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

by Robert M. Fogelson

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691237954
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	10/18/2022
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	408
File size:	20 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Robert M. Fogelson is professor emeritus of urban studies and history at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the author of several books about American urban history, including The Great Rent Wars: New York, 1917–1929; Bourgeois Nightmares: Suburbia, 1870–1930; and Downtown: Its Rise and Fall, 1880–1950.

Table of Contents

Prologue 1

1 The Origins of Cooperative Housing 9

2 Cooperative Housing after World War II 41

3 The United Housing Foundation 74

4 Co-op City 107

5 A More or Less Auspicious Start 138

6 Fiscal Troubles 168

7 Carrying Charges 196

8 The "Second Front" 224

9 "No Way, We Won't Pay" 254

10 The Great Rent Strike 285

Epilogue 326

Acknowledgments 335

Notes 336

Index 368

Image Credits 384

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“This book is a worthy successor to Robert Fogelson’s The Great Rent Wars: New York, 1917–1929 and indeed to his long list of important and prizewinning publications in urban history. Working-Class Utopias is scholarship at its highest level: deeply researched, offering a wealth of new material and original insights into a neglected aspect of New York City history, and surprisingly pertinent to current debates on the crisis of affordable housing.”—Robert Fishman, author of Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia

“Written by one of the most accomplished and dedicated historians of US cities, Working-Class Utopias confronts one of the greatest accomplishments—and, in the short-term, failures—of the postwar housing system: Co-op City, whose immense size and contentious history have fascinated New Yorkers and housing advocates for decades. No other scholar has spent the time with, or given the attention to, the available primary sources that Fogelson has. No other writer has chronicled the political struggles within and around Co-op City during its period of development through resolution of the ‘rent’ strike in 1976 in greater detail, or with such assurance, deftness, and authority.”—Matthew Gordon Lasner, coauthor of Affordable Housing in New York: The People, Places, and Policies That Transformed a City

Editorial Reviews

"Robert Fogelson deserves recognition for Working-Class Utopias. It is the product of deep and extensive research in primary and secondary sources, which he synthesizes elegantly. Readers interested in New York City history will find much to enjoy in this book."—-John Lepley, New York Labor History Association

From the Publisher