credit are, at a glance, technical. State housing agencies allocate tax credits to developers who agree to build or preserve affordable housing at set affordability levels for defined periods. The developers sell the credits to investors, who claim them against corporate tax liability. The cash generated by the credit sale becomes equity in the deal. Rents are capped. Residents’ incomes are capped. Compliance is monitored for the length of the affordability restriction, which is often 30 years or longer.
That description is accurate, and it is nearly useless for understanding what the credit has done. Since 1986, LIHTC has quietly rebuilt the affordable housing production pipeline in the United States after federal direct-appropriation housing programs contracted sharply in the early 1980s. It has done so through blended public and private capital, without a line-item federal appropriation of the sort that would have been politically vulnerable in any given budget cycle, and while producing more than four million affordable homes.
Blodgett’s argument is that LIHTC is a preservation tool as much as a production tool, and that the preservation side of the credit’s use — where Tredway concentrates — is where some of the most consequential and efficient work is currently being done to maintain access to affordable housing.
Blodgett has also pointed to specific recent reforms that, by his account, have made the credit meaningfully more effective. The Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021 fixed the 4 percent LIHTC floor at 4 percent, ending a floating-rate structure that had reduced the effective subsidy well below its statutory intent. “The fixing of the 4 percent loan tax credit at 4 percent, so it didn’t float, was huge,” Blodgett has said.
Two years later, the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2023 reduced the so-called 50 percent test, the minimum bond-financing threshold, to 25 percent for qualifying projects. That change significantly expanded access to 4 percent credits for both new construction and preservation. “The reduction of the 50 percent test on the affordable housing tax credit was huge,” Blodgett has said.
Every affordable housing deal Tredway has closed in the past eighteen months has run through LIHTC in some configuration — either 4 percent or 9 percent credits, often paired with tax-exempt bonds, project-based Section 8, and state or local subsidy layers. The Coney Island portfolio, the 1,096-apartment 2025 acquisition, was recapitalized through a LIHTC-plus-bonds structure. The Ocean Park Apartments in Far Rockaway, a 602-apartment family-designated property, closed with a concurrent regulatory agreement with New York City HPD that extended affordability at 60 and 80 percent of area median income. Parkside Place in New Rochelle, at 180 apartments, closed with continued affordability at 60 percent AMI and a $5.6 million renovation, again through the LIHTC framework.
The New Orleans acquisition, in which Tredway acquired approximately 1,602 affordable homes from the Archdiocese of New Orleans across ten properties and five parishes, extended affordability at those properties for at least the next forty years — a commitment that only makes sense inside a LIHTC-plus-project-based-Section 8 framework.
Blodgett has also argued that the housing crisis the credit is trying to solve has grown, not shrunk, over the past decade. Approximately half of all American renter households are now cost-burdened, defined as paying more than 30 percent of income on rent. Roughly one in four renters are severely cost-burdened, paying more than 50 percent. The U.S. now has approximately 44.1 million renter households, an all-time high. Rent-burdened renters, as Blodgett describes them, cannot move up when nearly all of their income is going to rent.
The credit is not perfect, and Blodgett has said so. HUD’s operating budget, in his view, remains inadequate to the scale of the housing crisis. Advocates in the sector have made the case for years that LIHTC should be expanded: that the per-state allocation should be raised, that a higher share of credits should be dedicated to preservation rather than new construction, that compliance requirements should be simplified for smaller nonprofit sponsors, and that additional credits should be paired with dedicated federal support for the deeper subsidies that the lowest-income households require.
Alfred Tredway White, the 19th-century Brooklyn philanthropist for whom Blodgett’s firm is named, had a fundamentally expansive view of what low-income housing could represent for American society. “He came back and started to build these beautiful buildings, saying that you can invest in the poor, not exploit the poor.” “You could invest in the poor and make money.”
The framing translates directly to LIHTC. The credit is a modern, national-scale version of the “philanthropy plus 5 percent” thesis. Investors receive a modest, predictable return. Developers acquire and preserve properties. Residents receive affordability commitments that are, in many cases, longer than a generation. And the sector produces housing without a direct federal appropriation.
The case Blodgett makes, when he makes it, is preservation-focused. Every LIHTC year 30 that arrives — the moment a property’s original affordability period expires and its long-term affordability could either be extended or lost — is a moment when a preservation-focused firm like Tredway can extend the affordability commitment by another thirty or forty years. Every property where that happens is a property that stays affordable. Every property where it does not is a property that could quietly move to market rate.
That is the case for LIHTC, in Blodgett’s version. It is not an abstract argument about tax policy. It is an argument about the specific families in Coney Island, in Far Rockaway, in New Rochelle, in Greenville, in El Paso, in New Orleans, and in Bed-Stuy who continue to have a home they can afford because a piece of tax reform written in 1986 gave the sector the tool it needed to maintain and improve affordable homes. It’s about the families across the country whose homes could be lost if the credit does not get its next round of thoughtful expansion.