As World War II ended and Americans turned their attention to
problems at home, union leaders and other prominent New Yorkers came
to believe that cooperative housing would solve the city’s
century-old problem of providing decent housing at a reasonable cost
for working-class families. Working-Class Utopias tells the
story of this ambitious movement from the construction of the
Amalgamated Houses after World War I to the building of Co-op City,
the world’s largest housing cooperative, four decades later.
Robert Fogelson
brings to life a tumultuous era in the life of New York, drawing on a
wealth of archival materials such as community newspapers, legal
records, and personal and institutional papers. In the early 1950s, a
consortium of labor unions founded the United Housing Foundation
under the visionary leadership of Abraham E. Kazan, who was supported
by Nelson A. Rockefeller, Robert F. Wagner Jr., and Robert Moses.
With the help of the state, which provided below-market-rate
mortgages, and the city, which granted tax abatements, Kazan’s
group built large-scale cooperatives in every borough except Staten
Island. Then came Co-op City, built in the Bronx in the 1960s as a
model for other cities but plagued by unforeseen fiscal problems,
culminating in the longest and costliest rent strike in American
history. Co-op City survived, but the United Housing Foundation did
not, and neither did the cooperative housing movement.
Working-Class
Utopias is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the
housing problem that continues to plague New York and cities across
the nation.