Lama Mia!

The subject of housing in New York can be maddeningly complex, even bordering on impenetrable. This conversation between housing researchers Jonathan Tarleton and Oksana Mironova attempts to clarify matters by drilling down on those programs that supply affordable housing, from rent-stabilized apartments to NYCHA complexes to the 105,000 Mitchell-Lama units developed for “middle-income” tenants. In 2025, Tarleton published Homes for Living (Beacon Press), a study of two Mitchell-Lamas in Brooklyn and Manhattan on the verge of privatization: the St. James Towers in Clinton Hill and the Southbridge Towers at the entrance to the Brooklyn Bridge. Homes for Living, which received a positive write-up in the Mitchell-Lama Residents Coalition’s newsletter (“a tough crowd,” notes Mironova, approvingly), forms the basis of the following exchange. But the discussion also grapples with live developments, parsing real constraints on the Mandani administration and how it still can work to shape housing policy for the better. —THE EDITORS

OKSANA MIRONOVA: Unlike other American cities, New York has a rich legacy of social housing. Early experiments were the result of immigrant unionists and anarchists making sense of the brutal housing market at the turn of the twentieth century. Others were funded by the expansion of a postwar municipal welfare state. Still others came out of that welfare state’s contraction. With Homes for Living, why did you choose to focus on cooperatives built under the Mitchell-Lama program?

JONATHAN TARLETON: The book really came together out of the stories of those privatization debates at St. James and Southbridge Towers rather than from my desire to make a specific argument then scaffold it with those cases. That said, mulling over whether those stories could form the basis of a broader book about American housing, I observed that Mitchell-Lama co-ops had a number of characteristics that made them ripe for easing readers not necessarily familiar with social housing into the conversation: The co-ops didn’t carry the significant stigma of public housing, borne of years of demonization; they offer a distinct variety of homeownership from the American norm and so could serve as a nice foil to that prevailing ideal; and they exist at a large enough scale (some 69,000 cooperative apartments in New York City alone) and enjoy a sturdy enough reputation that they’re more resistant to the common, erroneous argument that social housing just can’t work in the US of A or only does so in niche circumstances.

OM: One of the unique facets of Mitchell-Lama ownership that really came through in your book is the cooperators’ commitment to collective stewardship over a precious public good. This is certainly something that I observe among my neighbors in my Mitchell-Lama co-op, and it comes up again and again in academic and policy discussions about social housing. How did residents of Southbridge Towers and St. James Towers think about their roles as stewards, even as they wrestled with the privatization option?

JT: Something that impressed me, across both cooperators intent on privatization and those intent on preservation, was that almost everyone I spoke with agreed on the need for stewardship—to responsibly manage and maintain these places that, by virtue of their ownership, had been placed in their care. They loved their homes and their communities, so many were involved in civic efforts beyond their co-op and most thought they were doing what was best for their co-op long term. But of course, they have very different ideas of what that stewardship looks like and who it is for. Pro-privatization cooperators almost invariably see these co-ops as the collection of individuals at this moment in time and see the collective as exclusive to those who own a share in the co-op. Theirs is a stewardship that’s immediate and physical. Pro-Mitchell-Lama cooperators often had a broader view: They were thinking about future beneficiaries of this public good, what it meant for their neighbors and fellow New Yorkers outside the co-op in addition to themselves. And they knew the principles behind the opportunities that they had been given required as much maintenance as the bricks and concrete.

These different ideas of stewardship tracked with differing ideas of what ownership entails: Some consider “true homeownership” as constituted by the ability to profit from their home and felt an entitlement to that, in direct contradiction with the principles of their social housing. Others saw ownership as entailing a responsibility to stewardship for future generations in the housing’s current form. Ultimately, the lure of profit narrowly won out at Southbridge Towers, which eventually privatized, while the more expansive view of stewardship among pro-Mitchell-Lama cooperators carried the day at St. James.

That broader, deeper sense of stewardship doesn’t just happen. It has to be instilled through narrative and political education—a kind of social maintenance that’s needed on top of regular building maintenance and sound financial balance sheets. It’s unfair to expect resident-owners to manage this alone. They need to be supported through public messaging, like local politicians did at St. James, and public incentives, unlike the pure financial incentives available to keep co-ops in the program by offering cheap debt. In a wider environment of commodified housing, stewarding and maintaining this kind of social housing—and beating back attempts to commodify it—are difficult, especially when residents are out there on their own.

OM: You’re absolutely right about the difficulty of maintaining an island of noncommodification in a stormy, speculative ocean. You see this across different nonspeculative housing forms, with pressure ramped up during transitionary moments. For example, there is downtown lore about the handful of squatted buildings on the Lower East Side which, in an often tumultuous relationship with the Urban Homesteading Assistance Board (UHAB), transitioned to Housing Development Fund Corporations in 2002. [Eds. note: HDFCs are low-income cooperatives—and, in other cases, rentals—that receive generous tax breaks for means-testing potential new purchasers.] The scope of the story is operatic and has been documented by comic artist Seth Tobocman, oral historian Amy Starecheski, and many others. These squats arose out of a deep countercultural history with many of the squatters viewing the process of occupying buildings that had been abandoned by landlords and neglected by the city as an extension of their radical politics. There was a very vocal subsection of squatters who resented the regulatory agreements that accompanied the official deed transfer to their newly formed low-income cooperatives. There was an antiauthoritarian resentment of restrictions put in place by a previously absent, neglectful state. At the same time, there was also a little bit of a settler mentality, of wanting to extract value from a gentrifying neighborhood.

But I want to take a step back and hear about your thoughts on the concept of social housing. In a brilliant essay that touches on your book, New Yorker staff writer Jennifer Wilson—check out her essay about Soviet luxury goods in Lux—meditates on the twinned nightmares of renting or buying in New York City, considers an HDFC in Flatbush, and eventually lands on joining a tenants’ union and looking for a rent-stabilized apartment. I’ve had many conversations with Cea Weaver, the former coalition director at Housing Justice for All and current director of the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants, about how in practice there is not much of a difference between a tightly regulated low-income co-op and a rent-stabilized apartment in a market where tenants have an established collective bargaining right, like in Sweden. Where do you draw the line between social and market-based housing?

JT: The story of those squats, and the apparent shift in perspective on how or why the “value” in a home should be instrumentalized, is so telling and goes to show how social housing is one part of a greater ecosystem. Without a real social safety net—universal and affordable health care, education, child and eldercare—that search for needed cash to take care of these necessities, let alone dreams, will always land back on the commodified home: our current, rather feeble replacement. Some of Mayor Mamdani’s vision aims to fill some of these gaps, but just as with housing, to meet the need without more federal and state support is a tall task.

As for the difference between social and market-based housing, I’m indebted to your work at the Community Service Society to map a kind of spectrum of “socialness.” I tend to define social housing as homes that are intended to remain permanently affordable—of course, a contentious term—and have some element of resident governance.

But your question is making me think harder about this definition. I would say that social housing is primarily intended for use as a home, not as an asset or a mechanism of profit seeking. To put it in terms reflective of today’s corporate gospel, the duty of such housing is not to maximize the profits of its shareholders—or owners in other respects—but to provide a stable place to live. On the affordability side, I would reframe social housing as homes whose costs are responsive to the financial capacity of their residents, unlike market-based housing, where rent and maintenance are largely disconnected from any one individual’s ability to pay. And with respect to resident governance—I’m thinking about the Swedish example you gave—social housing is less concerned with governance so much as it is with power: Do residents have agency in determining where they live, what the community they live in feels like, and how that community operates? Do they have real leverage when it comes to decision-making around its future?

I think about this last piece a lot with regards to Mitchell-Lamas because of a real disconnect among those who want to privatize. As I mentioned earlier, many Mitchell-Lama residents who are pro-privatization frame part of their motivation as achieving “true homeownership,” which they imagine as a kind of regulationless ideal in which they can do whatever they want with their homes—something that doesn’t exist even for the most stereotypical, white-picket-fence suburban homeowner. At the same time, they don’t actually recognize that the possibility of privatization represents significant—and, to my mind, undesirable—power over the future of their homes. It’s their decision. I don’t think it should be. Of course, there’s some danger in fetishizing resident control over social housing to the point that it supersedes the importance of the rules that hold up the whole enterprise. There are many happy mediums in different forms of social housing, but embracing these does challenge us with getting comfortable, culturally and operationally, with many different ways of living and governing together.

So many policy conversations on housing tend to focus on one or two models as silver bullets to a crisis, and I can understand why, given that we’re dealing with a political system and public that still regard social housing as outside the norm. Would you agree that it’s important to broaden the conversation to encompass the many possible approaches to social housing? Those that traverse the spectrum of “socialness”?

OM: It’s interesting that pro-privatization cooperators imagined their post-Mitchell-Lama buildings as regulationless paradises. Do they know about local laws eleven [which requires larger residential buildings to conduct façade inspections every five years] and ninety-seven [which requires larger buildings to decarbonize]? And what about composting requirements?! Though I guess that is part of any kind of organizing, writing a good future narrative for yourself and your broader in-group.

I am a big proponent of pushing for as many variations of social housing as possible: public housing, mutual housing associations, community land trusts, and limited equity co-ops. Even tightly regulated private rentals, because landlordism will look very different in a regulatory environment where there is a solid rent control system, landlords have to open their books, building codes are proactively enforced, and tenants are organized. I am cautiously optimistic about the Mamdani administration’s interest in more active code enforcement. The Adams austerity regime hollowed out the city’s housing agencies, meaning there were fewer inspectors to go into buildings and fewer lawyers to force landlords to pay up. The fact that there are people excited to work for the city again is itself a big deal.

This winter, my colleagues and I traveled to Albany to advocate for the social housing development authority, a proposed new state agency that would finance social housing across the state. The idea is that this entity would be highly responsive to local conditions. The organizing environment, land market, housing stock are all very different in Yonkers, Suffolk County, North County, or Rochester. This flexibility would yield very different types of social housing, we hope.

The problem is that Housing Justice for All and other homeless advocates barely had enough political capital to win a time-limited state housing voucher, much less $5 billion for an agency that will fund public housing construction and limited equity co-op development. And when you zoom out at the federal level, it’s even more of a horror show: We see the full gutting of Nixon- and Reagan-era housing programs for being too liberal.

Other federal housing policy notwithstanding, Mayor Mamdani included six thousand “Mitchell-Lama-style” apartments in his pitch to Trump for a massive federal investment in a new neighborhood, by capping the rails at Sunnyside Yards. What do you think this says about the prospects for a broader Mitchell Lama 2.0 program?

JT: The Sunnyside Yards proposal is an interesting turn in the president and mayor’s absurd relationship that’s indicative of a few things: Mamdani understands that building new housing at scale in the city will require big federal dollars. He’s serious when he says he’s open to working with the Trump administration to solve key problems, and he continues to show skill in finding ways to use Trump’s ego to create openings to potentially benefit New Yorkers.

It’s not surprising to see that the Mamdani administration is interested in pursuing a decommodified model like Mitchell-Lama as a significant portion of a huge real estate development. And I expect we’ll see continued emphasis in the administration on leveraging public land, maintaining public ownership, using the city’s financial might through its pension funds to better serve its people, and reckoning with challenges within NYCHA, our biggest and arguably most important stock of social housing. But the fact that the Mitchell-Lama referent was a key talking point in an otherwise sparse concept points to the resonance the program has with both a general public and Trump in particular.

It’s legible as a program with great past success—it built close to 140,000 homes in New York City alone—though some of that success can be chalked up to the—very different—circumstances under which the program was implemented. It’s also a program through which Fred Trump, Donald’s dad, made quite a bit of money, often in unsavory ways. See Trump Village in Coney Island, a now-privatized Mitchell-Lama co-op complex built in 1964. Calls for more Mitchell-Lama can also play into a concerning deservingness narrative that I expect Trump would eat up. Of all the New Yorkers in dire need of housing aid, who deserves it the most? Middle-income folks!

Ignoring the vile bedfellows for a moment, I would love to see new Mitchell-Lama-style developments get off the ground if their structure reflects learnings from the first go around: The option for privatization should have never existed, especially for the co-ops, and the city and state governments can’t go into it thinking they can just “set it and forget it.” Co-ops need ongoing support and technical assistance. There are still big, open questions around existing Mitchell-Lamas, including around a new conversion option to HDFCs that many advocates consider a kind of privatization-lite. I sometimes worry that the reverence for the existing model will obscure the need to rectify its cracks before replicating it and that the model won’t adapt to a new reality—but those are stumbling blocks I expect Mamdani housing officials are more than capable of avoiding.

Setting the long shot Sunnyside Yards possibility aside, do you see this moment of federal revanchism as in any way conducive to a turn toward social housing on the local and state level, or am I grasping for a silver lining amid the devastation?

OM: Recent policy wins attest to the tenacity and hard work of the organizers and grassroots leaders who have been pushing the city and state to do better for years, if not decades. Some of these wins include the implementation of a right-to-counsel program that gives tenants access to a lawyer during an eviction proceeding, the 2019 Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act that closed up a bunch of loopholes and expanded the rent stabilization system, and the 2024 adoption of good cause that gives market tenants a bit more security of tenure. Landlord lobbyists have spent billions of dollars campaigning against all these protenant reforms, structuring their opposition around the same talking points landlords have always used against the regulation of rental markets, going back to New York City’s first rent control law in 1919: The housing quality will decrease, rents in market apartments will increase, landlords will stop building. These arguments are not only wrong, they are boring. And regular people don’t buy them anymore: Mamdani won because he campaigned for a rent freeze on the million or so apartments that are already regulated.

Housing justice groups have had limited success in pushing for increased capital funding for public housing and Mitchell-Lama. The past few state budgets did have preservation funding for both but not nearly enough to meet the capital needs of these aging buildings. To your point, though, public housing is the most important form of permanent and deeply affordable social housing we have: 153,000 apartments in New York City, thousands more in smaller public housing authorities across the state. It has been easy for both the city and the state to sideline public housing in their respective budgets for decades while shifting the blame for its underfunding to the feds.

Though it is hard to imagine keeping NYCHA going without federal support, because of the way that its financing is structured, there is clearly more that could be done on the state and local level. After all, after decades the state figured out how to fund another troubled authority with a capital backlog measured in tens of billions: the MTA. There has been some hand-wringing among advocates about the Mamdani administration’s lack of focus on NYCHA so far. But it is still early. We’ll see where the administration stands on the NYCHA question when the deputy mayor for housing and planning, Leila Bozorg, releases a housing plan.

I do worry about federal revanchism destroying any capacity for anyone to focus on anything that is not immediate crisis response, creating more space for fascist entrenchment. After all, it’s not like the US decided to expand its social safety net after homelessness increased dramatically during Reagan’s tenure, after he cut the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s budget by 75 percent. Instead, both of our political parties shifted rightward, individualizing the blame for structural social ills and increasing spending on policing and incarceration.

The extra upsetting thing is that the programs that the federal government is going after now are the Nixon- and Reagan-era neoliberal scraps meant to replace direct public investment in social housing in the 1980s. However, despite my philosophical problems with vouchers that project an illusion of “renter choice” while doing nothing to challenge racial segregation within the housing market or with formula-allocated block grants, cuts to both will send hundreds of thousands of people into eviction court and onto the street.

Taking a step back from the void, it has been great to see lots of people across the political spectrum practice everyday antifascism—whether or not they use that language to describe their activities. There’s something to be said about loose social relations that are built by engaging with people outside of the formal spaces of school or work. It feels like that is happening much more in the past year. Those types of relationships are really visible in Homes for Living and are at the core of fighting for, and keeping, social housing. I’m curious about how you see your book fit into the growing oeuvre of Mitchell-Lama books, like Peter Eisenstadt’s about Rochdale Village and Annemarie Sammartino’s Freedomland: Co-op City and the Story of New York?

JT: Add to that also Jennifer Baum’s recent book on RNA House, a Mitchell-Lama on the Upper West Side. I hadn’t thought of there being a Mitchell-Lama oeuvre until now!

I suppose I see Homes for Living as quite distinct from these great books. All the above were written by people who grew up in those co-ops, which impart them with a very particular point of view, and they also are much more biographies of distinct places than mine. The specificities of Southbridge and St. James are central to my treatment, but in many ways they are important context rather than the subject. Eisenstadt and Sammartino’s books also deal with two of the outliers of Mitchell-Lama and cooperative housing in the US in general: Rochdale and Co-op City are both massive, and for that reason they have faced operational challenges unique to the point of unrelatable.

What I aimed to do in Homes for Living was to bring readers into two rich places rife with conflict, with real characters facing an exceedingly difficult decision, as a way of grounding policy and American ideologies around housing in the everyday. As unique as these Mitchell-Lamas seem against the wider American housing landscape, ultimately the residents within were struggling with very relatable challenges and wrestling with a common American question: Should I instrumentalize my home for profit or let it largely serve its purpose for living? Between house-flipping shows and Zillow-as-hobby narratives, we’re awash in cultural production that venerates housing appreciation and “traditional” homeownership, and bringing forth some of the real drama of housing in these stories was my attempt at a narrative intervention to reopen certain housing assumptions at a time when curiosity about and expressed need for decommodified models are in the ascendant.

OM: From your newsletter, I know that you were living in Nairobi while working on your book. What was it like writing about New York while there? And did you get a sense of that city’s housing system?

JT: Yes, Nairobi is the silent place behind Homes for Living. I moved there in late 2021 for my wife’s job, having completed the bulk of the fieldwork and research. It’s ironic that her ability to earn in dollars while working there and my lack of work authorization meant I had the very necessary dedicated time to pull things together and put it all on the page—a financial and lifestyle setup that would not have been nearly as workable had we been living in, say, New York.

Being at a significant geographic remove from the day-to-day politics of housing in New York and other US cities also allowed me to do some necessary zooming in and zooming out: in to the people and communities that form the center of the book, captured already in my interviews and other research, and out to the ideas and through lines that reach far beyond what some might consider the niche topics of Mitchell-Lama and the very New Yorky perspective of the book. I’m enough of a perfectionist to always be concerned if I’ve done enough, and that remove helped me to identify some gaps fillable through a couple bops back to the states while also nudging me toward a conclusion. And given my hope that the stories in the book would resonate beyond the city, and beyond housing circles, to inform a broader conversation about maintenance and stewardship of public goods, writing from Nairobi and explaining my work to others was ongoing practice for how to get beyond the highly specific and connect the stories to broader concerns.

Of course, it wasn’t all sunny. The same dynamic that allowed me to happily write in Nairobi is behind the city’s very skewed housing market, where the very large number of foreign nationals earning relatively big money from the UN, World Bank, INGOs, and large corporations that have their East African headquarters there drive up housing costs for all. There’s a ton of new housing construction, some of it, anecdotally, driven by money laundering—“wash wash,” as the local parlance goes—and a good chunk of it sitting vacant because units are small and expensive relative to existing homes and way out of reach for most Nairobians. One area of opportunity that I was curious about, and for which there are some glimmers of possibility, is the ubiquity of credit unions or savings and credit cooperative societies. A huge proportion of Kenyans bank with these cooperatives, and I think they have a role to play in housing development at scale that actually serves their members, not just financing the very Kenyan dream of an individual buying a plot of land just outside the city or back in a family’s ancestral home. I hope to make it back to my favorite bookstore there, Cheche Bookshop, to make those connections one of these days, but for now I’m content just doing my best to spread some of these ideas of housing as a public good and a different conception of ownership of home back on this continent.

OM: Cooperative finance as an important part of social housing’s infrastructure is a great place to land on! I bet Abraham Kazan, the conflicted anarchist forebearer of New York City’s cooperative housing, would agree.