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HISTORY OF CO-OP CITY  
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Michael Casper
May 16, 2024
New Left Review
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_ A Bronx Tale _

, Adi Talwar for The New York Times

 

In 1909, at a library in Manhattan’s Yorkville neighborhood, Abraham
Kazan, a twenty-year-old union clerk who had grown up on the
countryside estate of a Russian general in what is now Ukraine, and
who arrived in the US aged 15 to work on a Jewish agricultural colony
in New Jersey, met an older Scottish anarchist named Thomas Hastie
Bell. A friend of Peter Kropotkin, Emma Goldman and Oscar Wilde, Bell
had recently been arrested for political organizing in France and had
once shouted in the face of Tsar Nicholas II. He made a deep
impression on Kazan, introducing him to the philosophy of cooperatives
– ‘that men can help themselves if they try to combine their
forces and work together’. Soon, Kazan joined Bell’s Cooperative
League, which met on the Lower East Side and operated a hat store and
a restaurant.

As Kazan worked his way up through the powerful International
Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union and, later, the Amalgamated
Clothing Workers of America, he continued his studies of cooperatism.
In 1920, after successfully wholesaling sugar and matzos to union
members, he put his ideas to the test by opening a cooperative grocery
store. But his dream was to build cooperative housing that would
undercut New York’s notorious landlord class. ‘The question in my
mind at the time was, “Why couldn’t 50 people . . . join their
forces and put together the required equity money and buy a house and
own it, and not be subject to rent increases or any other problems
such as confront people who live in somebody else’s house?”’

The passage of New York State’s 1926 Housing Act gave Kazan the
chance he needed. The law allowed for the creation of limited dividend
corporations, which granted developers a twenty-year exemption from
property taxes provided a third of the capital was raised from
shareholders, and that dividends and rents were limited. Under
Kazan’s initiative, the Amalgamated soon formed the state’s first
limited dividend corporation and, only a year later, opened the
Amalgamated Cooperative Apartment House in the Bronx, where rents were
capped at $11 per month. Thriftily using brick that had arrived as
ballast on Dutch ships, yet featuring oversized neo-Tudor façades and
dumbwaiters to bring ice to residents’ iceboxes, the development
gained a reputation as a worker’s idyll. Kazan himself moved in, and
went on to build cooperative housing across New York City. But it took
another forty years for his vision of a ‘cooperative
commonwealth’, in which workers would live and shop only in
collectively owned establishments, to come closest to fruition, when
Co-op City opened just a few miles from his Bronx home.

The world’s largest housing cooperative is hidden in plain sight. It
is tucked away in the northeastern corner of America’s most populous
city, in an area disconnected from the subway. Comprised of over
15,000 apartments in 35 towers and hundreds of townhouses on a
130-hectare site, it caused entire neighborhoods to empty as people
clambered to move in. This nearly bankrupted the city and the state,
shaping municipal housing policy for decades – yet Co-op City barely
appears in the many urban histories of New York.

Co-op City ‘fits awkwardly or not at all into the standard
narrative’ of New York’s dramatic postwar decline and revival,
Annemarie Sammartino writes in _Freedomland_, one of two
well-researched books that give the development its due. It is an
outlier, she argues, because of its consistency in providing
affordable housing since the 1960s to ‘residents occupying the hazy
space between the working class and the lower middle class’. ‘Even
if the color of these people’s skin may have changed in the ensuing
five decades’, Sammartino notes, ‘their social and economic
position has not’. During this period, as New York City dramatically
cut public services, from local libraries to the City University of
New York, Co-op City ‘weathered New York’s neoliberal transition
in a way that residents of other neighbourhoods often did not’. But
it was not an easy path. Its outsized ambition made Co-op City both
the crowning achievement of the cooperative housing movement and its
swansong.

Robert Fogelson’s _Working-class Utopias_ begins this history
earlier, describing the rise of cooperative housing in New York as one
of several responses to the city’s endemic housing crises. The Bronx
of the 1920s saw a cooperative renaissance. In 1927 alone, the year
that the Amalgamated Houses opened, Jewish Communist and Socialist
groups inaugurated three other sizable cooperative apartment
complexes. The depression and World War II slowed the construction of
cooperatives, but in 1951 Kazan formed the United Housing Foundation
(UHF) to expand the movement again in the prewar spirit. In 1955, two
state senators sponsored what became known as the Mitchell-Lama act to
stimulate the construction of affordable housing; five years later, a
Housing Finance Agency (HFA) was created to enact the law by offering
long-term, low-interest mortgages to cooperatives. As well as seeking
funding from banks and the state, cooperatives relied on economic
support from labour unions, insurance companies and of course the
‘cooperators’ themselves, as the tenants were endearingly known.

Kazan cultivated a somewhat unlikely partnership with city planner
Robert Moses, who was typically hostile to unions but who shared
Kazan’s contempt for slums, as well as his conviction that entire
neighbourhoods could be razed. Both of them dreamed of scale. In the
early 1960s, the UHF significantly expanded its developments:
Brooklyn’s Amalgamated Warbasse Houses have over 2,500 apartments;
Penn South, in midtown Manhattan, has nearly 3,000; a group of
buildings known as Cooperative Village, on the Lower East Side,
comprises 4,500; while Rochdale Village in Queens contains nearly
6,000 units. By 1964, the UHF had built twenty-three large
cooperatives that provided housing for over 100,000 people in four of
the city’s five boroughs, amounting to half of all affordable
housing constructed in postwar New York. At the same time, the failure
of public officials to rehouse the tens of thousands of New Yorkers
displaced by slum clearance had become impossible to ignore. Mayor
Robert F. Wagner, Jr. called relocation the city’s ‘number one
problem’. Proposals for redevelopment were met with increasingly
intense protest.

No one would have to be displaced from the land where Co-op City would
be constructed. The site of a failed American history-themed amusement
park called Freedomland, it was a marshy and uneven tract on Pelham
Bay. Its vacancy made it attractive, but it would need to be rezoned,
and it lacked sewer mains and other essential amenities, necessitating
a close relationship with the city and state from the outset. The HFA
agreed to provide $261 million of the $285 million the UHF needed to
purchase the land in 1964 and build the enormous complex, which
required transporting tonnes of dredged sand from Coney Island to fill
in wetlands, and driving thousands of steel pylons into bedrock. The
city agreed to build infrastructure such as schools and planned to
extend the subway to the site (which never happened). The long-term,
low-interest loan from the state, and a 50% tax abatement from the
city, ensured that apartments would cost an affordable $450 per room,
plus around $20 in monthly carrying charges, while Co-op City’s
inclusion in the Mitchell-Lama programme meant that cooperators could
earn no more than seven times the carrying charges. When the UHF broke
ground in 1966, the_ New York Times_ reported that ‘officials of the
United Housing Foundation say Co-op City will be the world’s largest
apartment development, including any built in the Soviet Union since
World War II’.

Co-op City attracted fierce criticism for its twenty-four-,
twenty-six- and thirty-three-storey high-rise towers designed by
Hermon Jessor, whose style Sammartino compares to that of late
modernist social housing in the GDR. Sammartino notes that Jane
Jacobs, in _The Life and Death of Great American Cities_, ‘reserves
particular contempt for the UHF’s Lower East Side cooperatives . . .
She chastises the affiliated cooperative supermarket for its lack of
friendliness’. Fogelson recalls that a group of academic architects
told the mayor and governor that Co-op City represented ‘the
negation of the ideals of the Great Society’. But the old union
executives running the UHF could not have cared less. They understood
their role as providing ‘the best possible housing at the lowest
possible price’ and allowing people to shop at the cooperatively run
grocery stores, banks, daycares, pharmacies and opticians that
eventually opened in the complex. UHF leaders harboured ‘an almost
perverse pride in Co-op City’s lack of charm’, writes Sammartino.
As Harold Ostroff, Kazan’s longtime assistant and the executive
vice-president of the UHF, explained, ‘We do not subscribe to the
theory that people become frustrated, alienated or dehumanized by the
size and shape of buildings. What is important is for people to have
the opportunity to live in dignity and self-respect with their
neighbours’. Less than two months after Co-op City was unveiled,
almost 15,000 people had applied to live there. After the
groundbreaking ceremony, Ostroff declared optimistically that the UHF
was ready to build forty Co-op Cities to solve New York’s slum
problem once and for all.

A lot happened between 1964, when the UHF bought the Freedomland
tract, and 1968, when Co-op City opened. Co-op City had been promoted
as a solution to white flight from urban neighborhoods but came to be
seen as a cause of it. Sammartino writes that despite the universalist
aims of the UHF, ‘in practice most residents of UHF cooperatives
were Jewish, or involved in the labour movement, or both’. In her
estimate, Co-op City was over 70% Jewish when it opened, and a large
number of these residents moved from the West Bronx, especially the
area around Grand Concourse. This alarmed the administration of John
Lindsay, the liberal Republican mayor elected in 1965, who was
concerned that entire Bronx neighborhoods would be destabilized by
such a dramatic demographic shift, and that non-whites would be left
out of Co-op City. Herman Badillo, the Bronx Borough president, told
Lindsay, ‘Everybody knows that the word “co-op” is a synonym for
“Jewish housing”’. Under pressure from the NAACP, the UHF
advertised outside of Jewish labour circles to attract more black
tenants while continuing to stress that its priority was economic
integration. In 1970, when the Black Caucus at Co-op City denounced a
board election that saw no people of colour elected, they put forward
a controversial resolution that called for an additional seat set
aside for ‘any non-white Jew, or any person other than the Jewish
faith’. The resolution passed. By 1972, when tenants moved into the
final section of Co-op City, the racial demographics reflected those
of the city as a whole.

That year, construction costs had run about $150 million over the
original estimate. Cracks were beginning to appear in walls in each
tower, pylons were sinking, and miles of pipes already needed to be
replaced. There were also instances of alleged corruption, such as the
hiring of Kazan’s nephew to design a power plant that never worked,
and the cost of Kazan’s extravagant, shareholder-backed retirement
party in 1968. (He died in 1971.) Perhaps most significantly, interest
rates shot up on the government-backed bonds that financed Co-op City,
which meant that the UHF planned to pass on the cost of its ballooning
mortgage to cooperators in the form of rising carrying charges.

The UHF and Riverbay, the corporation it formed to run Co-op City,
required new residents to undertake multipart courses on cooperative
philosophy. But as Sammartino and Fogelson both observe, the utopian
rhetoric of Co-op City tended to dissipate in the face of mundane
matters such as carrying charges, which the UHF, now headed by
Ostroff, raised by 15% in 1970, 35% over three years beginning in
1971, and an additional 20% in 1973. Ostroff was just as radical as
his boss, Kazan. Raised in the Amalgamated Houses by
anarcho-syndicalist immigrant parents, he had wanted to convert even
the sprawling cemeteries in Brooklyn and Queens, along with a slice of
Central Park, into cooperative housing. Now he was in the difficult
position of negotiating with cooperators and tried to blame the rising
carrying costs on the state and its mortgages. Yet as Sammartino
writes, ‘the majority of residents saw the UHF as part of the same
power structure that was imposing the cost increase in the first
place’. In 1974, cooperators formed a Steering Committee to address
the rising charges, by striking if necessary.

The following year, a charismatic, thirty-two-year-old union
typographer by the name of Charles Rosen became head of the Committee.
The child of Jewish immigrant anarchists, Rosen was widely read in the
history of the left and a member of the Maoist Progressive Labor
Party. Carrying charges had gone up 250% since Co-op City opened, and
that summer Rosen helped spur a strike. Sammartino observes that
‘the New York Jews who made up most of Co-op City’s population
were generally undeterred by his political views, which were – if
somewhat more colorful than most – certainly not as far removed from
the mainstream as they might have been in many other places in America
at the time’. Residents were easy to organize in the lobbies of the
towers they had to pass through daily, and support for a strike was
overwhelming. Cooperators were instructed to write out rent checks,
which were collected and hidden in secret locations, while mimeograph
machines churned out literature around the clock thanks to Rosen’s
expertise as a printer. Sammartino argues that ‘Rosen’s Marxism
was central to his understanding of why the rent strike had to happen
and how it would be won’. UHF leaders maintained a paternalistic
attitude, criticizing residents for showing a ‘lack of cooperative
values’. Despite threats of eviction, and a trial of Rosen and other
strike leaders for contempt, cooperators hung on until the HFA made
moves to foreclose on Co-op City. Thirteen months into the strike, the
Steering Committee and New York Governor Hugh Carey struck a deal that
would allow cooperators to run Co-op City if they handed over their
checks, which they did, in hundreds of boxes that filled up the Bronx
County Courthouse.

While Fogelson ends his book after the rent strike, Sammartino carries
the narrative forward to 1995. The Steering Committee ran into the
same problems as the UHF. Unable to pay its mortgage or afford
construction repairs (which the state eventually funded), Co-op City
stopped paying city taxes. In 1979, Mayor Ed Koch threatened Co-op
City with foreclosure again before coming to an agreement to gradually
raise carrying charges over the next six years in exchange for a state
loan to offset operating expenses.

The demographic shifts that had affected so many other parts of New
York City eventually reached Co-op City. According to census data, in
1990, the complex’s black and white populations had evened out at
40% each, with 18% of residents identifying as Hispanic (and an
additional 2% in none of these categories). Sammartino cautions
against understanding this as ‘white flight’, noting that the
elderly population of Co-op City was always whiter than the rest of
the development. ‘What caused Co-op City to become less white was
not so much that white people moved out but that so few white people
moved in’, she writes. Nonetheless, some of the conditions that
caused white flight in other areas, such as a rise in crime, did touch
Co-op City, although not as much, in part due to close coordination of
residents, both black and white, with local law enforcement. ‘Two
decades after it had been constructed, there were few utopians left in
Co-op City. Instead, Co-op City’s residents were hard-bitten
realists’. Today, monthly carrying charges for a one-bedroom
apartment in Co-op City are well below the citywide average. Co-op
City is majority-black and still home to a Jewish community and
radical labour leaders such as Bhairavi Desai, the head of the New
York Taxi Workers Alliance. Charles Rosen lives there to this day.

At the heart of Co-op City is the tension between the old utopianism
and the new. Union leaders’ vision of economic equality conflicted
with, but eventually accommodated, the demands for racial justice that
characterized New York liberal politics of the 1960s. It was this
balance that helped it survive ‘the supposed transition between the
urban liberal era to the neoliberal era’, argues Sammartino. Another
key factor was Co-op City’s sheer size, which gave it political
power in Albany, the capital of New York state, and, due to the
quantity of its debt, leverage in the rent strike. Sammartino also
suggests that the persistence of a belief in the value of living in a
multiracial community helped Co-op City residents avoid the racial
tension that plagued other New York neighbourhoods. But these ideals
were isolated from the broader philosophy of a cooperative
commonwealth. Even at the height of Co-op City’s financial troubles
and existential crises, ‘Riverbay and others rarely made a larger
case about the importance of either subsidized housing or the
cooperative model’.

Fogelson’s conclusion is harsh – Co-op City ‘was not the wave of
the future, not in New York City and not anywhere else in the United
States’ – while Sammartino’s is more optimistic: ‘It is
possible to imagine a way in which Co-op City would represent the
vanguard of a better America rather than its past’. Yet both authors
acknowledge the utopianism at the heart of the cooperative endeavor.
Sammartino lingers on Co-op City’s streets, named after figures such
Edward Bellamy, Eugene Debs, Theodore Dreiser, George Washington
Carver and Sholem Asch. Bellamy’s 1888 novel, _Looking Backward_,
tells the story of a man who falls into a century-long sleep only to
awaken in the year 2000 and find the United States has become a
socialist utopia. To walk Bellamy Loop and Debs Place today, or for
that matter Kazan Street on the Lower East Side, surrounded by
thousands of affordable homes, is to tour a past generation’s
version of the future. In such moments, one feels that it is those
outside of the cooperatives who have yet to awaken from their slumber.

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