Abraham E. Kazan
By Glyn Robbbins
Few people have left a greater mark on the landscape of New York City than Abraham E. Kazan. While the names of Robert Moses or Jane Jacobs are immediately linked with shaping the city, Kazan’s is often overlooked. But as two contemporaries observed:
“He may very well have made the most important single contribution to the seemingly endless battle to clear New York of its slums, and to replace them with decent housing at a reasonable price.” (Rachlis and Marqusee 1963, p134)
Kazan’s efforts, combined with the power of the city’s labor movement and astute political alliance making, led to the building of 40,000 homes for working class New Yorkers. At a time when The Housing Question has rarely been more pressing than since Frederick Engels first raised it in 1872, recognising Kazan’s legacy is important. He successfully developed a model that worked: an alternative to the brutality of the housing market that, despite many challenges, has endured.
Young Abraham E. Kazan
A New York City Story
“Kazan” (as he was called by people who knew him) was born in 1888 in a shtetl near Kiev. Although he rarely referred to his childhood, being raised in a Yiddish speaking, tight-knit, Jewish community must have been a formative experience. Under the twin threats of poverty and persecution, he left Imperial Russia, arriving in New York City aboard the SS Etruria on 22nd May 1904. After a brief stay in the city, he spent several years in Carmel, New Jersey, one of the scores of communitarian agricultural colonies established by and for Jewish people in the early 20th Century, some of them inspired by the Am Olam movement, which also had its origins in Ukraine.
In 1910, he settled in the Lower East Side, finding work in the garment industry, becoming involved in the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) and experiencing the type of over-priced, insecure, slum housing he dedicated the rest of his life to eradicating.
Like many from his background, Kazan arrived in the United States having been exposed to radical ideas. However, he recalls the years 1910 to 1919 as his “apprenticeship for my life’s work” (Kazan 1968, p11). He absorbed an eclectic mix of progressive thought, embracing communism and anarchism, but remained determined not to be identified with a particular political ideology. However, probably his seminal encounter was with Thomas Hastie Bell (1867–1942), a Scottish-born anarchist who believed cooperativism was the best way for working class people to escape the brutality of industrial capitalism (Avrich 2005).
Inspired by Bell, Kazan determined to put into practice the original ideals of the 1844 Rochdale Pioneers. Like them, he began with consumer cooperative enterprises, using the ILGWU’s apparatus to promote sales of hats, sugar, and matzohs. None of these was successful in the long run, but Kazan was not deterred and remained convinced that housing, based on Rochdale principles, was the solution to NYC’s slums.
Housing co-ops were not new to NYC. In Sunset Park, Brooklyn, Finnish immigrants developed the Alku housing cooperative in 1916 (Gordon Lasner 2012). A decade later, four separate housing co-ops were being built in the Bronx, all inspired by radical Jewish immigrants (Robbins 2023a).
The fundamental principle of the limited equity cooperatives Kazan inspired is that housing cannot be used as a personal, speculative, financial investment. Co-op rules prohibit homes being sold on the market, enabling them to remain available and affordable for people with moderate incomes, in perpetuity. Residents are encouraged not to think of themselves as tenants, but as co-owners. As Kazan put it “where all personal gain and benefit is eliminated, greater good can be accomplished for the benefit of all” (Kazan 1929).
Amalgamated Housing, in the Bronx, is the oldest surviving limited equity housing co-op in the United States.
The Amalgamated Housing Co-Op (and its successors)
In 1918, Kazan left the ILGWU and joined its rival, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, which was more receptive to his plans for cooperative housing. He was able to align these ambitions with mainstream politics, a skill for successful collaboration that he demonstrated throughout his career. Utilising political support from NYC Mayor Al Smith and newly legislated tax breaks that encouraged cooperative housing, Kazan identified a site in the north Bronx where, in 1927, 303 homes were completed. Kazan’s second co-op followed soon after, with the Amalgamated Dwellings on Grand Street in the Lower East Side. The Amalgamated Housing Cooperative in the Bronx now has 1,482 homes and is the oldest surviving limited equity housing co-op in the USA.
In a sentiment that rings down the decades and across continents, two years after the completion of the Amalgamated, Kazan wrote:
“Housing for the wage earner and low paid worker is today as much of a problem as it was five or ten years ago. In the commercial field, there is no one who would undertake the building of low-priced apartments. There is not enough profit in that line of business. Philanthropic, socially minded and charitable people have been talking about housing for a long time; as have city officials and candidates for public office, but very little has actually been done in a practical way to solve the problems.” (Kazan 1929)
Over the following 40 years, Kazan oversaw the development of 40,000 cooperative homes in NYC. Following the Great Depression and World War II, when house building virtually stopped, Kazan assumed a prominent role in the city’s rebuilding. He was partly able to do so by forging an unlikely partnership with Robert Moses. As Freeman observes:
“Kazan and Moses both imbibed the early-twentieth-century faith in the perfectibility of society through systematic thought and technological advance, though for one it came linked to co-cooperativism and socialism and for the other to elitism and anti-communism. To outsiders, Moses and Kazan may have looked very different, but hey recognised each other as brothers under the skin.” (Freeman 2000, p118)
However, as Freeman also states, the source of Kazan’s influence lay firmly with NYC’s labour movement:
“In the three decades after World War II, the labour movement played a huge role in housing New Yorkers, massively intervening in a social sphere previously deemed the domain of the market. Labor’s housing program transformed the physical face and social geography of New York, contributing to its distinctive character. It constituted one of the greatest and least-known achievements of working-class New York”. (Freeman 2000, p105)
The Rise and Fall of the United Housing Federation
In 1951 Kazan established the United Housing Foundation (UHF), a vehicle for taking on more ambitious projects, supported by several trade unions, Moses and other key figures in NYC’s political establishment. This led to the building of Penn South in the heart of Manhattan (2,829 homes, completed 1962), Rochdale Village, in Queens (5,860 homes, completed 1963), Amalgamated Warbasse in Brooklyn (2,585 homes, completed 1965), where Kazan clashed with the property developer father of President Trump (Blair 2000). The UHF’s activities culminated in Co-Op City in the Bronx (15,382 homes, completed 1971), the biggest housing cooperative in the world (Sammartino 2022).
However, Co-Op City proved to be the beginning of the end. Multiple problems, including poor design, budgeting and management, combined with profound socio-economic shifts, led to a severe financial crisis (Fogelson 2022). Recently arrived residents, the majority of them Jewish families seeking an escape from the deteriorating conditions of other parts of the Bronx, were faced with steep increases in charges. In response – and in defiance of the UHF’s doctrine of co-ownership – in June 1975, Co-Op City residents started the longest rent strike in US history. It ended thirteen months later with a bail out by New York State, residents taking over direct management of Co-Op City and the demise of the UHF which, historian Peter Eisenstadt said, “died of a broken heart” (Eisenstadt 2010, p247). No limited equity housing co-ops have been built in NYC since.
Conclusions
Abraham Kazan died in 1971, so was spared seeing the fate of Co-Op City and the UHF. Despite his undoubted achievements, it is important to consider some criticisms. First, there is the extent to which people on the lowest incomes, with the greatest housing needs, were excluded from his developments which, in some cases, also led to significant displacement of existing low income, ethnically mixed communities. Second, whether they perpetuated a system of social (and ethnic) exclusion by presenting themselves as homes for the “respectable and hard working”, a value-judgment Kazan explicitly endorsed. Third, from the outset, Kazan’s developments offered only limited forms of democracy and transparency. Despite having an equity share, residents were not meaningfully involved in decision-making, which remained the preserve of outside appointees (almost all male, white and from the ranks of the union and political hierarchy), although this began to change with revolts by residents at Rochdale Village and Co-Op City. Fourth, there is an important question as to whether, from the perspective of NYC’s political and real estate establishment, housing co-ops acted as a bulwark against public housing, arguably, a more progressive, inclusive and sustainable model of non-market rented housing. All these issues remain contentious within contemporary housing policy, in NYC and beyond.
The city Kazan worked in has changed very significantly, limiting the potential to replicate his achievements, particularly in the context of reduced State investment in non-market housing and rampant commodification, making land prices for new co-op housing prohibitive. Trade unions no longer wield the power they did (although they remain significant players in NYC politics) and as Ed Yaker, a life-long resident of the Amalgamated laments, “cars, shopping and television” have weakened the social sinews of cooperativism. Lack of adequate funding are currently posing a serious threat to Kazan’s first project, evoking memories of the Co-Op City crisis of the 1970s (Robbins 2023b). We might ask, as Upton Sinclair did in his 1936 novel about co-ops in California “whether any co-operative can exist alongside a capitalist economy”? (Sinclair 1935, p49)
Nonetheless, Kazan’s career demonstrates that large-scale, long-term alternatives to the volatile, iniquitous housing market are possible, given the right conditions and the kind of determination and political savvy of Kazan and his allies. Furthermore, the co-ops encouraged a flourishing cultural scene, with numerous free concerts, lectures and events that fostered a sense of the collective, countering increasing urban atomisation. Kazan’s protégé, Harold Ostroff, described this in an address to the US Congress in 1967:
“The city has been pictured as a place where people have no roots, where people are part of a ‘lonely crowd’. This is generally true but not in a cooperative...” (National Commission on Urban Problems, 7th September 1967, cited by Sammartino 2022, p12)
When the private property machine is seeking to consume everything in its path, we need to remember alternatives. New York’s co-operatives have proved their ability to play a part in defusing the perennial volatility of the capitalist housing market and in so doing, helping to humanise the city. The architect Daniel Libeskind spent his teenage years living at the Amalgamated Housing Co-Op and credits it with inspiring his career. In an interview on 9th February 2023, he told me:
“It was a fantastic experience, living in a community, not just an anonymous apartment, with people who shared a political vision, not just a home. There was a real sense of solidarity. It was working people, not professionals. But it was a beautiful, creative environment. There was no air-conditioning back then, so we met in the courtyard and argued about politics and the future.”
References
Avrich P (2005) Anarchist Voices: An oral history of anarchism in America, AK Press, Edinburgh.
Blair G (2000) The Trumps: Three generations of builders and a presidential candidate, Simon and Schuster, New York.
Eisenstadt P (2010) Rochdale Village: Robert Moses, 6,000 families and New York City’s great experiment in integrated housing, Cornell University Press, Ithaca.
Fogelson R (2022) Working Class Utopias: A history of cooperative housing in New York City, Princeton Press, Princeton.
Freeman J B (2000) Working Class New York: Life and labor since World War II, The New Press, New York.
Gordon Lasner M (2012) High Life: Country living in the suburban century, Yale University Press, London.
Kazan A (1929) Our Latest Step Forward, Amalgamated Cooperator bulletin, Nov. 8th 1929.
Kazan A (1968) The Practical Dreamer: The life of Abraham Kazan, father of cooperative housing in the United States, unpublished memoir, as told to Lloyd Kaplan.
Rachlis E and Marqusee J F (1963) The Landlords, Random House, New York.
Robbins G (2023a) Building a Better World, Jewish Socialist, 22nd January 2023 Building a better world | Jewish Socialists' Group
Robbins G (2023b) New York City’s Famed Cooperative Housing is Under Threat, Jacobin, 28th April 2023 New York City’s Famed Cooperative Housing Is Under Threat (jacobin.com)
Sammartino A H (2022) Freedomland: Co-Op City and the Story of New York, Cornell University Press, Ithaca.
Sinclair U (1936) Co-Op: A novel of living together, Farrar and Rinehart, New York.
Glyn Robbins (PhD) is a housing scholar and activist from the UK. He was a Fulbright Scholar at the CUNY Graduate Center in 2021.