Working Class Utopias: A History of Cooperative Housing in New York City by Robert M. Fogelson, and Freedomland: Co-Op City and the Story of New York by Annemarie H. Sammartino

Reviewed By Nicholas Dagen Bloom

Working-Class Utopias: A History of Cooperative Housing in New York City
By Robert M. Fogelson
Princeton University Press
October 2022, 308 pg.

Can progressive New Yorkers, frustrated with high rents and for-profit developers, create a movement for large-scale, non-profit housing? The search for quality housing drives discussions among young idealists, many of whom populate my classes at Hunter College’s policy and planning program. Their desire for better housing is ideological and personal, as few have much hope of owning or renting an affordable home in New York City.

Today's progressive housers usually overlook the city’s unique history of cooperative housing as a source of inspiration. The cooperatives built in the twentieth century, at least those retaining a limited profit model, still provide moderate-income city families with stable, low-cost, high-quality apartments. Co-op City achieved these outcomes on an unrivaled scale, minting 15,372 apartments between 1966-1973, and remains the nation’s largest cooperative community. So why is there so little appreciation for communities like Co-op City?

To understand why local cooperatives rank so low in progressive housing discourse, it’s worth reading either of the excellent books under review. Annemarie Sammartino’s Freedomland provides a socially informed history of Co-op City, chronicling its triumphs and travails, with particular attention to resident experiences and long-term outcomes. Legendary urban history Robert M. Fogelson’s Working-Class Utopias offers readers a comprehensive account of the New York cooperative movement, giving special attention to the spectacular collapse of Co-op City’s finances during the 1975-76 rent strike. Both books capture the complexity, and nearly insuperable challenges, faced by cooperative sponsors, state officials, and residents in sustaining communal housing.

Sammartino’s book is the more personal of the two books, focusing almost entirely on Co-op City and informed by her childhood there. A warmth and appreciation come through even as she describes the troubled development. The New York State's Housing Finance Agency (NYSHFA), funded by the Mitchell-Lama program, provided its largest loan to Co-op City in 1965. The United Housing Foundation (UHF), a consortium of labor organizations with a long history of cooperative development, created a subsidiary to build the complex and another, Riverbay Corporation, to manage it. Despite its lackluster architecture of towers-in-the-park, Co-op City was a hive of activity, including associations, cultural life, and struggles over race relations and schools.

Freedomland: Co-Op City and the Story of New York
By Annemarie H. Sammartino
Three Hills (Cornell University Press)
April 2022, 320 pg.

Sammartino’s ability to capture idealism makes the chapters about the spectacular failure of that vision painful. The residents, in the 1970s, felt betrayed by much higher-than-promised maintenance costs, substandard construction, and paternalistic management. They unsuccessfully sued the UHF, and the NYSHFA, all the way to the Supreme Court. At the same time, they pressured local and state officials to take action without a satisfactory result. Having failed in conventional channels, they organized a rent strike from 1975-1976, squirreling away tens of millions of dollars in uncashed checks. Thanks to the size and political sophistication of their community and the threat of default on the largest mortgage NYSHFA ever issued, the Co-op City residents were able to settle the strike in their favor, securing new financing and thus lowering maintenance charge increases.

Sammartino, in later chapters, tracks Co-op City’s changing demographics and its relative success since the 1970s in securing additional state aid to renovate and finance their homes. Co-op City became a form of long-term subsidized housing rather than a self-supporting cooperative. This reliance on state support has an upside. Unlike many other cooperatives that have “gone private,” Co-op City retains low prices for newcomers. The apartments are bright and large, and the complex has been extensively renovated. Like Rochdale Village in Queens, the community is a crucial source of housing for nonwhite working families.

Sammartino, in my opinion, is overly sympathetic to the residents and the rent strike. After all, the strike bankrupted the nation’s largest developer of cooperative housing and likely scared off other nonprofit cooperative sponsors. The strike also mortally wounded the nation’s most productive state housing program, Mitchell-Lama. And despite being at the fore of the rent strike battles, most white/Jewish residents of Co-op City jumped ship for the suburbs or other locales in the 1970s and 1980s. Many likely took on high-interest mortgages and pricey suburban property taxes as the price for moving out. Co-op City, in retrospect, looks like it was a waystation for many white families on their way to the suburbs, a place to save some money but little else. Many residents, in my opinion, were not opposed to higher maintenance; instead, they were just resistant to paying more to live in a racially integrated urban apartment community in the East Bronx.

Fogelson’s book is for those seeking a comprehensive recounting of the cooperative tradition in New York. Fogelson digs deeper into the history of New York housing reform, recounting the struggles over limited-dividend housing, housing legislation state and federal, and the rise of early cooperatives like the Amalgamated Houses. Fogelson orients the story of cooperative housing around its greatest advocate, Abraham E. Kazan, who would lead the UHF to the postwar cooperative boom. Kazan genuinely believed he could build a socialist world within capitalist America, with low-cost tenant-run housing, cooperative stores, and lively communal activities. Kazan could be pragmatic when necessary, too, building massively because of his alliance with Robert Moses. Kazan also cut the architectural frills to deliver high-volume housing.

The details in Fogelson are abundant on every front, particularly in the many chapters devoted to Co-op City. We learn a great deal about the development’s marshy site, the design and related controversy, and the many ups and downs of the financing situation. The densely packed, if readable, chapters running from pages 168-325 focus on the financial problems, lawsuits, and the rent strike. The legal battle is fascinating, with blow-by-blow accounts of arguments from both sides and the decisions. Both Sammartino and Fogelson capture the inventiveness of the rent strikers and the critical role played by Charles Rosen, the charismatic Marxist leader of the rent strike who won the residents a decent deal.

Reading these works will clarify why so few cite Co-op City or Rochdale Village as models: collaboration is complex in an individualistic, capitalist society; cooperation is the exception rather than the rule. A new generation of housing enthusiasts will have to reckon with similar issues if and when they begin to scale up their favored prescriptions for housing reform, such as community land trusts. Reading either of these books is an excellent place to prepare for these challenges.

Professor Nicholas Dagen Bloom, Hunter College, is author most recently of The Great American Transit Disaster: A Century of Austerity, Auto-Centric Planning, and White Flight (Chicago, 2023).