The first time Will Blodgett saw the “stuttering iceberg,” at an event held by the American Institute for Stuttering, he started crying.
The iceberg is a therapeutic concept used by the organization and the broader stuttering therapy community. What sits above the waterline is the visible disfluency, the interrupted speech that everyone else in the room notices. What sits below the waterline is everything else: shame, anxiety, isolation, depression, hopelessness. Blodgett had spent decades managing both. He had never seen someone else name the underwater half.
“It just explained so much to me,” he said in a recent interview, describing the moment. “All my anxiety, all my depression. So AIS is a very, very important organization.”
Blodgett is the founder and CEO of Tredway, the national affordable and workforce housing investment and development firm. The company was ranked the tenth most active affordable housing developer in the country for 2025 by Affordable Housing Finance. He is on track to own more than 20,000 affordable homes by the end of 2026, across 11 states and counting. He is also a board member of the American Institute for Stuttering, which recently honored him. He grew up with a stutter.
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He still has one.
The AIS approach, in Blodgett’s telling, is different from the speech therapy he received as a child. That earlier therapy was about not stuttering. AIS is about accepting the stutter. “So it’s more like mental health for people who stutter,” Blodgett has said. “When I was growing up, my parents didn’t know what a stutter was. So even if they did know where to go, they didn’t have the money to go there. AIS says: ‘Hey, if you have a stutter, there’s a place that can help you. And if you can’t afford it, don’t worry, we’ll make it affordable to you.’”
That distinction, between fighting the disfluency and integrating it, and between an expensive therapy and an affordable one, turns out to be the operating principle behind how Tredway does business.
A Shift in Strategy
Since founding the firm in 2021, Blodgett has done the vast majority of Tredway’s acquisitions in partnership: with local operators, mission-driven nonprofits, public agencies, and a handful of institutional co-investors. The partnership orientation is not a financing convenience. It is the counterweight to a national Low-Income Housing Tax Credit industry that has largely gone the other direction: toward vertical integration, centralized asset management, and standardized rehab specs applied top-down across markets.
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Blodgett tried that vertically integrated model at his previous firm, Fairstead. He has since called it a mistake. “We brought our way of thinking, our mentality everywhere, versus going there and receiving the feedback from the community and weaving ourselves into the fabric of the community in which we serve,” he has said.
While the broader real estate industry often chases the efficiency of standardized systems, the complexity of affordable housing often defies a simple playbook. Local political winds and historical neighborhood ties can derail even the most well-funded centralized projects if they lack community buy-in. Tredway’s strategy implies that ceding some control to local experts isn’t just altruism; it is a practical method for managing markets that refuse to be standardized.
The Tredway alternative is to bring in a local partner at the acquisition and let that partner shape the work. “In almost all these states, we have local partners who went to high school there, went to college there. Their spouses went to high school and college there. They know the nonprofits, they know the vendors, and that gives us a lot of strength and credibility in those markets.”
The stutter, and the discipline of listening that came with it, is where this operating philosophy comes from. For most of Blodgett’s life, he has had to work harder than the person across the table to get a sentence out. That experience, he has said, taught him early to listen before he spoke. It also taught him that a room where everyone is racing to talk is not a room where everyone is being heard.
