A 19th-century Brooklyn philanthropist built the first model tenements in America. He gave them private toilets, cross-ventilated courtyards, and a 5 percent return ceiling. A century and a half later, his name is on the door of one of the country’s most active affordable housing platforms, and the choice was deliberate.
In 1877, a 31-year-old Brooklynite named Alfred Tredway White opened a six-building tenement complex on Hicks Street, in what is now Cobble Hill. He called it the Home Buildings. By the standards of late-19th-century American multi-family housing, the design choices were heretical. Every unit had its own private toilet. The structures wrapped around a central courtyard so that every apartment had cross-ventilation through facing windows. The buildings were financed on a model White described as “philanthropy plus 5 percent.” The phrase named a deliberate ceiling on his own return, and White argued the ceiling was the line between investing in the poor and exploiting them.
Two more White-developed projects followed on the same block. The Tower Buildings opened in 1879. Riverside Buildings, a larger complex on Columbia Place in Brooklyn Heights, opened in 1890. Jacob Riis, in How the Other Half Lives, praised White’s developments as among the most advanced tenements in America.
A century and a half later, White’s name is on the door of one of the country’s most active affordable housing platforms. Tredway, the national affordable and workforce housing investment and development firm founded by Will Blodgett in 2021, is on track to own approximately 21,000 apartments across 36 states by the end of 2026. Blodgett chose the name deliberately.
“You should read about him, Alfred Tredway White,” Blodgett said in a recent interview. “Simple idea, but talk about living in a healthy home. … He was thoughtful in how he built and how he preserved. And we try to take the mindset of Alfred Tredway White in how we build and how we preserve and how we inspire our residents.”
Who Alfred Tredway White actually was
White was born in Brooklyn on May 28, 1846, to a wealthy merchant family. He graduated from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1865 with a degree in civil engineering, then joined his father’s hardware import business. By his late twenties, he was a successful Brooklyn merchant. He was also a profoundly uneasy one. He spent weekends walking the slum tenements of Manhattan’s Lower East Side and felt, in his own words, a moral obligation to act on what he was seeing.
In January 1876, White traveled to London to study the work of the British housing reform movement. He looked specifically at the model dwellings being built by Sydney Waterlow and the Improved Industrial Dwellings Company, and at the work of the Peabody Trust. The British reformers had concluded that decent multi-family housing for workers could be built at scale on a commercial basis if returns were modest. White came back to Brooklyn convinced the same thing was possible in the United States.
He built the Home Buildings in 1877 on his own capital. The Tower Buildings followed two years later, on the adjacent block. Riverside Buildings opened in 1890. Together they housed roughly 1,500 working-class families. White structured every project around the same 5 percent return ceiling and the same design principles: light, air, sanitation, dignity. He was vocal about the economics. The buildings were profitable. They proved his point.
Blodgett’s version of White’s argument is almost word-for-word identical. “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. It was his money plus 5 percent.”
The design choices, and why they still matter
Three innovations defined White’s model. All three have continued to define what dignified affordable housing means in the century and a half since.
The first was a private toilet in every unit. In 1877, the standard New York tenement housed multiple families per floor with shared, frequently unsanitary water closets. Many had no plumbing at all. White’s decision to put a private toilet in every apartment was not just a hygiene upgrade. It was an explicit statement that working-class tenants were entitled to the same basic privacy as middle-class ones. The housing reform literature of the 1880s, including Riis’s reporting in How the Other Half Lives, flagged it as a defining departure.
The second was courtyards engineered for cross-ventilation. White built the Home, Tower, and Riverside Buildings around interior courtyards specifically so that every apartment had windows on two facing sides. The result was air movement. In conventional tenement design, the absence of air movement was a primary driver of tuberculosis transmission in crowded immigrant neighborhoods. The courtyards were a public health measure as much as an architectural one.
The third was the 5 percent return ceiling. The financial structure was the part that made the rest possible. By capping his own return at 5 percent, modest enough to make capital welcome but generous enough to make capital come back for the next building, White wrote into the deal terms the proposition that dignified housing and respectable returns were not in opposition. The phrase he used for it, “philanthropy plus 5 percent,” became shorthand in the American housing reform movement for what would, a half-century later, get reorganized as the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit’s blended-capital model.
How Tredway carries it forward
The core of Tredway’s business is what Blodgett refers to as essential housing preservation. The work centers on the acquisition and rehabilitation of existing affordable housing. Tredway acquires aging and often underinvested properties, recapitalizes them through public-private partnerships, secures their long-term affordability, and renovates them based on direct feedback from the residents who live there.
For Blodgett, preservation is not simply about maintaining existing affordable homes. It is about protecting housing opportunity at scale. Every affordable apartment preserved is one less affordable apartment lost from an already constrained market. In a country facing a severe housing shortage, preservation and production are complementary strategies, not competing ones.
In the firm’s senior buildings, Tredway typically retrofits standard bathtubs to walk-in showers. The choice came from residents themselves, who reported that fellow tenants had fallen and broken hips trying to step in and out of the original tubs. Lighting often moves to dimmable fixtures because aging eyes are more sensitive to harsh, fixed lighting. At many of Tredway’s senior properties, community rooms get built out with daily food service to counter what the U.S. Surgeon General in 2023 declared a public health epidemic of loneliness and isolation. Many Tredway properties partner with healthcare providers for resident physical and mental health programming. These choices come from asking residents what they need. It is the same methodology, structurally, that put a private toilet in every Home Buildings unit in 1877.
Many of Tredway’s family communities offer before/after-school programs and daycare partnerships. Tredway partners with Esusu, the fintech platform that reports on-time rent payments to all three major credit bureaus. The partnership lets renters build credit history through housing stability, which historically has not happened because less than 10 percent of rent payments get reported.
The operating philosophy is the throughline: affordable housing should create opportunity, not simply provide shelter. Tredway operates with a deliberate local-partners model, working alongside developers and managers who have lived and worked in their communities for decades. In almost every state Tredway operates in, the local partners grew up in the markets they now run. They know the nonprofits, the vendors, the politics. That fluency, Blodgett has argued, is the cornerstone of how the firm has scaled to 36 states and counting without losing the community-level care that distinguishes a preservation operator from a portfolio.
It is the same insight White acted on in Brooklyn. The people who knew the neighborhood best, the residents themselves and the local builders and local doctors, were the people whose feedback shaped the buildings.
Why the name matters
Industry observers have described Tredway’s preservation-first thesis as a return to first principles. Blodgett is direct about why he anchored the company in a 19th-century philanthropist. White proved, a century and a half ago, that dignified housing and a respectable return were not in opposition. The Home Buildings were not charity; they were a profitable enterprise that returned a modest 5 percent. Putting White’s name on the door is a reminder that the most durable housing solutions have always aligned the interests of residents and investors. Tredway is not inventing a new approach so much as running one with a long track record.
In 2025, Tredway acquired a portfolio of approximately 1,800 affordable homes for seniors in New Orleans, preserving the housing portfolio of the Archdiocese of New Orleans. The renovations Tredway is now making in those buildings are the modern version of what White was doing in Cobble Hill in 1877: the same residents-first design discipline, updated for a financing model built on LIHTC, tax-exempt bonds, and project-based Section 8.