Co-op City

If you've ever driven into New York City from the North, there's a good chance you pass by a massive cluster of high-rise apartment buildings just as you enter the Bronx. 35 buildings in total. All of them with identical brick facades, all over 20 stories tall. I remember the first time I saw these buildings, riding a greyhound bus into the city from Worcester, Massachusetts. 99 P.I. producer Emeritus Katie Mingle is back to tell our story

this week. I was in my early 20s at the time, and I'd never really seen skyscrapers

that weren't office buildings. These buildings, I could tell, were people's homes. I could see laundry hanging on balconies, way up on like the 22nd floor. There was something thrilling but also almost frightening about contemplating the number of individual lives playing out in just one of those skyscrapers. It had the effect of making me feel very small and insignificant. The way looking at something incomprehensibly large can sometimes do.

“I think I assumed at the time that what I was looking at was a public housing project.”

But I know now that it wasn't. This cluster of high rises was and is the largest housing

cooperative in the world. Co-op city. When co-op city opened in the late 1960s, people hated the way it looked. Journalists and architecture critics thought the buildings embodied everything that was wrong with modernist architecture. Newsweek said, quote, "The towers of New York City's co-op city rise bleak and spectrally through the smog." A prospect so remote and cheerless that affluent commuters often shutter when they pass it. Those comments are exactly why co-op cities

are best kept secret because it's like hiding and playing sight. This is Diane Patrick.

She lives in co-op city. You look at the exterior, you make your judgment and you just keep

moving and you don't give it another thought. Diane moved into her co-op city apartment in 1978.

“"I think I paid 25 tons of dollars for the apartment." Diane doesn't pay rent,”

but she doesn't exactly own the unit either. Technically, when she handed over that $2,500, she was buying a share in a corporation. This is how co-ops work. The housing development itself is a corporation. And when you buy a share, you are buying the right to live in a specific unit. Together all the residents of a cooperative collectively own the corporation that is their building. "Do you feel like you're an owner like is does that?" "Yes, we can build things inside our unit

or whatever we want. We need to our own painting and moring and whatever implements we want to do." On top of that initial $2,500 investment, every month Diane pays what are called carrying charges. For Diane, these are about $800 a month and they cover the mortgage and utilities like heat, electricity, and air conditioning. "How big is your apartment like what does it look like?" "Yes, it's gorgeous." "I think it's like air into 50 square feet, it's large and it's beautiful and

it's large and it's beautiful." Diane used to work in real estate, so she's particularly aware of how lucky she is to have a place she likes at a price she can afford. "I saw what people were paying

“for tiny, tiny, tiny little apartments and then you know you have to have a big pile of money”

and with money because they're not made for people who just ordinary people." Not made for ordinary people. I know what Diane is getting at here. In major cities like New York, sometimes it feels like there's public housing for low-income families and market rate housing that is insanely expensive with not much in-between. "Corp City though is that in-between in a couple of different ways. It's in-between renting and owning and it offers some of the perks of both.

It's also in-between in terms of cost. Corp City was specifically intended to be affordable for middle-class New Yorkers. In fact, it was part of a whole movement to build this kind of in-between middle-class housing. Corp City was the crowning achievement of that movement and also the end of it. This story begins with a Russian immigrant named Abraham Cason. In the early 1900s, Cason was a young socialist and union organizer. But what he was really passionate about,

This is Joshua Freeman. He's a historian who's written about labor and housing.

“This was a viable alternative to capitalism to market systems that you could sort of develop”

within an existing capital society. Cason pursued a few different cooperative ventures before turning his attention to the thing that would become his life's work, housing. At this point, he's an organizer for the amalgamated clothing workers union of America, which represented garment workers. These garment workers were mostly living on the low-reside in these cramped, unhealthy, rundown, slump tenements. By 1920 or so, Cason was convinced that the union should help

get rid of the predatory landlords who owned these tenements. He thought that the union should

construct its own apartment buildings and let its members become collective owners.

This was cooperative housing, and it was actually a concept that New Yorkers already understood. The origins of co-ops don't come from the working or radical milieu. This was something

“like rich people came up with. You know, I'm sitting in a co-op building right now. I live in a”

building with about a hundred apartments and a hundred of us residents. We collectively on this building, but it's middle class with upper middle class building. And if someone moves out, they sell their apartment where they think of it selling their apartment. They really selling the shares and the corporation, you know, on the open market. And if they sell it for more than they bought it, more power to them, they had to keep the money. But that's not how Cason envisioned his co-ops

working. In the kind of co-ops he wanted to build when people moved out and sold their share in the corporation, they get back the money they'd put in, but they wouldn't make a profit. Removing profit would ensure the building's state affordable into the future.

Cason said at first, the Union Brass wasn't all that interested in his cooperative housing idea.

“Here he is in an interview that he did late in his life. For a long while, I was the left-wing”

stock in the organization. A nice spoke about building cooperative housing. All my close friends used to make fun of me. Hater's be damned by the late 1920s, Cason and various Union partners had built three new cooperative buildings that housed more than 850 working class families. During the Great Depression and World War II, the work of building cooperative housing or any housing for that matter mostly just stopped. Which is why after World War II, New York, along with a

lot of urban America, found itself in a pretty acute housing shortage. In 1949, the federal government passed the American Housing Act to help fix it. The new legislation had provisions to promote home ownership and the construction of public housing, and it also provided a bunch of money to clear blighted neighborhoods or so-called slums. If we don't clean out these slums, the central areas are going to rock. There are very few cases. Where genuine slums can be fixed up

in any other way than by tearing them down. That, of course, is Robert Moses. New York City's most prolific and problematic city planner. As Diehard fans, the show will know, Robert Moses did more to reshape New York City in the 20th century than probably any other single person. After the American Housing Act was passed, Moses became head of New York City's Slam Clearance Committee. Part of what Moses wanted to do was replace these blighted buildings with public housing.

And in the post-war years, he did oversee the construction of a lot of public housing for low-income renters. But he and others in government also wanted housing for the middle class. In most other places, municipal governments sort of pursue like a two-pronged strategy for building new housing after World War II. This is Ann Marie Samartino. She's a professor of history at Oberlin College. On the one hand, there's housing projects for the very poor that are in the urban core. And then

there's single family, you know, sort of mortgage support for single family homes. New York's a little bit different because the mayor and other people in city government, they want to keep the middle class. And when they're saying this, they don't just mean the white middle class, but they mostly mean the white middle class living in New York City. But it wasn't easy to find developers who wanted to get into the business of Slam Clearance in order to build homes for the

middle class. On the short list of groups willing to do the work were the unions and socialists. They'd already started building housing cooperatives in blighted neighborhoods and were anxious

Kason and Moses were quite closely together and they realized that in a lot of ways they had

“overlapping visions for the future of the city, you know, that both of them wanted to replace”

Slam's with better housing. In 1951, Kason created an organization dedicated to doing just that.

It was called the United Housing Foundation or UHF. And it's an alliance basically of existing

cooperative projects of unions and working past fraternal groups. So, you know, they band together to create the UHF. And Kason is like, you know, the leader. I mean, he's got the tenants, but he's the guy. Then in 1955, New York State created a program called Mitchell Lama. It gave private developers like the UHF more incentive to build no class housing by offering them low interest rate mortgages and tax breaks. For a wonky government program, Mitchell Lama

is still weirdly well known in New York. And one of the many answers people might give to the

“question, where did you grow up? Like, I grew up in a brownstone. I grew up in the projects.”

I grew up in a Mitchell Lama. If I may take us on a very quick digression to prove my point,

here is Timothy Shalame on Theovans podcast back in 2024. See, they may I grow up in like a Mitchell Lama. You know, by Mitchell Lama? Oh, yeah, the restaurant stars are within and then no, the App Mitchell Lama is like, at this point in the interview, Timothy does a pretty bad job of explaining what Mitchell Lama is, but he gets one of the main things, right? It was meant to be housing for people of moderate income. Oh, that damn Mitchell Lama brother? Absolutely. Oh, that's me baby

moderate. Mitchell Lama was launched in an era of big government liberalism. The state was subsidizing

not just housing for the poor, but for people of middle income like construction workers and teachers.

In the Mitchell Lama years, the program would finance over 100,000 units of affordable housing for the middle class. Many of them would be cooperatives built by the United Housing Foundation. The United Housing Foundation started relatively small. They put up a couple of buildings in the Bronx about 400 apartments in total. But at the opening ceremony for one of the buildings, Robert Moses said it wasn't enough that at the current rate it would take 50 years to clear the

city's slums. Abraham Kason got the message. The projects would only get bigger from there. By the late 1950s, they had finished a project called the Penn South Cooperative. 10 buildings, all of them, about 20 stories tall. It was an absolutely massive development in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. Penn South and extraordinarily ambitious project was built to provide decent housing for garment workers who could then walk to work.

Right. You know, talk about that urbanistic utopian vision. You know, that was it. 15,000 people came to the dedication ceremony for the Penn South Cooperative in 1962. In attendance was an absolute who's who of power brokerage. Robert Moses, of course, but also Nelson Rockefeller, who was governor of New York at the time. Eleanor Roosevelt was there and the president of the AFL CIO, the president of the

International Ladies garment workers union. And oh yeah, the president of the United States of America, John F. Kennedy. This union deserves the hottest commendation. I hope others will follow your example. And I come here today and ask you to continue to work. But it wasn't all sunshine and rainbows and housing for the working class. In the speeches that day between the self-congratulations, you can hear something else.

The people responsible for building this massive housing development are defensive. They seem to feel embattled. Here's Abraham Cason at the podium. And here's Robert Moses, addressing the audience after Cason.

“I believe that when the dust of the housing battles are settled,”

this cooperative nonprofit village will go down in history as one of the very best.

Development and others like it. During each project, old neighborhoods had been destroyed and

“resonance displaced. Robert Caro, author of the Powerbroker, estimated that Moses evicted 250,000”

people to build highways in New York City. And another 250,000 for urban renewal projects like Sloan Clearance and Housing Development. Efforts to rehouse the displaced were half-hearted at best. Robert Moses was infamously dismissive of his detractors, saying once that the critics

build nothing and also this classic. You're never going to get a unanimous approval.

And must be people who are dismoted in convenience to call it much oil on the old theory, but you can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs. In the case of the Penn South Cooperative, the broken eggs were 354 homes demolished, 183 stores raised and nearly 2,000 residents evicted. Those evicted residents could apply to live in the new Cooperative buildings,

“but a lot of people couldn't afford it. You know Union sponsored nonprofit housing was”

affordable to a plumber or a garment worker with a steady job and a Union contract.

It was not necessarily affordable to a lower level of the working class. The poorest segment

of Sloan Durellers were more likely to be African-American or Puerto Rican. So in fact, a lot of the Union co-ops were almost all white. You know, I mean in some cases they were literally all white. They saw the world in kind of class terms. Again Anne Marie San Martino. Now of course, the world does not just exist in class terms. There's also racial dynamics here. And the leaders of the United Housing Foundation from the beginning were clear that they were fine with anybody

of any racial background if they could afford to pay the equity deposit. The UHF was stubbornly

“philosophically committed to the equity deposit. They felt like this investment was a crucial”

piece of what they were building. This in-between housing that kept the middle class in the city by offering them apartments that could afford and empowered them as co-owners. Because they saw that this gave people a stake in the community that they would not have if they were mere renters in their minds. Apart from displaced community members, Robert Moses and the UHF had another prominent critic around this time. The writer and activist Jane Jacobs. And what she was saying

is like, no, no, no. You know, these places that you're so quick to condemn both physically condemn and like morally condemn are actually functioning communities. And that when you build new housing, what you're doing is destroying community and you're building something sterile from which no community can emerge. The title is shifting against modernist architecture, against Robert Moses and his urban renewal policies. And soon against the project of big government liberalism that

made all of this building possible. But for now, the United Housing Foundation and Robert Moses still had momentum and money. And their biggest project was still ahead of them. Not just their biggest project, actually, but one of the biggest residential housing developments ever constructed. 35 skyscrapers that would house more than 15,000 families.

Coming up, a project that will ultimately destroy the United Housing Foundation

and the cooperative housing movement that Abraham Cason had built. That's after the break. 200 and five acres of fun and tradition from San Francisco in '99. This is an advertisement for freedom land. An amusement park in the north Bronx that aimed to teach children about American history through interactive experiences. Look at that. It's a Chicago fire of 1871. Hurry up, man. We're going to need volunteers for this one. Everybody, man, the pump.

After freedom land went bust in 1964. Robert Moses saw an opportunity to buy a 400 acre parcel of land for a relatively cheap. This would be the site of the United Housing Foundations biggest project yet. That cluster of 35 skyscrapers that I would marvel at years later from the Greyhound bus. Co-op city. Co-op city is the largest project for the United Housing Foundation and the largest by far mortgage that is ever sponsored by Mitchell Lama. Building co-op

would need to be evicted. This was basically a concession to Jane Jacobs and other critics who

turned against urban renewal and slum clearance. But in many other respects, the development the UHF had in mind was exactly the kind that Jacobs hated skyscrapers set back from the street and surrounded by green space. Jacobs had warned that true community could not emerge from places like this. Co-op city opened to its first residence in December of 1968. A few months later a blizzard hit New York and this blizzard would be an early test of whether a community could emerge

in this new development. This is Mayor John Lindsay. As I'm reporting to you over the radio this morning our city is blanketed with a very very heavy blanket of snow. The worst problem that we have in the city is abandoned cars. People were just leaving their vehicles right there on the road and setting out on foot all over the city including on the stretch of i95 that ran right past the cooperative. And the story goes that people leave the buildings they calm their helping stranded

travelers. They're bringing them in. They're giving them like hot tea or hot cocoa. Meanwhile kids are having like snowball fights and so it becomes celebrated in this kind of co-op city mythology as like the creation of a community. It was kind of proving the critics wrong. Yeah exactly. The architecture did not stand in the way of creating a community at all. Anne Marie wasn't there for the blizzard but she actually did grow up in co-op city and she remembers a pretty idyllic

childhood there. Writing her bike around the vast green spaces that surrounded the buildings, playing with the other kids and then as a teenager just wandering around looking for any kind of fun.

“I remember being like 13 years old when there's this big mall that opened and it had”

the first store that opened in my memory at least was a hardware store and me and all these other

kids my age just went to the hardware store just to like look at wrenches or whatever because there was like nothing to do. Great place to be a kid boring place to be a teenager. In other words this place was basically the suburbs. Co-op city and a lot of other UHF cooperatives were providing alternatives to suburbia that helped convince the middle class to stay in the city. When he died in 1971 Abraham Cason had built thousands of units of cooperative housing for

middle-class New Yorkers. Co-op city had been the crowning achievement of his vision but he wasn't there to see it unravel. So basically co-op city was built, it originally was supposed to have

a $235 million mortgage. That mortgage balloons to $391 million by the time construction is completed.

Building 35 skyscrapers on top of a swamp had not been easy or cheap. During the years of construction costs rose and rose because of inflation and the United Housing Foundation had to take out a larger mortgage from the state to pay for it. A bigger mortgage for co-op city meant that each resident would have to pay higher carrying charges. Those monthly fees that went towards the mortgage and utilities.

“At least that's what the state wanted. The residents disagreed. They'd been promised a certain”

monthly cost by the United Housing Foundation before construction even began. And how did the residents see the UHF at this time? Like, just another bad landlord? Yes. Yeah. They'd been duped by the United Housing Foundation. And they found the United Housing Foundation very condescending because if you were a resident and you went to the United Housing Foundation and you said, hey, I don't like the amount this costs or the air conditioning in my apartment isn't working or

whatever complete you had, there was this whole sort of like you don't understand what it means to be in a cooperative. The residents of co-op city were in no mood to hear the UHF's lecturing on the collective sacrifices required to live in a cooperative. Despite being shareholders or co-owners of the place, early on, the residents had very little say in what happened to it. They were not allowed to be voting members on the board that controlled the co-op that made decisions on things like

whether carrying charges went up or who they would hire to repair the roof. Members of the United

“Housing Foundation controlled co-op cities board and they made those kinds of decisions. I think”

you could argue that the UHF was in effect a kind of arm of the government. You know, they became so central to what the UHF did in terms of providing mortgage money and tax abatements and zoning

wanted the UHF to get out of their way. They wanted to run co-op city themselves and they wanted the state to give them relief on their mortgage. Here's co-op city resident Charlie Rosen on NBC saying basically, hey, you are the ones who wanted to keep the middle class in the city. So put your money where your mouth is. And what we're telling the state legislature is, either scrap the concept of moderate income housing to keep tax banks citizens in the city

or pay for it, but you cannot bring people into this type of housing and believe that's not

“going to cost money. But the cost of construction was not the only thing that had changed during the”

year as well co-op city was being built. As the 1960s became the 1970s, New York City was

teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. New York State was not much better off. Essential services were

being cut, government workers laid off. City officials could hardly justify giving more money to a middle class housing development. So the state held firm. The mortgage was what it was and the residents of co-op city would have to find a way to pay it. In response, the residents of co-op city decided to strike. In 1975, after years of cost increases and no progress negotiating with the state, residents began withholding their monthly carrying charges. They called it a rent strike,

but technically it was really more like a mortgage strike. Every month during the strike, the steering committee collected the carrying charges from the residents. They would collect all of these checks, but they wouldn't cash them. They would just hold all of the checks. Like, okay, well you now state have to negotiate with us. We have the checks and you can't essentially get out of them. Of course, New York needed those checks rather desperately. So the state

did what it could to stop the strike. It assessed fines on the strike organizers and it stopped providing certain kinds of maintenance to the buildings. The residents would have to do some things themselves. People were sort of washing the floors and the halls of their own building and the public

“halls of their own buildings. You know, I think my mother shifted to help my public hall floors.”

This is Noel Ellison. He's lived in co-op cities since the days of the strike. It kind of forced you to get to know your name as well. I think I've got a picture of my mother sitting in a meeting with other wives or people from the floor. Noel remembers it all feeling really well organized, which makes sense because a lot of the residents of co-op city belonged to unions. They knew how to run a strike. The strike lasted 13 months. In the end, the state agreed to help

with some large repairs that were needed on the buildings, but the residents didn't get any significant relief on their mortgage. They did however get control of co-op city. The United Housing Foundation

was out. After the residents took over co-op city in 1976, the UHF would never build

another co-operative. You could say that like there was never a greater demonstration of the co-operative spirit than the rent strike that destroyed the United Housing Foundation. Co-op city itself was the cried monitor from which the movement could never escape. That was it. It wasn't only that co-op city had been a disaster for the UHF. By the mid-1970s, the project of big government liberalism was over. And a small government neoliberal era had begun. Abraham Cason had died. Robert Moses

was more or less retired. And although many of the existing Mitchell Lama developments in New York would continue to receive government subsidies, nothing new would be built under the program

“after the late 70s. Mitchell Lama was not the only thing to lose funding in the 1970s. A”

worldwide recession meant that it was a period of austerity for the whole country and certainly

for New York. The city pulled back on essential services like police and firefighters,

unemployment and crime went up. People who could leave the city did and the white flight that Robert Moses had tried to stay of off finally came knocking. Co-op city was no exception. Early residents had been about 80% white, the vast majority of them doish, and about 20% people of color. This had been similar to the racial makeup of the Bronx at the time. But by the mid-1970s, the Bronx was changing. And so was co-op city. By 1976,

90% of the people on the waiting list to move into co-op city are black and Hispanic. Co-op city goes from being a majority white development to being one that is not really over

services for lack of congregants, the cooperative zone, Harriest Truman High School began offering

a class on African-American studies. And the development became a hub of early hip-hop culture. So here's a beat that's coming your way. In a 1986 documentary about rap in New York City, called Big Fun in the Big Town, the filmmakers interviewed a group of students from Harriest Truman High on the grounds of co-op city. You can see the skyscrapers in the background.

“What co-op city was undergoing in the 1980s was indeed a racial transition. And I remember this”

very clearly growing up. Like when I was an eighth grade, all these families moved out. Emery says that with this racial transition came some anxiety about crime and what would become this middle-class development. There's all these anxieties about co-op cities supposed to climb anxieties that were voiced by white residents of co-op city for sure, but also by black residents of co-op city. And crime did go up some in the 1980s as it did all over New York City.

But a lot of this decline that people worried about at co-op city, and Marie says it just never really

came to pass. You know, often when you talk about neighborhoods that undergo racial change, you know, where there's white flight, it's either a story of violence or a story of, you know, neglect or whatever. And co-op city, it's not really that story. Co-op city did become a majority black community by 1990. It is remain that way to this day, but it has stayed at the same time a middle-class community. And Marie says that co-op city's ability to stay middle-class,

even as it went through a big racial transition, may have had something to do with that equity deposit. The thing that the UHF had always been so adamant about. In the early years, that deposit

had been a barrier to people of color. But by the mid-1970s, the black middle-class had grown,

and more families could afford the upfront investment. And that investment may have helped create some stability during a decade when much of the Bronx was emptying out.

“It's harder to just pick up and leave when you have to sell your share or when you feel tied to a place”

not just as a renter, but as a co-owner. We moved in 1981. This is Frank Ritty. His parents, who are Puerto Rican, moved to co-op city during its big racial shift in the 80s, and they're still there today. So they've been there 40? What is it now? 81? It's at 45 years? Well, do you think the cooperative structure of the place has contributed to kind of how long they've been there? Like this a long time to live in a place? Yeah, absolutely. You know,

they're somewhere between a tenant and a owner. You know, but I think the right word is like investment. You know, not just my natural, but like a investment and a stake in a community that a typical New York tenant did not have. I don't know why my parents go anywhere. I wanted to stay right

“out of the private because it's affordable. And, you know, we can have health care attend this come in.”

And I mean, it's an ideal place still for someone of their income bracket and their stage of wife to live. Frank's parents are part of a huge constituency of older residents who currently live in co-op city. In fact, the development has become the largest naturally occurring retirement community or north in the U.S. partly because it's an affordable place to live on a fixed income in a very expensive city. There was a period during and after the rent strike, when co-op city was

looked at as a failure. The state had subsidized the building of this massive and many thought ugly cluster of skyscrapers and then its residents refused for over a year to pay their own mortgage. There were politicians and pundits during the strike that suggested that government should foreclose on the mortgage in a bit of the residents walk away from this expensive project and cut its losses. And it's true that the development has needed continued subsidies from the

state over the years. Building on top of a swamp has meant ongoing structural issues that residents have not been able to afford on their own. But if co-op city once served as a cautionary tale about the perils of big government ambition, it now stands as a reminder of what that kind of ambition can create. Speaking of ambition, the new mayor of New York, Zoran Mamdani, has a plan to build 200,000 units of affordable housing over 10 years. It's a goal that former mayor

Bill de Blasio also had, but failed to accomplish. It won't be easy. The last time anyone

World War II, spearheaded by people like Robert Moses and Abraham Cason. They made a lot of

“extremely harmful mistakes along the way. Bulldozing neighborhoods, displacing residents, treating”

whole communities like they were expendable. But the ambition to solve a housing crisis wasn't

a mistake. And in a city once again wrestling with how to house the people who keep it running,

the question isn't whether the government should attempt something that big again. It's whether it can afford not to.

“99% of us what was produced this week by Katie Minkle and edited by Christopher Johnson.”

This episode was mixed by Martin Gonzalez with music by Swanry Allen and George Lankford,

fact checking by Graham Hesha. Some audio from this episode came from the municipal archives in New York City and the oral history archives at Columbia. Thanks to Michael Rohatin for

“help finding archival material. Thanks also to Linda Lutton, Bernie Silich, Andy Riker,”

Richard Heitler, and Rose Ann Boone, all of whom provided invaluable insights to this reporting. Kathy 2 is our executive producer Kurt Colstet is the visual director. The rest of the team includes Chris Brube, Jason Dillion, Emmett Fitzgerald, Delaney Hall, Vivienne Lay, Washington, Kelly Pron, Joe Rosenberg, Jacob Medina Gleason, talent and range stradly, and me Roman Mars. But 99% of us will logo was created by Stefan Lawrence.

We are part of the Series XM podcast family. Now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora Building. In beautiful, uptown, Oakland, California. You can find us on all the usual social media sites as well as our own discord server. This link to that as well as every past episode of 99 MPI and 99PI.org.