Come Together

As the parable goes, after a group of blind men happens upon an elephant, each feels a different body part (a tusk, a trunk, a tail) and comes to a different conclusion about what the animal must be. None are fully correct, of course; the creature is some combination of their projections. When it comes to alternative models of mass housing in the United States, one could replace the allegorical elephant with Co-op City, the crown jewel of the country’s cooperative housing movement—in fact, the largest housing cooperative in the world, 15,300 units spread across thirty-five towers and 236 townhouses, home to roughly 45,000 residents.

In our adaptation of the parable, different stakeholders finger the massive development, built from 1966 to 1973 on the 320-acre site of a crumbled theme park, for something it was and wasn’t. To a collection of trade unions and housing advocates, Co-op City and the type of cooperative housing it exemplified would improve the lives of workers, build their collective consciousness, and loosen the foundations of a society premised on real estate speculation and the exploitation of the working class. To a host of politicians, developers, and capitalists, it was a pragmatic way to provide much-needed middle-income housing with minimal government intervention; it was less socialistic than public housing and reinforced the values of homeownership. To residents, it presented a rare opportunity for realizing high-quality, stable, affordable housing in one of the world’s most expensive cities. Which constituency got it right? A pair of new books, Robert M. Fogelson’s Working-Class Utopias and (former Co-op City resident) Annemarie Sammartino’s Freedomland, grapples with these competing visions to take stock of the project’s idealistic origins, brutal challenges, and lasting successes. In recounting this history, both authors attempt to contextualize the flourishing and foundering of the wider co-op phenomenon in the slide from generous postwar urban liberalism into miserly neoliberal austerity.

The story of Co-op City begins with Abraham Kazan, the father of the American cooperative housing movement. A Russian Jewish immigrant with anarchist leanings who rose to become the head of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, Kazan guided the successful creation of several co-ops in the Bronx and on the Lower East Side. As his political passion drifted from labor to exclusively housing, he cobbled together an organization dedicated to building middle-income cooperatives, the United Housing Foundation (UHF), from sixty-two unions as well as some civic organizations and existing co-ops. To Kazan, who viewed state socialism as paternalistic, housing cooperatives were a revolutionary end unto themselves, a way for workers to grow through “self-help.”

In his aim to realize this ideal, Kazan found ideologically incongruous comrades. The Rockefellers, Lehman Brothers, Robert Moses, and the Real Estate Board of New York (REBNY) all became enthusiastic collaborators. Fogelson, whose previous book The Great Rent Wars was an exhaustive study of the early-twentieth-century New York tenant movement, rigorously (though at times dryly) details the political alliances and financial mechanisms behind the legislative measures that provided the financial impetus for cooperative housing. With insufficient national backing for housing co-ops, funding schemes ultimately passed onto the state level. At this juncture, both Fogelson and Sammartino examine the nuts and bolts of New York’s understudied Mitchell-Lama program, which provided the tax abatements, low-cost mortgages, and loan guarantees that enabled the construction of over one hundred thousand limited-equity co-op units targeted toward the middle and working class, including Co-op City.

With a résumé of successful projects, broad ideological consensus, and Moses, master of the municipal bureaucracy, on the UHF’s side, few wheels could not be greased in the planning and financing of Co-op City. Physically, despite the immense technical challenge of building on marshland, the organization managed to build not only the towers and townhouses but also cooperative shops and restaurants, a credit union, commercial establishments, and several community centers. The UHF even compelled New York City to dedicate vast sums to building new infrastructure like public transit (though not a subway line), streets (named after luminaries like Eugene Debs and Albert Einstein), libraries, and water and sewage lines to the previously underdeveloped land.

To this day, the material implications of this task are staggering to consider. Before even beginning construction, the swampland was filled in with roughly five million cubic yards of dirt—enough earth to build a twelve-by-twelve-foot base tower 178 miles high. Building materials were used in equally massive quantities. Sammartino writes: “So much bathroom tile was used in the construction of Co-op City that it could have been used to build a wall five feet high from New York City to Saint Louis. If laid end to end, the pilings driven to support its massive high rises would stretch from New York City to Boston and back again.”

Excitement about the opening of such an ambitious project was short-lived, however. Inflation, construction delays (including multiple labor strikes), corruption, and poor financial planning caused operating costs to spike; seeing few alternatives, the UHF proposed passing these overages on to residents, who were only just beginning to settle into their new homes. The move would have caused carrying charges (each resident’s payment toward the mortgage, operating expenses, and utilities) to far exceed the affordable rates advertised to buyers. In 1975, at the height of New York City’s fiscal crisis, 80 percent of residents voted to withhold their carrying charges until the proposed increases were dropped. Though they were technically “co-operators” of the development, not renters, residents from the beginning branded their action as a rent strike. The most thrilling sections of each book detail the electric thirteen-month struggle, which commanded national attention, nearly tanked the entire state bond market, and eventually resulted in the residents’ “winning” their strike and wrenching control from the board the UHF had hand-picked to run the development. In another example of ideological convergence, both the Wall Street Journal editorial board and Vivian Gornick of the Village Voice agreed that the victory would herald an era of unchecked tenant/co-operator power. Needless to say, they were wrong.

Whereas Fogelson’s study finds a premature ending here, Sammartino’s ratchets up. She closely examines the contradictions of this pyrrhic victory and its aftermath amid rising neoliberal austerity. Faced with towering debt obligations, residents ended up accepting some of the carrying charge increases they had fought so bitterly against. At the same time, they were eventually able to force the state to step in and cover the cost of major repairs, in part because Co-op City’s population density transformed political districts, motivating local politicians of all stripes to advocate aggressively for this massive voting bloc.

In the decades following the strike, thousands of families left the cooperative, but for those who have remained, the perseverance paid off: today the development rates as extremely affordable—as of 2020, the carrying charge on a one-bedroom apartment was $675/month (compared with an average rent of over $3,000/month in Manhattan). However, with a mortgage now owned by Wells Fargo, and with Douglas Elliman hired by residents as the property manager, the development does not quite represent the grassroots democratic control once envisioned by Kazan or the leaders of the rent strike.

In both books, the most interesting tensions arise when Co-op City is positioned against broader housing trends. Fogelson suggests that public housing, once supported by political consensus, was undercut by a coalition pushing cooperative housing to check government intervention and spur private capital; Sammartino highlights how the same logic was used to shift funding away from projects like Co-op City toward measures designed to promote private homeownership and rehabilitate run-down buildings in areas more attractive to gentrifiers. Political expediency is a fickle mistress.

Initially, Co-op City residents took pride in the limited government support they received. Proud of their middle-class status as property owners, they explicitly saw themselves as distinct from those on public assistance, as well as the tenants they had been before moving in. Yet over the course of the strike, residents began to view themselves as tenants again, the paternalistic management board installed by the UHF as their landlord, and their carrying charges as rent. They spoke of themselves as part of the broader history of tenant struggle in New York City and reported feeling less housing security than what they had experienced under rent control. Though they had once championed abstract causes of self-sufficiency and freedom from government largesse, they eventually identified the target for their strike as the state government, demanded significant financial support, and forced Albany to come to the negotiating table.

Kazan’s hope that the cooperative model would spark radical collective action came true, if not in the way he expected. It was only in their fight against his organization that the residents of Co-op City began to come together. “For the first time, the strike created a feeling of community here,” Sammartino quotes a leader in the rent strike as saying. “There was a sense of solidarity. The people had something to do. Their lives suddenly had a meaning.”

By the twentieth anniversary of Co-op City’s opening, no mentions of its cooperative political principles were to be found among its promotional materials or in the speeches given to mark the occasion. Though the project failed to continue the cooperative movement in the way Kazan and others had envisioned, its ultimate success in creating thousands of affordable, stable homes has proved an incredible feat. The fairest evaluation comes from architecture critic and initial skeptic of the project Ada Louise Huxtable: “Co-op City is neither the purgatory nor the heaven that its critics and champions predicted. It is a functioning community.”

Not only was Co-op City the last major cooperative housing project constructed in the city, and the capstone of both Kazan’s and Moses’s careers, it was the last major infrastructure project of New York’s ambitious era of postwar urban liberalism. Rather than serving as inspiration, the highly visible struggles within or around Co-op City were, in the hands of neoliberal crusaders, clear evidence of the pitfalls of mass urban housing. The state was swayed and slammed the door on housing provisions of nearly every kind—a door that present-day tenant organizers are focused on prying ajar.

In some versions of the elephant parable, the blind men come to blows, unable to accept the competing visions of the object in their grasp. Perhaps conflict is necessary to truly define what something is; without its rent strike, Co-op City would never have been forced to made good on its promise as a bastion of relatively affordable, tenant-controlled cooperative housing. Yet it’s hard not to wonder what might have been created with the same financial resources had organizing efforts been rooted in a united tenant movement from the start and had government actors not been so intent on limiting their own involvement. The question “Affordable for whom?” is a common retort among critics of contemporary housing developments, with their threadbare provisions for “affordability.” Those fighting for housing beyond the grasp of the market should assess co-ops by asking “Cooperating with whom, toward what?” and demanding an answer greater than the mere creation of co-ops themselves.