transcript
Speaker 1:
[00:00] This episode is brought to you by Progressive, where drivers who save by switching save nearly $750 on average. Plus, auto customers qualify for an average of seven discounts. Quote now at progressive.com to see if you could save. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates national average 12-month savings of $744 by new customer survey who saved with Progressive between June 2022 and May 2023. Potential savings will vary. Discounts not available in all states and situations. Ever invest in something that seemed incredible at first, but didn't live up to the hype? Marketers know that feeling. They optimize for the numbers that look great, like impressions, but then they don't see revenue. LinkedIn has a word for that, bull spend. Instead, you can get the highest ROAS of major ad networks with LinkedIn ads. Cut the bull spend. Advertise on LinkedIn. Spend $250 and get a $250 credit. Go to linkedin.com/invisible. Terms apply. This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. If you've ever driven into New York City from the north, there's a good chance you've passed by a massive cluster of high-rise apartment buildings just as you enter the Bronx. Thirty-five buildings in total. All of them with identical brick facades, all over 20 stories tall.
Speaker 2:
[01:24] I remember the first time I saw these buildings, riding a Greyhound bus into the city from Worcester, Massachusetts.
Speaker 1:
[01:32] 99PI producer Emeritus Katie Mingle is back to tell our story this week.
Speaker 2:
[01:36] I was in my early 20s at the time, and I'd never really seen skyscrapers that weren't office buildings. These buildings, I could tell, were people's homes. I could see laundry hanging on balconies way up on like the 22nd floor. There was something thrilling, but also almost frightening, about contemplating the number of individual lives playing out in just one of those skyscrapers. It had the effect of making me feel very small and insignificant. The way looking at something incomprehensibly large can sometimes do. I think I assumed at the time that what I was looking at was a public housing project, but I know now that it wasn't. This cluster of high rises was and is the largest housing cooperative in the world, Co-op City.
Speaker 1:
[02:29] When Co-op City opened in the late 1960s, people hated the way it looked. Journalists and architecture critics thought the buildings embodied everything that was wrong with modernist architecture. Newsweek said, The towers of New York City's Co-op City rise bleak and spectrally through the smog, a prospect so remote and cheerless that affluent commuters often shudder when they pass it.
Speaker 3:
[02:54] Those comments are exactly why Co-op City is the best kept secret, because it's like hiding in plain sight.
Speaker 2:
[03:04] This is Diane Patrick. She lives in Co-op City.
Speaker 3:
[03:07] You look at the exterior, you make your judgment, and you just keep moving, and you don't give it another thought.
Speaker 2:
[03:15] Diane moved into her Co-op City apartment in 1978.
Speaker 3:
[03:20] I think I paid $2,500 for the apartment.
Speaker 1:
[03:24] Diane doesn't pay rent, but she doesn't exactly own the unit either. Technically, when she handed over that $2,500, she was buying a share in a corporation. This is how Co-ops work. The housing development itself is a corporation, and when you buy a share, you are buying the right to live in a specific unit. Together, all the residents of a cooperative collectively own the corporation that is their building.
Speaker 2:
[03:49] Do you feel like you're an owner? Like, does that?
Speaker 3:
[03:53] Yes, we can do things inside our unit, whatever we want. We do our own painting and flooring and whatever improvements we want to do.
Speaker 2:
[04:05] On top of that initial $2,500 investment, every month Diane pays what are called carrying charges. For Diane, these are about $800 a month, and they cover the mortgage and utilities like heat, electricity and air conditioning. How big is your apartment? Like, what does it look like?
Speaker 3:
[04:25] It's gorgeous. I think it's like 850 square feet. It's large and it's beautiful. And it's large and it's beautiful.
Speaker 2:
[04:43] Diane used to work in real estate, so she's particularly aware of how lucky she is to have a place she likes at a price she can afford.
Speaker 3:
[04:51] I saw what people were paying for tiny, teeny, teeny little apartments in Manhattan. You know, you have to have a big pile of money, endless money, because they're not made for people who are just ordinary people.
Speaker 2:
[05:07] Not made for ordinary people. I know what Diane is getting at here. In major cities like New York, sometimes it feels like there's public housing for low income families and market rate housing that is insanely expensive with not much in between.
Speaker 1:
[05:23] Co-op City, though, is that in between in a couple of different ways. It's in between renting and owning, and it offers some of the perks of both. It's also in between in terms of cost. Co-op City was specifically intended to be affordable for middle class New Yorkers. In fact, it was part of a whole movement to build this kind of in between middle class housing. Co-op City was the crowning achievement of that movement and also the end of it.
Speaker 2:
[05:51] This story begins with a Russian immigrant named Abraham Kazin. In the early 1900s, Kazin was a young socialist and union organizer. But what he was really passionate about actually went beyond the normal work of unions.
Speaker 4:
[06:05] He was very interested in cooperatives.
Speaker 2:
[06:10] This is Joshua Freeman. He's a historian who's written about labor and housing.
Speaker 4:
[06:15] This was a viable alternative to capitalism, to market systems that you could sort of develop within an existing capitalist society.
Speaker 1:
[06:27] Kazin pursued a few different cooperative ventures before turning his attention to the thing that would become his life's work, housing. At this point, he's an organizer for the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union of America, which represented garment workers.
Speaker 4:
[06:41] These garment workers were mostly living on the lower east side in these cramped, unhealthy, run-down slum tenements.
Speaker 2:
[06:52] By 1920 or so, Kazin was convinced that the union should help get rid of the predatory landlords who owned these tenements. He thought that the union should construct its own apartment buildings and let its members become collective owners.
Speaker 1:
[07:06] This was cooperative housing, and it was actually a concept that New Yorkers already understood.
Speaker 4:
[07:12] The origins of co-ops don't come from the working or radical milieu. This was something that rich people came up with. You know, I'm sitting in a co-op building right now. I live in a building with about 100 apartments, and the 100 of us residents, we collectively own this building. But it's a middle class, an upper middle class building. And if someone moves out, they sell their apartment. When they think of it selling the apartment, they're really selling the shares in the corporation, you know, on the open market. And if they sell it for more than they bought it, more power to them, they have to keep the money.
Speaker 1:
[07:49] But that's not how Cason envisioned his co-ops working. In the kind of co-ops he wanted to build, when people moved out and sold their share in the corporation, they get back the money they put in, but they wouldn't make a profit. Removing profit would ensure the building stayed affordable into the future.
Speaker 2:
[08:06] But Cason said, at first, the union brass wasn't all that interested in his cooperative housing idea. Here he is in an interview that he did late in his life.
Speaker 5:
[08:15] For a long while, I was the laughing stock in the organization when I spoke about building cooperative housing. All my close friends used to make fun of me.
Speaker 2:
[08:29] Haters be damned by the late 1920s, Hazen and various union partners had built three new cooperative buildings that housed more than 850 working class families.
Speaker 1:
[08:41] During the Great Depression and World War II, the work of building cooperative housing or any housing, for that matter, mostly just stopped.
Speaker 2:
[08:49] Which is why after World War II, New York, along with a lot of urban America, found itself in a pretty acute housing shortage. In 1949, the federal government passed the American Housing Act to help fix it. The new legislation had provisions to promote home ownership and the construction of public housing. And it also provided a bunch of money to clear blighted neighborhoods, or so-called slums.
Speaker 6:
[09:15] If we don't clean out these slums, the central areas are going to rot. There are very few cases where genuine slums can be fixed up in any other way than by tearing them down.
Speaker 2:
[09:31] That, of course, is Robert Moses, New York City's most prolific and problematic city planner.
Speaker 1:
[09:38] As diehard fans of the show will know, Robert Moses did more to reshape New York City in the 20th century than probably any other single person. After the American Housing Act was passed, Moses became head of New York City's Slum Clearance Committee.
Speaker 2:
[09:53] Part of what Moses wanted to do was replace these blighted buildings with public housing. And in the post-war years, he did oversee the construction of a lot of public housing for low-income renters.
Speaker 1:
[10:05] But he and others in government also wanted housing for the middle class.
Speaker 7:
[10:10] In most other places, municipal governments sort of pursue like a two-pronged strategy for building new housing after World War II.
Speaker 2:
[10:18] This is Anne-Marie Sammartino. She's a professor of history at Oberlin College.
Speaker 7:
[10:23] On the one hand, there's housing projects for the very poor that are in the urban core. And then there's single-family, you know, sort of mortgage support for single-family homes. New York's a little bit different because the mayor and other people in city government, they want to keep the middle class. And when they're saying this, they don't just mean the white middle class, but they mostly mean the white middle class living in New York City.
Speaker 2:
[10:48] But it wasn't easy to find developers who wanted to get into the business of slum clearance in order to build homes for the middle class. On the short list of groups willing to do the work were the unions and socialists. They'd already started building housing cooperatives in blighted neighborhoods and were anxious to build more. And the person most associated with this movement was our guy, Abraham Kazin.
Speaker 4:
[11:14] Kazin and Moses were quite closely together, and they realized that in a lot of ways, they had overlapping visions for the future of the city. Both of them wanted to replace slums with better housing.
Speaker 2:
[11:30] In 1951, Kazin created an organization dedicated to doing just that. It was called the United Housing Foundation, or UHF.
Speaker 4:
[11:40] And it's an alliance, basically, of existing cooperative projects, of unions, and working-class fraternal groups. So, you know, they band together to create the UHF. And Kazin is like, you know, the leader. I mean, he's got lieutenants, but he's the guy.
Speaker 1:
[12:01] Then, in 1955, New York State created a program called Mitchell-Lama. It gave private developers, like the UHF, more incentive to build middle-class housing by offering them low-interest-rate mortgages and tax breaks.
Speaker 2:
[12:14] For a wonky government program, Mitchell-Lama is still weirdly well-known in New York. And one of the many answers people might give to the question, where did you grow up? Like, I grew up in a brownstone. I grew up in the projects. I grew up in a Mitchell-Lama. If I may take us on a very quick digression to prove my point, here is Timothy Chalamet on Theo Vaughn's podcast back in 2024. Same thing, man.
Speaker 1:
[12:39] I grew up in a Mitchell-Lama.
Speaker 8:
[12:40] You know about Mitchell-Lama? Oh, yeah, the restaurant stars or whatever.
Speaker 7:
[12:43] No, no, no, no. Mitchell-Lama is like...
Speaker 2:
[12:46] At this point in the interview, Timothy does a pretty bad job of explaining what Mitchell-Lama is, but he gets one of the main things right. It was meant to be housing for people of moderate income.
Speaker 9:
[12:58] Oh, that damn Mitchell-Lama, brother.
Speaker 1:
[13:00] Absolutely. Oh, that's me, baby, moderate. Mitchell-Lama was launched in an era of big government liberalism. The state was subsidizing not just housing for the poor, but for people of middle income, like construction workers and teachers. In the Mitchell-Lama years, the program would finance over 100,000 units of affordable housing for the middle class. Many of them would be cooperatives built by the United Housing Foundation.
Speaker 2:
[13:28] The United Housing Foundation started relatively small. They put up a couple of buildings in the Bronx, about 400 apartments in total. But at the opening ceremony for one of the buildings, Robert Moses said it wasn't enough, that at the current rate, it would take 50 years to clear the city's slums. Abraham Kazin got the message. The projects would only get bigger from there.
Speaker 1:
[13:52] By the late 1950s, they had finished a project called the Penn South Cooperative. Ten buildings, all of them about 20 stories tall. It was an absolutely massive development in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan.
Speaker 4:
[14:05] Penn South, an extraordinarily ambitious project, was built to provide decent housing for garment workers who could then walk to work. Talk about it, urbanistic utopian vision, that was it.
Speaker 1:
[14:21] Fifteen thousand people came to the dedication ceremony for Penn South Cooperative in 1962. In attendance was an absolute who's who of power brokerage. Robert Moses, of course, but also Nelson Rockefeller, who was governor of New York at the time. Eleanor Roosevelt was there, and the president of the AFL-CIO, the president of the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union, and oh yeah, the president of the United States of America, John F. Kennedy.
Speaker 5:
[14:49] This union deserves the hardiest commendation.
Speaker 10:
[14:52] I hope others will follow your example.
Speaker 11:
[14:55] And I come here today and ask you to continue to work.
Speaker 2:
[15:01] But it wasn't all sunshine and rainbows and housing for the working class. In the speeches that day between the self-congratulations, you can hear something else. The people responsible for building this massive housing development are defensive. They seem to feel embattled. Here's Abraham Kazin at the podium.
Speaker 5:
[15:24] Contrary to the false impression that this type of redevelopment destroys existing neighborhoods, we are proud to say that developments like this remove from the city a cancerous blight, the breeding ground of crime and delinquency, and all other social yields.
Speaker 2:
[15:45] And here's Robert Moses addressing the audience after Kazin.
Speaker 6:
[15:49] I believe that when the dust of the housing battles is settled, this cooperative non-profit village will go down in history as one of the very best.
Speaker 1:
[16:06] The housing battles Moses is referring to is likely the community opposition to the Ten South Development and others like it. During each project, old neighborhoods had been destroyed and residents displaced. Robert Caro, author of The Power Broker, estimated that Moses evicted 250,000 people to build highways in New York City, and another 250,000 for urban renewal projects like slum clearance and housing development. Efforts to rehouse the displaced were half-hearted at best.
Speaker 2:
[16:38] Robert Moses was infamously dismissive of his detractors, saying once that the critics build nothing, and also this classic.
Speaker 6:
[16:46] You're never going to get unanimous approval. There must be people who are discommoded, inconvenienced, or call it what you will, on the old theory that you can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs.
Speaker 1:
[17:00] In the case of the Penn South Cooperative, the broken eggs were 354 homes demolished, 183 stores raised, and nearly 2,000 residents evicted.
Speaker 2:
[17:11] Those evicted residents could apply to live in the new cooperative buildings, but a lot of people couldn't afford it.
Speaker 4:
[17:18] You know, union-sponsored, nonprofit housing was affordable to a plumber or a garment worker with a steady job and a union contract. It was not necessarily affordable to a lower level of the working class. The poorer segment of slum dwellers were more likely to be African-American or Puerto Rican. So in fact, a lot of the union co-ops were almost all white. You know, I mean, in some cases they were literally all white.
Speaker 7:
[17:50] They saw the world in kind of class terms.
Speaker 2:
[17:53] Again, Anne Marie Sanmartino.
Speaker 7:
[17:56] Now, of course, the world does not just exist in class terms. There's also racial dynamics here. And the leaders of the United Housing Foundation, from the beginning, were clear that they were fine with anybody of any racial background if they could afford to pay the equity deposit.
Speaker 2:
[18:12] The UHF was stubbornly philosophically committed to the equity deposit. They felt like this investment was a crucial piece of what they were building. This in-between housing that kept the middle class in the city by offering them apartments they could afford and empowered them as co-owners.
Speaker 7:
[18:29] Because they saw that this gave people a stake in the community, that they would not have if they were mere renters in their minds.
Speaker 1:
[18:38] Apart from displaced community members, Robert Moses in the UHF had another prominent critic around this time, the writer and activist Jane Jacobs.
Speaker 7:
[18:47] What she was saying is like, no, no, no. These places that you're so quick to condemn, both physically condemn and morally condemn, are actually functioning communities. That when you build new housing, what you're doing is destroying community and you're building something sterile from which no community can emerge.
Speaker 2:
[19:10] The tide was shifting against modernist architecture, against Robert Moses and his urban renewal policies, and soon against the project of big government liberalism that made all of this building possible. But for now, the United Housing Foundation and Robert Moses still had momentum and money and their biggest project was still ahead of them. Not just their biggest project, actually, but one of the biggest residential housing developments ever constructed. Thirty-five skyscrapers that would house more than fifteen thousand families.
Speaker 1:
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Speaker 12:
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Speaker 1:
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Speaker 5:
[23:42] 205 acres of fun and tradition from San Francisco.
Speaker 2:
[23:46] This is an advertisement for Freedom Land, an amusement park in the North Bronx that aimed to teach children about American history through interactive experiences.
Speaker 5:
[23:58] Look at that! It's the Chicago Fire of 1871. Hurry up, man! We're going to need volunteers for this one. Everybody man the pump!
Speaker 2:
[24:07] After Freedom Land went bust in 1964, Robert Moses saw an opportunity to buy a 400-acre parcel of land for relatively cheap. This would be the site of the United Housing Foundation's biggest project yet. That cluster of 35 skyscrapers that I would marvel at years later from the Greyhound Bus.
Speaker 7:
[24:28] Co-op City. Co-op City is the largest project for the United Housing Foundation and the largest by far mortgage that is ever sponsored by Mitchell-Lama.
Speaker 2:
[24:39] Building Co-op City on the site of a defunct amusement park, which itself was built on a swamp, meant that no one would need to be evicted. This was basically a concession to Jane Jacobs and other critics who turned against urban renewal and slum clearance.
Speaker 1:
[24:56] But in many other respects, the development the UHF had in mind was exactly the kind that Jacobs hated. Skyscrapers set back from the street and surrounded by green space. Jacobs had warned that true community could not emerge from places like this.
Speaker 2:
[25:13] Co-op City opened to its first residence in December of 1968. A few months later, a blizzard hit New York. And this blizzard would be an early test of whether a community could emerge in this new development.
Speaker 11:
[25:29] This is Mayor John Lindsay. As I'm reporting to you over the radio this morning, our city is blanketed with a very, very heavy blanket of snow. The worst problem that we have in the city is abandoned cars.
Speaker 2:
[25:45] People were just leaving their vehicles right there on the road and setting out on foot all over the city. Including on the stretch of I-95 that ran right past the cooperative.
Speaker 7:
[25:56] And the story goes that people leave the buildings, they come, they're helping stranded travelers, they're bringing them in, they're giving them hot tea or hot cocoa. Meanwhile, kids are having snowball fights, and so it becomes celebrated in this kind of co-op city mythology as the creation of a community.
Speaker 2:
[26:16] It was kind of proving the critics wrong.
Speaker 7:
[26:19] Yeah, exactly. The architecture did not stand in the way of creating a community at all.
Speaker 2:
[26:26] Anne-Marie wasn't there for the blizzard, but she actually did grow up in co-op city, and she remembers a pretty idyllic childhood there, riding her bike around the vast green spaces that surrounded the buildings, playing with the other kids, and then as a teenager just wandering around looking for any kind of fun.
Speaker 7:
[26:46] I remember being like 13 years old when there's this big mall that opened, and it had the first store that opened in my memory at least was a hardware store, and me and all these other kids my age just went to the hardware store just to like look at wrenches or whatever because there was like nothing to do.
Speaker 1:
[27:05] Great place to be a kid, boring place to be a teenager. In other words, this place was basically the suburbs. Co-op city and a lot of other UHF cooperatives were providing alternatives to suburbia that helped convince the middle class to stay in the city.
Speaker 2:
[27:20] When he died in 1971, Abraham Kazin had built thousands of units of cooperative housing for middle class New Yorkers. Co-op city had been the crowning achievement of his vision, but he wasn't there to see it unravel.
Speaker 7:
[27:35] So basically Co-op city was built, it originally was supposed to have a $235 million mortgage. That mortgage balloons to $391 million by the time construction is completed.
Speaker 1:
[27:47] Building 35 skyscrapers on top of a swamp had not been easy or cheap.
Speaker 2:
[27:53] During the years of construction, costs rose and rose because of inflation. And the United Housing Foundation had to take out a larger mortgage from the state to pay for it.
Speaker 1:
[28:04] A bigger mortgage for Co-op city meant that each resident would have to pay higher carrying charges. Those monthly fees that went towards the mortgage and utilities. At least that's what the state wanted. The residents disagreed. They'd been promised a certain monthly cost by the United Housing Foundation before construction even began.
Speaker 2:
[28:23] And how did the residents see the UHF at this time? Like, just another bad landlord?
Speaker 7:
[28:32] Yes. They'd been duped by the United Housing Foundation. And they found the United Housing Foundation very condescending. Because if you were a resident and you went to the United Housing Foundation and you said, hey, I don't like the amount this costs or the air conditioning in my apartment isn't working or whatever complaint you had, there was this whole sort of like, you don't understand what it means to be in a cooperative.
Speaker 2:
[28:57] The residents of Co-Op City were in no mood to hear the UHF's lecturing on the collective sacrifices required to live in a cooperative. Despite being shareholders or co-owners of the place, early on, the residents had very little say in what happened to it. They were not allowed to be voting members on the board that controlled the Co-Op, that made decisions on things like whether carrying charges went up or who they would hire to repair the roof. Members of the United Housing Foundation controlled Co-Op City's board and they made those kinds of decisions.
Speaker 4:
[29:30] I think you could argue that the UHF was in effect a kind of arm of the government, you know? I mean, you know, they became so central to what the UHF did in terms of providing mortgage money and tax abatements and zoning and land clearance that in a way you could kind of argue they captured the UHF.
Speaker 2:
[29:52] Co-Op City residents wanted the UHF to get out of their way. They wanted to run Co-Op City themselves and they wanted the state to give them relief on their mortgage. Here's Co-Op City resident Charlie Rosen on NBC saying basically, hey, you are the ones who wanted to keep the middle class in the city, so put your money where your mouth is.
Speaker 13:
[30:13] And what we're telling the state legislature is either scrap the concept of moderate income housing to keep taxpaying citizens in the city or pay for it, but you cannot bring people into this type of housing and believe that it's not going to cost money.
Speaker 1:
[30:29] But the cost of construction was not the only thing that had changed during the years while Co-op City was being built. As the 1960s became the 1970s, New York City was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. New York State was not much better off. Essential services were being cut, government workers laid off. State officials could hardly justify giving more money to a middle class housing development.
Speaker 2:
[30:52] So the state held firm. The mortgage was what it was, and the residents of Co-op City would have to find a way to pay it.
Speaker 1:
[30:59] In response, the residents of Co-op City decided to strike. In 1975, after years of cost increases and no progress negotiating with the state, residents began withholding their monthly carrying charges.
Speaker 2:
[31:13] They called it a rent strike, but technically it was really more like a mortgage strike. Every month during the strike, the steering committee collected the carrying charges from the residents.
Speaker 7:
[31:24] They would collect all of these checks, but they wouldn't cash them. They would just hold all of the checks. Like, okay, well, you now state have to negotiate with us. We have the checks and you can't, essentially you can't have them.
Speaker 1:
[31:37] Of course, New York needed those checks rather desperately.
Speaker 2:
[31:41] So the state did what it could to stop the strike. It assessed fines on the strike organizers, and it stopped providing certain kinds of maintenance to the buildings. The residents would have to do some things themselves.
Speaker 13:
[31:53] People were sort of washing the floors in the halls of their own building and the public halls of their own buildings. You know, I think my mother chipped in, pitched in to help mop the public hall floors.
Speaker 2:
[32:06] This is Noel Ellison. He's lived in Co-op City since the days of the strike.
Speaker 13:
[32:11] It kind of forced you to get to know your neighbors as well. I think I've got a picture of my mother sitting in a meeting with other wives or people from the floor.
Speaker 2:
[32:23] Noel remembers it all feeling really well organized, which makes sense because a lot of the residents of Co-op City belonged to unions. They knew how to run a strike.
Speaker 1:
[32:33] The strike lasted thirteen months. In the end, the state agreed to help with some large repairs that were needed on the buildings, but the residents didn't get any significant relief on their mortgage. They did, however, get control of Co-op City. The United Housing Foundation was out.
Speaker 2:
[32:53] After the residents took over Co-op City in 1976, the UHF would never build another cooperative.
Speaker 7:
[33:01] You could say that, like, there was never a greater demonstration of the cooperative spirit than the rent strike that destroyed the United Housing Foundation.
Speaker 4:
[33:11] Co-op City itself was the quagmire from which the movement could never escape. That was it.
Speaker 2:
[33:18] It wasn't only that Co-op City had been a disaster for the UHF. By the mid-1970s, the project of big government liberalism was over, and a small government neo-liberal era had begun. Abraham Kazin had died. Robert Moses was more or less retired. And although many of the existing Mitchell-Lama developments in New York would continue to receive government subsidies, nothing new would be built under the program after the late 70s.
Speaker 1:
[33:48] Mitchell-Lama was not the only thing to lose funding in the 1970s. A worldwide recession meant that it was a period of austerity for the whole country, and certainly for New York. The city pulled back on essential services like police and firefighters. Unemployment and crime went up. People who could leave the city did, and the white flight that Robert Moses had tried to stave off finally came knocking.
Speaker 2:
[34:15] Co-op City was no exception. Early residents had been about 80% white, the vast majority of them Jewish, and about 20% people of color. This had been similar to the racial makeup of the Bronx at the time. But by the mid-1970s, the Bronx was changing, and so was Co-op City.
Speaker 7:
[34:35] By 1976, 90% of the people on the waiting list to move into Co-op City are black and Hispanic. Co-op City goes from being a majority white development to being one that is not, really over the course of the 1980s.
Speaker 1:
[34:51] While the orthodox synagogue on the grounds of Co-op City scaled back services for lack of congregants, the cooperative's own Harry S. Truman High School began offering a class on African-American studies, and the development became a hub of early hip hop culture.
Speaker 14:
[35:05] So here's a beat that's coming your way.
Speaker 2:
[35:10] In a 1986 documentary about rap in New York City, called Big Fun in the Big Town, the filmmakers interviewed a group of students from Harry S. Truman High on the grounds of Co-op City. You can see the skyscrapers in the background.
Speaker 14:
[35:24] Here we are, folk, the first time, guaranteed to make it any party line. So just land as you have. If you please. And if you don't want to rock, then you might as well leave.
Speaker 7:
[35:33] What Co-op City was undergoing in the 1980s was indeed a racial transition. And I remember this very clearly growing up. Like when I was in eighth grade, all these families moved out.
Speaker 2:
[35:45] Anne-Marie says that with this racial transition came some anxiety about crime and what would become of this middle class development.
Speaker 7:
[35:55] There's all these anxieties about Co-op City's supposed decline, anxieties that were voiced by white residents of Co-op City for sure, but also by black residents of Co-op City.
Speaker 1:
[36:06] And crime did go up some in the 1980s, as it did all over New York City. But a lot of this decline that people worried about at Co-op City, Anne-Marie says it just never really came to pass.
Speaker 7:
[36:18] You know, often when you talk about neighborhoods that undergo like racial change, you know, where there's white flight, it's either a story of violence or a story of, you know, neglect or whatever. And Co-op City, it's not really that story. Co-op City did become a majority black community by 1990. It has remained that way to this day, but it has stayed at the same time, a middle class community.
Speaker 1:
[36:44] Anne-Marie says that Co-op City's ability to stay middle class, even as it went through a big racial transition, may have had something to do with that equity deposit, the thing that the UHF had always been so adamant about. In the early years, that deposit had been a barrier to people of color, but by the mid-1970s, the black middle class had grown, and more families could afford the upfront investment.
Speaker 2:
[37:06] And that investment may have helped create some stability during a decade when much of the Bronx was emptying out. It's harder to just pick up and leave when you have to sell your share, or when you feel tied to a place not just as a renter but as a co-owner.
Speaker 15:
[37:23] We moved in in 1981.
Speaker 2:
[37:25] This is Frank Garritti. His parents, who are Puerto Rican, moved to Co-Op City during its big racial shift in the 80s, and they're still there today.
Speaker 15:
[37:34] They've been there 40, what is it now? It's 81, so it's 45 years.
Speaker 2:
[37:39] Wow. Do you think the cooperative structure of the place has contributed to how long they've been there? That's a long time to live in a place.
Speaker 15:
[37:50] Yeah, absolutely. There's somewhere between a tenant and an owner. But I think the right word is investment. Not just financial, but investment in a stake in a community that a typical New York tenant did not have. I don't want my parents to go anywhere. I want them to stay right in the apartment because it's affordable. And we can have health care attendants come in. It's an ideal place still for someone of their income bracket and their stage of life to live.
Speaker 2:
[38:18] Frank's parents are part of a huge constituency of older residents who currently live in Co-op City. In fact, the development has become the largest naturally occurring retirement community, or NORC, in the US. Partly because it's an affordable place to live on a fixed income in a very expensive city.
Speaker 1:
[38:41] There was a period during and after the wrench strike when Co-op City was looked at as a failure. The state had subsidized the building of this massive and many thought ugly cluster of skyscrapers. And then its residents refused for over a year to pay their own mortgage. There were politicians and pundits during the strike that suggested government should foreclose on the mortgage and evict the residents, walk away from this expensive project, and cut its losses.
Speaker 2:
[39:09] And it's true that the development has needed continued subsidies from the state over the years. Building on top of a swamp has meant ongoing structural issues that residents have not been able to afford on their own. But if Co-op City once served as a cautionary tale about the perils of big government ambition, it now stands as a reminder of what that kind of ambition can create.
Speaker 1:
[39:34] Speaking of ambition, the new mayor of New York, Zoran Mamdani, has a plan to build 200,000 units of affordable housing over ten years. It's a goal that former mayor Bill de Blasio also had, but failed to accomplish. It won't be easy.
Speaker 2:
[39:50] The last time anyone built housing on this scale in New York City, well, you just heard the story of it. It was after World War II, spearheaded by people like Robert Moses and Abraham Kazin. They made a lot of extremely harmful mistakes along the way. Bulldozing neighborhoods, displacing residents, treating whole communities like they were expendable. But the ambition to solve a housing crisis wasn't a mistake. And in a city once again wrestling with how to house the people who keep it running, the question isn't whether the government should attempt something that big again. It's whether it can afford not to.
Speaker 1:
[40:39] 99% Invisible was produced this week by Katie Minkle and edited by Christopher Johnson. This episode was mixed by Martine Gonzalez with music by Swan Real and George Langford. Fact-checking by Graham Hayesha. Some audio from this episode came from the municipal archives in New York City and the Oral History Archives at Columbia. Thanks to Michael Rohatton for help finding archival material. Thanks also to Linda Lutten, Bernie Silich, Andy Riker, Richard Heitler and Roseanne Boone, all of whom provided invaluable insights to this reporting. Cathy Tu is our executive producer, Kurt Kohlstedt is the digital director. The rest of the team includes Chris Berube, Jason DeLeon, Emmett Fitzgerald, Delaney Hall, Vivian Ley, Lashma Don, Kelly Prine, Joe Rosenberg, Jacob Medina Gleason, Talon and Rain Stradley, and me, Roman Mars. The 99% Invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. We are part of the SiriusXM Podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building, in beautiful Uptown, Oakland, California. You can find us on all the usual social media sites, as well as our own Discord server. There's a link to that, as well as every past episode of 99PI at 99pi.org.
Speaker 10:
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