Working-Class Utopias: A History of Cooperative Housing in New York City

by Robert M Fogelson

One of the nation’s foremost urban historians traces the history of cooperative housing in New York City from the 1920s through the 1970s

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.

Genres: Nonfiction, History

408 pages, Hardcover

Published October 18, 2022

Reviews

[Aslihan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this book for research on housing cooperatives. The book provides a detailed account of the largest cooperative housing example in the USA and in the world, but the details provided are more of a chronicle of the process by which the cooperative operated, started the project and established a residential area for 15,000 families. There’s also a reference to political and civil actors involved in the debates and the decision-making process, especially in regards to the financing and the completion of the project. However there is a little reference to the conceptual debate on housing cooperatives, project housing, collective ownership or anything of that sort. I thought the book was written by a journalist and was surprised to see that the author was an urban historian, an emeritus professor at MIT. The lack of theoretical and conceptual references also tells us how the study of the urban setting evolved overtime. It’s a useful book if you want to know about the history of housing in New York City, but it’s not central if you’re seeking critical debate overurban housing crisis.