Summary judgment for the affordable housing founder reopens the question of how much Fairstead owes him.
Affordable housing has been the rare corner of real estate where capital and political wind have been moving in the same direction for several years. Inside one of the firms that rode that wave, the founders spent the same period in court. On Wednesday, that fight produced a clear winner.
Will Blodgett, the founder of Tredway and a former founding partner of Fairstead, won summary judgment from the Delaware Court of Chancery in the suit Fairstead brought against him. Vice Chancellor J. Travis Laster ruled that Fairstead had no right to cancel Blodgett’s equity interests in the limited liability companies that hold the business. The Real Deal’s Lilah Burke broke the story on May 14, 2026.
For real estate operators watching the case, the ruling has implications well beyond the parties involved. It draws a usable line between what a founder does as an employee and what a founder is entitled to as a member of an LLC. It also signals what an appropriately scaled affordable housing operator with a working portfolio can look like after a public partnership breakup, because Tredway has continued to grow throughout.
The ruling, in plain terms
Laster ruled on a narrow but important question: did Blodgett breach the LLC agreements that governed his equity stake when he shared confidential information with his in-laws and made early plans for a new company? The court’s answer was no. An arbitrator had previously found that Blodgett violated his employment agreement by sharing that information. The Delaware court did not disturb that finding. It did, however, reject Fairstead’s argument that the same conduct violated his obligations as a member of the LLCs.
The practical effect is that Fairstead’s decision to cancel Blodgett’s equity was improper. Because Blodgett countersued, the court will now have to set the size of the damages he is owed. Attorneys for Blodgett have suggested the figure could land in the tens of millions of dollars.
Elisha Barron, the Susman Godfrey partner representing Blodgett, told The Real Deal that the court “found in Blodgett’s favor on all claims, confirmed for a second time that Fairstead had no right to cancel Blodgett’s equity and recognized that Blodgett’s efforts and expertise were essential to Fairstead’s success.”
The backstory
Fairstead was founded by Blodgett, hedge fund manager Stuart Feldman, and attorney Jeffrey Goldberg. According to the Delaware court’s opinion, Blodgett ran the firm’s affordable housing business day to day, assembled the team, and supplied the operational momentum that drove its growth. The court credited him with providing “the vision and the energy” behind the affordable housing platform.
The relationship broke down in 2020, when Blodgett and John Tatum III pushed for a restructuring that would give them a larger ownership share. Feldman declined the proposal. Blodgett and Tatum began planning their exits and the launch of a new firm. Fairstead’s leadership discovered the plans through an invoice tied to outside counsel, terminated Blodgett, and canceled his equity.
Litigation followed in arbitration and in court. Both sides have claimed wins at various stages, and the case has produced a string of attention-grabbing moments, including the “rope-a-doped” email exchange that The Real Deal first covered in 2022. The Delaware summary judgment ruling is the most consequential decision in Blodgett’s favor to date.
What Tredway has been doing while the lawsuit ran
While the legal fight ground forward, Blodgett built Tredway into a sizable operator on its own terms. The firm reports that it has built, bought, or preserved roughly 9,000 affordable housing units and operates across 11 states. Tredway has about 1,500 units in development in New York City, where it has positioned itself in Section 8 preservation, public housing partnerships, and tax-credit development.
Tredway has also been visible in policy conversations. Blodgett was named to the Commercial Observer’s Power 100 list for 2026, where he was profiled for the firm’s production volume and its emphasis on social impact in operations, including in-house healthcare partnerships at properties serving older residents. Those programmatic choices are central to how Tredway positions itself competitively against larger platforms.
Fairstead remains the larger company, with about 25,000 units across 28 states based on its own materials. The two firms now share a sector and a vocabulary, while operating in distinct lanes within affordable housing.
A clean line for partnerships
Operators reading the Laster opinion will see a familiar contour. Founders who hold both operational roles and ownership stakes often sign two sets of governing documents that pull in different directions. Employment agreements are written to protect the company from competitive risk during the term of employment. LLC agreements are written to protect investors from the loss of capital. The temptation, when a partnership turns adversarial, is to treat every breach of one as a breach of the other.
Vice Chancellor Laster declined that move. He ruled that conduct undertaken in an employee capacity, even where it violates an employment agreement, is not automatically a breach of the duties owed as an LLC member or investor. For founders, the holding is reassuring. For platform-level operators using LLC structures to align senior leadership, it is a reminder that contractual termination of an equity stake requires more than a related employment dispute.
What is left
The next phase of the case will turn on damages. Counsel for Fairstead has signaled the firm intends to keep contesting the result. Michael Carlinsky of Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan told The Real Deal that “this litigation has been ongoing for years, and unfortunately may take several more years before it is resolved,” a reference to ongoing remedies and possible appeals.
For Blodgett, the public record now reads differently than it did even a year ago. The summary judgment confirms what he has consistently argued, in the court of public opinion as well as the actual one: he built the affordable housing arm of Fairstead, his equity in that business was not Fairstead’s to take, and the company he runs today is a fair reflection of the operator he has always been.