Co-op City

Summary

99% Invisible – Episode: "Co-op City"

Host: Roman Mars
Reported by: Katie Mingle
Date: April 21, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode delves into the story of Co-op City, the largest housing cooperative in the world, located in the Bronx, New York. Through immersive storytelling, archival interviews, and expert commentary, it explores the origins, ambitions, challenges, and legacy of this massive experiment in middle-class urban housing. The episode traces the historical forces—from postwar urban renewal to labor union dreams—that made Co-op City possible, its turbulent fight for resident control, its evolution through racial transition, and its ongoing status as a monument to both the possibilities and pitfalls of collective ambition in American cities.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. First Impressions and the Big Reveal

• [00:00-02:30]
  • Katie Mingle remembers her first sight of the imposing, uniform towers of Co-op City from a Greyhound bus, originally mistaking the complex for public housing due to its scale and appearance.
  • Co-op City is clarified as not a public housing project but a "middle class in-between" as the world's largest housing cooperative.

    “There was something thrilling, but also almost frightening about contemplating the number of individual lives playing out in just one of those skyscrapers.”
    —Katie Mingle, [01:38]

2. The Cooperative Model: A Design for Middle-Class Affordability

• [02:30-05:24]

  • Co-op City’s design and ownership structure: instead of traditional renting or outright ownership, residents buy into a corporation and collectively own the development.
  • Diane Patrick, a Co-op City resident since 1978, shares her perspective:

    “You look at the exterior, you make your judgment, and you just keep moving and you don't give it another thought.”
    —Diane Patrick, [03:08]

  • The unit's affordability ($2,500 investment, $800/month carrying charges covering utilities) is contrasted with Manhattan's sky-high rental market.

• The "In-Between":
  Co-op City offers a rare alternative to the binary of subsidized public housing for the poor or unaffordable market housing for the wealthy—targeting the middle class.

3. Origins of Cooperative Housing in NYC

• [05:53-13:29]

  • Abraham Kazin, a Russian immigrant, is introduced as the driving force behind the union-based cooperative housing movement.

    "He was very interested in cooperatives. This was a viable alternative to capitalism, to market systems that you could sort of develop within an existing capitalist society." —Joshua Freeman, historian, [06:17]

  • Kazin’s vision opposed profit-taking: sellers could recover what they invested, but not profit, keeping housing permanently affordable.
  • Union leaders were initially skeptical:

    “For a long while, I was the laughingstock in the organization. When I spoke about building cooperative housing, all my close friends used to make fun of me.”
    —Abraham Kazin, [08:17]

• Post-War Housing Crisis, Robert Moses, and Slum Clearance

  • The GI Bill, Federal Housing Act of 1949, and urban renewal: emphasis on eradicating slums—often with massive displacement, led by Robert Moses.
  • Moses’ controversial impact:

    “You can't make an omelette without breaking some eggs.”
    —Robert Moses, [16:49]

4. Mitchell-Lama Program and UHF’s Expansion

• [12:02–14:50]
  • The Mitchell-Lama program, launched in 1955, enabled the construction of tens of thousands of affordable, middle-income units—many as co-ops built by the United Housing Foundation (UHF).
  • Example: Penn South Cooperative, ten 20-story towers for garment workers in Chelsea, a “utopian vision” brought to life.
  • Ceremony for Penn South (1962) was attended by major political figures, including JFK.

5. Community Opposition and the Racial/Class Dynamics

• [15:03–18:39]
  • Urban renewal projects, lauded for their ambition, were heavily criticized for erasing existing communities and fostering racial inequity.
  • Cooperative housing became a “white” enterprise, inaccessible to many people of color due to the required equity deposits.
  • Resistance from activists like Jane Jacobs, who argued that supposedly blighted neighborhoods were vibrant, functioning communities and that their demolition was destructive.

6. The Birth and Building of Co-op City

• [23:32–26:34]

  • Co-op City was constructed on the site of a failed amusement park, circumventing the need for forced evictions—an answer to critics of urban renewal.
  • Despite architectural critiques (tall towers, green space, lacking street integration), a sense of community did arise, notably after shared hardships like the blizzard shortly after opening.

    “The architecture did not stand in the way of creating a community at all.”
    —Anne Marie Sammartino, historian and Co-op City native, [26:09]

• Childhood in Co-op City:

  • Anne Marie Sammartino describes an idyllic, if occasionally boring, childhood—suburban lifestyle within city limits.

    “Great place to be a kid, boring place to be a teenager. In other words, this place was basically the suburbs.”
    —Roman Mars, [26:55]

7. Financial Crisis, the Rent/Mortgage Strike, and the Fall of UHF

• [27:26–33:39]
  • Co-op City was completed far over budget; residents faced “carrying charges” much higher than promised.
  • In 1975, residents organized a “rent strike” (technically a mortgage strike), withholding payments for over a year.

    “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... there was this whole sort of like, you don’t understand what it means to be in a cooperative.”
    —Anne Marie Sammartino, [28:22]

  • Strike showcased cooperative spirit but led to government crackdown and withdrawal of UHF control, shifting autonomy to residents.

8. Racial Transition and Lasting Impact

• [34:05–38:09]

  • Original demographics were about 80% white, 20% people of color.
  • By the late 1970s and ’80s, Co-op City transitioned to majority Black and Hispanic, reflecting broader changes in the Bronx.

    “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.” —Anne Marie Sammartino, [36:08]

  • The requirement of an equity deposit, once a barrier, eventually helped stabilize the community amid upheaval.

    “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.”
    —Katie Mingle, [36:56]

• Current Role as a NORC:
  Co-op City is now the country’s largest “naturally occurring retirement community,” providing affordable housing to many on fixed incomes.

9. Legacy and Questions for Today

• [38:31–40:29]

  • Co-op City was once viewed as a failure and drain on government resources, but with time, it stands as a monument to ambitious attempts to solve urban housing crises.

  • The episode closes reflecting on new mayoral ambitions to create large-scale affordable housing—reminding listeners that the problems and dreams that built Co-op City are still very much alive.

    “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.”
    —Katie Mingle, [39:40]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On looking at Co-op City:
  “It had the effect of making me feel very small and insignificant, the way looking at something incomprehensibly large can sometimes do.”
  —Katie Mingle, [01:38]

• On architectural criticism:
  “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.”
  —Quoting Newsweek, [02:30]

• On the co-op structure:
  “All the residents of a cooperative collectively own the corporation that is their building.”
  —Roman Mars, [03:25]

• On the challenge of middle-class housing:
  “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.”
  —Katie Mingle, [05:06]

• On profits in housing:
  “When people moved out and sold their share in the corporation, they get back the money they'd put in, but they wouldn't make a profit.”
  —Roman Mars, [07:51]

• On urban renewal and displacement:
  “There must be people who are discommoded, inconvenienced, or call it what you will on the old theory that you can't make an omelette without breaking some eggs.”
  —Robert Moses, [16:49]

• On community vs. design:
  “The architecture did not stand in the way of creating a community at all.”
  —Anne Marie Sammartino, [26:09]

• On the cooperative spirit in the rent strike:
  “You could say that there was never a greater demonstration of the cooperative spirit than the rent strike that destroyed the United Housing Foundation.”
  —Anne Marie Sammartino, [32:51]

• On Co-op City’s legacy:
  “It now stands as a reminder of what that kind of ambition can create.”
  —Katie Mingle, [39:24]

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• [01:38] – Katie Mingle’s first impression of Co-op City
• [02:30] – Public perception and architectural criticisms
• [03:21] – Diane Patrick on the co-op ownership experience
• [05:24] – Need for middle-class housing
• [06:07] – Abraham Kazin and the cooperative ideal
• [09:17] – Role of Robert Moses and urban renewal
• [12:02] – Founding of United Housing Foundation and Mitchell-Lama program
• [14:06] – Penn South’s vision and ceremony
• [16:49] – Robert Moses’ justification for slum clearance
• [17:20] – Racial and class exclusions in early co-ops
• [19:51] – Setting the stage for Co-op City’s construction
• [25:03] – Opening of Co-op City and early test of community (blizzard)
• [27:26] – Financial issues, cost overruns, and start of mortgage strike
• [32:24] – Outcome of the strike: resident control, end of UHF involvement
• [34:05] – Racial transition in Co-op City
• [36:08] – On stability and community after transition
• [38:31] – Co-op City’s legacy as a NORC and cautionary/aspirational example
• [39:40] – Closing reflections on the challenge of big, ambitious housing policy

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Conclusion

99% Invisible’s "Co-op City" episode weaves together personal stories, history, and architectural analysis to unpack the complex legacy of a singular place. While it lays bare the high cost and political fraughtness of such experiments, it also highlights the rare, enduring community created—and suggests a blueprint for those seeking to solve today’s urban housing crises. The episode closes with a question that lingers long after the credits: Can we once again find the ambition to build homes for all who keep cities running—and can we afford not to try?

Transcript

[Roman Mars]

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[Katie Mingle]

I remember the first time I saw these buildings riding a Greyhound bus into the city from Worcester, Massachusetts.

[Roman Mars]

99pi producer emeritus Katie Mingle is back to tell our story this week.

[Katie Mingle]

I was in my early 20s at the time, and I'd never really seen skyscrapers that were in 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

[Roman Mars]

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, quote, the 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.

[Diane Patrick]

Those comments are exactly why Co Op City is the best kept secret, because it's like hiding in plain sight.

[Katie Mingle]

This is Diane Patrick she lives in Co Op City.

[Diane Patrick]

You look at the exterior, you make your judgment, and you just keep moving and you don't give it another thought.

[Katie Mingle]

Diane moved into her Co Op city apartment in 1978.

[Diane Patrick]

I think I paid $2,500 for the apartment.

[Roman Mars]

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.

[Katie Mingle]

Do you feel like you're an owner, like, does that?

[Diane Patrick]

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.

[Katie Mingle]

On top of that initial $2,500 investment, as 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?

[Diane Patrick]

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.

[Katie Mingle]

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.

[Diane Patrick]

I saw what people were paying for tiny, teeny, teeny little apartments in Manhattan. You know, you'd have to have a big pile of money, endless money, because they're not made for people who are

[Katie Mingle]

just ordinary people, 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.

[Roman Mars]

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.

[Katie Mingle]

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.

[Joshua Freeman]

He was very interested in cooperatives.

[Katie Mingle]

This is Joshua Freeman. He's a historian who's written about labor and housing.

[Joshua Freeman]

This was a viable alternative to capitalism, to market systems that you could sort of develop within an existing capitalist society.

[Roman Mars]

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.

[Joshua Freeman]

These garment workers were mostly living on the Lower east side in these cramped, unhealthy, run down slum tenements.

[Katie Mingle]

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.

[Roman Mars]

This was cooperative housing, and it was actually a concept that New Yorkers already understood.

[Joshua Freeman]

The origins of co ops don't come from the working or radical milieu. This was something like 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 hundred 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 or they think of as selling the apartment, they really selling the shares in the corporation 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.

[Roman Mars]

But that's not how Kazin envisioned his co ops working and 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'd put in, but they wouldn't make a profit.

[Frank Garridi]

Profit.

[Roman Mars]

Removing profit would ensure the building stayed affordable into the future.

[Katie Mingle]

But Kazin 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.

[Abraham Kazin]

For a long while, I was the laughingstock in the organization. When I spoke about building cooperative housing, all my close friends used to make fun of me.

[Katie Mingle]

Haters be damned. By the late 1920s, Kazin and various union partners had built three new cooperative buildings that housed more than 850 working class families.

[Roman Mars]

During the Great Depression and World War II, the work of building cooperative housing, or any housing for that matter, mostly just stopped.

[Katie Mingle]

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 homeownership and the construction of public housing. And it also provided a bunch of money to clear blighted neighborhoods or so called slums.

[Robert Moses]

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.

[Katie Mingle]

That, of course, is Robert Moses, New York City's most prolific and problematic city planner.

[Roman Mars]

As die hard 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.

[Katie Mingle]

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.

[Roman Mars]

But he and others in government also wanted housing for the middle class.

[Anne Marie Sammartino]

In most other places, municipal governments sort of pursue like a two pronged strategy for building new housing after World War II.

[Katie Mingle]

This is Ann Marie Sammartino. She's a professor of history at Oberlin College.

[Anne Marie Sammartino]

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.

[Katie Mingle]

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.

[Joshua Freeman]

Kazin and Moses worked quite closely together and they realized that in a lot of ways they had overlapping visions for the future of the city. You know, that both of them wanted to replace slums with better housing.

[Katie Mingle]

In 1951, Kazin created an organization dedicated to doing just that. It was called the United Housing foundation, or uhf.

[Joshua Freeman]

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 the leader. I mean, he's got lieutenants, but he's the guy.

[Roman Mars]

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 houses housing by offering them low interest rate mortgages and tax breaks for a wonky government program.

[Katie Mingle]

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 Llama. If I may take us on a very quick digression to prove my point, here is Timothee Chalamet on Theo Vaughn's podcast back in 2024.

[Roman Mars]

Same thing, man. I grew up in like a Mitchell Llama. You know about Mitchell Lama?

[Timothée Chalamet]

Oh, yeah, the five.

[Charlie Rosen]

The restaurant stars or whatever.

[Roman Mars]

No, no, no, no, no.

[Joshua Freeman]

The Michelle Lama is like, at this

[Katie Mingle]

point in the interview, Timothy does a pretty bad job of explaining what Mitchell Llama is, but he gets one of the main things right. It was meant to be housing for people of moderate income.

[Roman Mars]

Oh, that damn Mitchell Llama, brother. 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.

[Katie Mingle]

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.

[Roman Mars]

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.

[Joshua Freeman]

Penn south, an extraordinarily ambitious project, was built to provide decent housing for garment workers who could then walk to work. Right. You know, talk about an urbanistic utopian vision, you know, that was it.

[Roman Mars]

15,000 people came to the dedication ceremony for the 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.

[Narrator/Advertiser]

This union deserves the heartiest commendation. I hope others will follow your example and I come here today and ask you to continue to work.

[Katie Mingle]

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.

[Abraham Kazin]

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 ills.

[Katie Mingle]

And here's Robert Moses addressing the audience after Kazin.

[Robert Moses]

I believe that when the dust of the housing battles is settled, this cooperative nonprofit village will go down in history as one of the very best.

[Roman Mars]

The housing battles Moses is referring to is likely the community opposition to the Penn 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.

[Katie Mingle]

Robert Moses was infamously dismissive of his detractors, saying once that the critics build nothing. And also this classic you're never going

[Robert Moses]

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 omelette without breaking some eggs.

[Roman Mars]

In the case of the Penn south cooperative, the broken eggs were 354 homes demolished, 183 stores raised, and nearly 2,000 residents evicted.

[Katie Mingle]

Those evicted residents could apply to live in the new cooperative buildings, but a lot of people couldn't afford it.

[Joshua Freeman]

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.

[Anne Marie Sammartino]

They saw the world in kind of class terms again.

[Katie Mingle]

Anne Marie Sammartino now, of course, the

[Anne Marie Sammartino]

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.

[Katie Mingle]

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

[Anne Marie Sammartino]

them as co owners 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.

[Roman Mars]

Apart from displaced community members, Robert Moses and the UHF had another prominent critic around this time, the writer and activist Jane Jacobs.

[Anne Marie Sammartino]

And what she was saying is like, no, no, no. You know, these places that you're so quick to condemn, both physically condemn and like morally condemn, are actually functioning communities. And 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.

[Katie Mingle]

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. 35 skyscrapers that would house more than 15,000 families.

[Roman Mars]

Coming up, a project that will ultimately destroy the United Housing foundation and the cooperative housing movement that Abraham Kazin had built. That's after the break. This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. Squarespace is an all in one website platform that helps you stand out online, whether you're just getting started or growing your business. It's got everything you need, from securing your domain to building a professional site and showcasing your work, all in one place. Bring your vision to life with AI powered design or curated templates, plus flexible editing tools that help you create something that truly reflects your style. No experience needed. Squarespace makes it easy to share your work, book clients and get paid with built in tools for scheduling, invoicing and email all in one place. I've had a Squarespace site Romanmars.com for 12 years or so and the key for me isn't that it was easy to build, although it was, is that it's easy to maintain. It never gives me any trouble at all. It's great. Head to squarespace.com invisible for a free trial and when you're ready to launch, use offer code Invisible to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. If you're trying to be more intentional about what you wear day to day, Quint can help with that. They've got pieces that feel easy, comfortable and still put together. The fabrics feel elevated and the fits are clean. Think 100% European linen shorts and shirts from $34, lightweight, breathable and comfortable. Everything is priced 50 to 80% less than what you'd find at similar brands. Quince works directly with ethical factories and cuts out the middleman so you're getting premium materials without the markup. So speaking of being intentional about what you wear, I often wear a T shirt when I'm at home working, but then I have to go on a zoom and interview someone that I, you know, respect and admire. And so I have a Quince zip up cashmere sweater on my chair at all times so I can put that thing on, zip it up and look good when I talk to these people. Refresh your everyday with luxury you'll actually use head to quint.com invisible for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada too. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E.com invisible for free shipping and 365 day returns. Quints.com invisible Dell PCs with Intel inside

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[Katie Mingle]

And this is an advertisement for Freedomland, an amusement park in the North Bronx that aimed to teach children about American history through interactive experiences.

[Narrator/Advertiser]

Look at that. It's the Chicago fire of 1871. Hurry up, men. We're going to need volunteers for this one. Everybody man the pump.

[Katie Mingle]

After Freedomland 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. Co Op City.

[Anne Marie Sammartino]

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.

[Katie Mingle]

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'd turned against urban renewal and slum clearance.

[Roman Mars]

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.

[Katie Mingle]

Co Op City opened to its first residents 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.

[Narrator/Advertiser]

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.

[Katie Mingle]

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 I95 that ran right past the cooperative.

[Anne Marie Sammartino]

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 like hot tea or hot cocoa. Meanwhile, kids are having like, snowball fights. And so it becomes celebrated in this kind of Co Op City mythology as, like the creation of a community.

[Katie Mingle]

It was kind of proving the critics wrong.

[Anne Marie Sammartino]

Yeah, exactly. The architecture did not stand in the way of creating a community at all.

[Katie Mingle]

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

[Anne Marie Sammartino]

kind of fun 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.

[Roman Mars]

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.

[Katie Mingle]

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.

[Anne Marie Sammartino]

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.

[Roman Mars]

Building 35 skyscrapers on top of a swamp had not been easy or cheap.

[Katie Mingle]

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.

[Roman Mars]

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.

[Katie Mingle]

And how did the residents see the UHF at this time? Like just another bad landlord.

[Anne Marie Sammartino]

Yes. Yeah, 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.

[Katie Mingle]

The residents of Co Op City were in no mood to hear the UHFs 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.

[Joshua Freeman]

I think you could argue that the UHF was in effect a kind of arm of the government. I mean, 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.

[Katie Mingle]

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.

[Charlie Rosen]

What we're telling the state legislature is either scrap the concept of moderate income housing to keep tax paying citizens in the city or pay for it. But you cannot bring people into this type of housing and believe that some not going to cost money.

[Roman Mars]

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.

[Katie Mingle]

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.

[Roman Mars]

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.

[Katie Mingle]

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.

[Anne Marie Sammartino]

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.

[Roman Mars]

Of course, New York needed those checks rather desperately.

[Katie Mingle]

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.

[Noel Ellison]

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.

[Katie Mingle]

This is Noel Ellison. He's lived in Co Op City since the days of the strike.

[Noel Ellison]

It kind of forced you to get to know your neighbors as well. I think I got a picture of my mother sitting in a meeting with other wives or people from the floor.

[Katie Mingle]

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.

[Roman Mars]

The strike lasted 13 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

[Angie Hicks]

after

[Katie Mingle]

the residents took over Co op City in 1976. The UHF would never build another cooperative.

[Anne Marie Sammartino]

You could say that, like there was never a greater demonstration of the cooperative spirit than the Ren strike that destroyed the United Housing Foundation.

[Joshua Freeman]

Co Op City itself was the quagmire from which the movement could never escape.

[Katie Mingle]

That was 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 neoliberal 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, Michelama was not

[Roman Mars]

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 the finally came knocking.

[Katie Mingle]

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.

[Anne Marie Sammartino]

By 1976, 90% of 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, while

[Roman Mars]

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.

[Charlie Rosen]

So here's a beat that's coming your way.

[Katie Mingle]

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.

[Anne Marie Sammartino]

Here we are, folk the facade guaranteed

[Katie Mingle]

to make any party live. If you don't want to rock, then

[Narrator/Advertiser]

you might as well leave.

[Anne Marie Sammartino]

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 8th grade, all these families moved out.

[Katie Mingle]

Anne Marie says that with this racial transition came some anxiety about crime and what would become of this middle class development.

[Anne Marie Sammartino]

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.

[Roman Mars]

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.

[Anne Marie Sammartino]

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.

[Roman Mars]

Emory 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. 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.

[Katie Mingle]

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.

[Frank Garridi]

We moved in in 1981.

[Katie Mingle]

This is Frank Garridi. 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.

[Frank Garridi]

So they've been there 40, what is it now?

[Diane Patrick]

81.

[Frank Garridi]

So it's 45 years.

[Katie Mingle]

Wow. Do you think the cooperative structure of the place has contributed to kind of how long they've been there? Like, that's a long time to live in a place?

[Frank Garridi]

Yeah, absolutely. You know, they're somewhere between A tenant and an owner, you know, but I. I think the right word is like investment, you know, not just financial, but like 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 that apartment because it's affordable and, you know, we can have healthcare attendants come in and I mean, it's. It's an ideal place still for someone of their income bracket and their stage of life to live.

[Katie Mingle]

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.

[Roman Mars]

There was a period during and after the rent 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 that government should foreclose on the mortgage and evict the residents, walk away from this expensive project and cut its losses.

[Katie Mingle]

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.

[Roman Mars]

Speaking of ambition, the new mayor of New York, Zoran Mamdani, has a plan to build 200,000 units of affordable housing over 10 years. It's a goal that former Mayor Bill de Blasio also had, but failed to accomplish. It won't be easy.

[Katie Mingle]

The last time anyone built housing on this scale in New York City. Well, you just heard the story of 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.

[Roman Mars]

99% invisible was produced this week by Katie Mingle and edited by Christopher Johnson. This episode was mixed by Martin Gonzalez with music by Swan Real and George Lee Lankford. Fact checking by Graham Hacha Some audio from this episode came from the Municipal Archives in New York City and the Oral History archives at Columbia. Thanks to Michael Rohatin for help finding archival material. Thanks also to Linda Lutton, Bernie Silich, Andy Riker, Richard Heitler, and Roseanne Boone, all of whom provided invaluable insights to this reporting. Kathy Tu is our executive producer. Kurt Kolstead is the digital director. The rest of the team includes Chris Berube, Jason De Leon, Emmett Fitzgerald, Delaney Hall, Vivien Leigh, Lashma Dawn Kelly Prime, Joe Rosenberg, Jacob Medina, Gleason Talyn and Rain Stradley and me, Roman Mars. But 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 [e-mail].

[Angie Hicks]

Hi, I'm Angie Hicks, co founder of Angie. One thing I've learned is that you buy a house, but you make it a home. For decades, Angie's helped millions of homeowners hire skilled pros for the projects that matter. Angie the one you trust to find the ones you trust. Find a pro for your [e-mail] Breathe in.

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[Roman Mars]

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[Anne Marie Sammartino]

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[Charlie Rosen]

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[Roman Mars]

Hello beautiful nerds, It's Roman here. If you're loving 99% invisible and you want to hear new episodes ad free and get access to exclusive bonus content, subscribe to SiriusXM Podcast plus on Apple Podcasts or visit siriusxm.com podcastplus to start your free trial today.