As New York City struggles with an acute shortage of affordable housing, we should remember that New Yorkers once built cooperative housing for people with low and moderate incomes on a massive scale. Central to this effort was the United Housing Foundation, an offshoot of the city’s labor movement that built large cooperative apartment complexes such as Penn South in Manhattan, Rochdale Village in Queens and Co-op City in the Bronx.

The United Housing Foundation is gone and its cooperatives have changed, but they remain islands of affordable housing in an increasingly expensive city. What can we learn from this history as we confront New York’s housing crisis?

Margy Brown, executive director of the Urban Homesteading Assistance Program and previously the Associate Commissioner of Housing Opportunity and Program Services at the New York City's Department of Housing Preservation and Development.

Peter Eisenstadt, author of Rochdale Village: Robert Moses, 6,000 Families, and New York City's Great Experiment in Integrated Housing, is finishing a book on Jackie Robinson and the meaning of integration.

Glyn Robbins, senior lecturer at London Metropolitan University and Fulbright scholar at Rutgers University-Newark, is working on a biography of Abraham Kazan, founder of the United Housing Foundation.

Robert Snyder, Manhattan Borough Historian, is professor emeritus of American Studies and Journalism at Rutgers University-Newark and author of When the City Stopped: Stories from New York's Essential Workers