Working-class utopias : a history of cooperative housing in New York City / Robert M. Fogelson.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Prologue -- The Origins of Cooperative Housing -- Cooperative Housing after World War II -- The United Housing Foundation -- Co-op City -- A More or Less Auspicious Start -- Fiscal Troubles -- Carrying Charges -- The "Second Front" -- "No Way, We Won't Pay!" -- The Great Rent Strike -- Epilogue.

As opposed to the co-ops and condominiums that we might think of today-buildings built by speculative developers, sold to well-to-do Americans, and conceived of as an integral part of the capitalist market-the country's first cooperative housing was conceived of as an effective way to address the problem of housing low- and moderate-income Americans. Built in the 1960s, Co-op City in the Bronx, New York, remains the one of the largest housing cooperatives in the world. Created by the United Housing Foundation, which for more than a decade had built and managed smaller cooperative housing around New York City, this "city" was designed to accommodate between 55,000 and 60,000 people, an extraordinary population. Working Class Utopias tells the story of Co-op City and the larger cooperative housing movement in New York City from the 1920s to the 1970s, when financial struggles between the UHF and Co-op residents proved to be the beginning of the end of non-profit cooperative housing not only in New York, but elsewhere in the United States. While Co-op City and other non-profit cooperatives still served tens of thousands of people, they were no longer viewed as a solution to the problem of housing working-class Americans. In examining this history, Robert Fogelson allows us to better understand the rise and fall of a once-promising idea-providing insight into the intractability of the housing problem still faced by cities around the country.

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