Co-op City: The Rise, Revolt, and Resilience of the World's Largest Housing Cooperative

This episode of 99% Invisible tells the story of Co-op City, a massive cluster of 35 identical high-rise apartment buildings in the Bronx that became the world's largest housing cooperative—and the unlikely site of a dramatic resident revolt that ultimately destroyed the movement that built it. Through interviews with historians, longtime residents, and archival audio, the episode traces how a socialist-inspired vision for middle-class housing in New York City rose from the ashes of urban renewal, nearly collapsed under its own ambition, and then survived to become something its creators never imagined: a stable, majority-Black middle-class community and the largest naturally occurring retirement community in the United States.

0:00The Monument That Hides in Plain Sight

The episode opens with producer Katie Mingle describing her first encounter with Co-op City as a young woman riding a Greyhound bus from Worcester, Massachusetts into New York City. She saw 35 skyscrapers with identical brick facades, all over 20 stories tall, with laundry hanging from balconies on the 22nd floor. She assumed she was looking at a public housing project, but she was wrong. This was—and remains—the largest housing cooperative in the world.

When Co-op City opened in the late 1960s, architecture critics savaged it. Newsweek wrote that "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." But longtime resident Diane Patrick, who moved in during 1978, sees those dismissive reactions differently: "Those comments are exactly why Co-op City is the best kept secret, because it's like hiding in plain sight. You look at the exterior, you make your judgment, and you just keep moving and you don't give it another thought."

Diane paid $2,500 for her apartment in 1978—not to own the unit outright, but to buy a share in a corporation that collectively owns the entire development. She now pays about $800 per month in "carrying charges" covering the mortgage, heat, electricity, and air conditioning. Her apartment is roughly 850 square feet, and she describes it as "gorgeous." Having worked in real estate, she's acutely aware of her good fortune: "I saw what people were paying for tiny, teeny, teeny little apartments in Manhattan. You'd have to have a big pile of money, endless money, because they're not made for people who are just ordinary people."

6:07Abraham Kazin and the Socialist Roots of Cooperative Housing

The story begins with Abraham Kazin, a Russian immigrant who arrived in the early 1900s as a young socialist and union organizer. Historian Joshua Freeman explains that Kazin was "very interested in cooperatives" as "a viable alternative to capitalism, to market systems that you could sort of develop within an existing capitalist society." Kazin eventually became an organizer for the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union of America, representing garment workers who lived in cramped, unhealthy tenements on the Lower East Side.

By the 1920s, Kazin convinced the union that it should construct its own apartment buildings and let members become collective owners. The cooperative housing concept wasn't new—it had originated among wealthy New Yorkers who used it to control who lived in their buildings. But Kazin's vision was different. In his co-ops, when people moved out and sold their shares, they would get back only what they'd put in, making no profit. This would keep the buildings permanently affordable.

The union brass initially dismissed the idea. Kazin recalled late in life: "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." By the late 1920s, however, Kazin and various union partners had built three cooperative buildings housing more than 850 working-class families. Then the Great Depression and World War II halted virtually all housing construction.

9:00Robert Moses, Urban Renewal, and the Mitchell-Lama Program

After World War II, New York faced an acute housing shortage. In 1949, the federal American Housing Act provided money for public housing and slum clearance. Robert Moses, New York's most powerful and controversial city planner, became head of the city's Slum Clearance Committee. Moses argued: "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."

Moses oversaw construction of public housing for low-income renters, but he and others also wanted housing for the middle class. Historian Ann Marie Sammartino of Oberlin College explains that most American cities pursued a two-pronged strategy after the war: housing projects for the poor in urban cores, and mortgage support for single-family homes in the suburbs. New York was different because city government wanted to keep the middle class—and when they said "middle class," they mostly meant the white middle class.

Finding developers willing to clear slums for middle-class housing proved difficult. On the short list were the unions and socialists who had already started building housing cooperatives in blighted neighborhoods. Abraham Kazin was the person most associated with this movement. In 1951, he created the United Housing Foundation (UHF), an alliance of existing cooperative projects, unions, and working-class fraternal groups.

In 1955, New York State created the Mitchell-Lama program, which gave private developers like the UHF low-interest mortgages and tax breaks to build middle-class housing. The program eventually financed over 100,000 units of affordable housing for the middle class. Mitchell-Lama became so well-known that actor Timothée Chalamet, in a 2024 podcast appearance, mentioned growing up in a Mitchell-Lama development—though he struggled to explain what it was, getting only as far as "it was meant to be housing for people of moderate income."

13:51Penn South and the Growing Opposition

The UHF started small, building a couple of buildings in the Bronx with about 400 apartments total. At the opening ceremony for one building, Robert Moses said the pace was too slow—at the current rate, it would take 50 years to clear the city's slums. Kazin got the message, and the projects got bigger.

By the late 1950s, the UHF finished Penn South Cooperative in Chelsea, Manhattan: ten buildings, each about 20 stories tall. Fifteen thousand people attended the dedication ceremony in 1962, including Robert Moses, Governor Nelson Rockefeller, Eleanor Roosevelt, the presidents of the AFL-CIO and the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, and President John F. Kennedy. Kennedy praised the union: "This union deserves the heartiest commendation. I hope others will follow your example."

But the speeches also revealed defensiveness. Kazin insisted that "developments like this remove from the city a cancerous blight, the breeding ground of crime and delinquency and all other social ills." Moses, referencing community opposition, predicted that "when the dust of the housing battles is settled, this cooperative non-profit village will go down in history as one of the very best."

The "housing battles" were real. To build Penn South, 354 homes were demolished, 183 stores raised, and nearly 2,000 residents evicted. Robert Caro, author of *The Power Broker*, estimated that Moses evicted 250,000 people for highways and another 250,000 for urban renewal projects. Moses was famously dismissive: "You're never going 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."

Evicted residents could apply to live in the new cooperative buildings, but many couldn't afford it. Union-sponsored nonprofit housing was affordable to a plumber or garment worker with a steady job, but not to the poorer segment of slum dwellers, who were more likely to be African American or Puerto Rican. The union co-ops were often almost entirely white. The UHF's leaders insisted they were fine with anyone of any racial background who could afford the equity deposit—but that deposit was itself a barrier.

Around this time, writer and activist Jane Jacobs emerged as a prominent critic. Sammartino explains Jacobs's argument: "These places that you're so quick to condemn, both physically condemn and like morally condemn, are actually functioning communities. When you build new housing, what you're doing is destroying community and you're building something sterile from which no community can emerge."

24:19Building Co-op City on a Swamp

Despite growing opposition, the UHF and Moses still had momentum and money. Their biggest project was yet to come. After the Freedomland amusement park went bankrupt in 1964, Moses saw an opportunity to buy 400 acres in the North Bronx for relatively cheap. Building on the site of a defunct amusement park—which itself had been built on a swamp—meant no one would need to be evicted. This was a concession to Jacobs and other critics of slum clearance.

But in other respects, the development was exactly the kind Jacobs hated: skyscrapers set back from the street, surrounded by green space, with no traditional street grid or neighborhood fabric. Jacobs had warned that true community could not emerge from such places.

Co-op City opened to its first residents in December 1968. A few months later, a massive blizzard hit New York. People abandoned cars on the stretch of I-95 that ran past the cooperative. Residents left their buildings to help stranded travelers, bringing them in for hot tea and hot cocoa, while kids had snowball fights. This blizzard became celebrated in Co-op City mythology as the creation of a community—proving the critics wrong. Sammartino, who grew up in Co-op City, remembers an idyllic childhood: riding bikes around vast green spaces, playing with other kids, and as a teenager, wandering the grounds looking for fun. When a new mall opened with a hardware store as its first tenant, she and her friends went just to look at wrenches because there was nothing else to do. "Great place to be a kid, boring place to be a teenager," she says. In other words, Co-op City was basically the suburbs—an alternative that helped convince the middle class to stay in the city.

27:30The Rent Strike That Destroyed the Movement

When Abraham Kazin died in 1971, he had built thousands of units of cooperative housing. But he wasn't there to see Co-op City unravel. The project was originally supposed to have a $235 million mortgage, but that ballooned to $391 million by the time construction was completed. Building 35 skyscrapers on a swamp had not been easy or cheap, and inflation drove costs up during construction.

A bigger mortgage meant higher carrying charges for residents. The state wanted to raise them, but residents disagreed—they'd been promised a certain monthly cost before construction began. They felt duped by the UHF, which they now saw as just another bad landlord. When residents complained, the UHF responded condescendingly, lecturing them about what it meant to be in a cooperative. Despite being shareholders, residents had very little say in decisions. The UHF controlled the board that set carrying charges and hired contractors.

Sammartino argues that the UHF had become "in effect, a kind of arm of the government," captured by the state's mortgage money, tax abatements, zoning, and land clearance. Residents wanted the UHF out and wanted the state to give them mortgage relief. Resident Charlie Rosen told NBC: "What we're telling the state legislature is either scrap the concept of moderate income housing to keep taxpaying citizens in the state city or pay for it, but you cannot bring people into this type of housing and believe that it's not going to cost money."

But New York City was teetering on bankruptcy, and the state was hardly better off. Officials could not justify giving more money to a middle-class housing development. The state held firm.

In 1975, after years of cost increases and failed negotiations, residents began withholding their monthly carrying charges. It was technically a mortgage strike, not a rent strike. Every month, the steering committee collected the checks from residents but refused to cash them, holding them as leverage. The state responded by assessing fines on strike organizers and stopping maintenance. Residents had to wash the floors of their own hallways. Longtime resident Noel Ellison remembers his mother mopping public hall floors with neighbors. "It kind of forced you to get to know your neighbors as well," he says. The strike was well-organized—many residents belonged to unions and knew how to run one.

The strike lasted 13 months. In the end, the state agreed to help with large repairs but gave no significant mortgage relief. The residents did, however, get control of Co-op City. The UHF was out. After residents took over in 1976, the UHF never built another cooperative. As one speaker put it: "There was never a greater demonstration of the cooperative spirit than the rent strike that destroyed the United Housing Foundation. Co-op City itself was the quagmire from which the movement could never escape."

33:50Racial Transition and Unexpected Stability

By the mid-1970s, the era of big government liberalism was over, replaced by a small-government neoliberal era. Kazin was dead, Moses was retired, and although existing Mitchell-Lama developments continued receiving subsidies, nothing new was built under the program. A worldwide recession brought austerity, the city cut essential services, unemployment and crime rose, and the white flight that Moses had tried to prevent finally arrived.

Co-op City was not immune. Early residents had been about 80% white (the vast majority Jewish) and about 20% people of color. By 1976, 90% of people on the waiting list to move in were Black and Hispanic. Over the 1980s, the Orthodox synagogue on the grounds scaled back services for lack of congregants, while Harry S. Truman High School began offering African American studies. The development became a hub of early hip-hop culture.

Sammartino remembers the anxiety that accompanied this racial transition—voiced by both white and Black residents. Crime did go up some in the 1980s, as it did all over New York. But the feared decline never really came to pass. "Often when you talk about neighborhoods that undergo racial change, where there's white flight, it's either a story of violence or a story of neglect," Sammartino says. "Co-op City, it's not really that story."

By 1990, Co-op City had become a majority-Black community, and it has remained that way. But it also stayed a middle-class community. Sammartino suggests that the equity deposit—the thing the UHF had always insisted on—may have been key. 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. That investment created stability: "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 Garretti's parents, who are Puerto Rican, moved to Co-op City in 1981 during its big racial shift. They're still there 45 years later. Frank says the cooperative structure contributed to their longevity: "They're somewhere between a tenant and an owner. The right word is investment—not just financial, but investment in a stake in a community that a typical New York tenant did not have." Co-op City has become the largest naturally occurring retirement community in the United States, partly because it's affordable on a fixed income in an expensive city.

38:37The Legacy: Failure or Blueprint?

There was a period during and after the rent strike when Co-op City was viewed as a failure. The state had subsidized a massive, ugly cluster of skyscrapers, and then residents refused to pay their own mortgage for over a year. Some politicians suggested the government should foreclose and walk away. The development has needed continued subsidies over the years—building on a swamp created ongoing structural issues that residents couldn't afford on their own.

But if Co-op City once served as a cautionary tale about big government ambition, it now stands as a reminder of what that ambition can create. The episode notes that New York's new mayor, Zoran Mamdani, has a plan to build 200,000 units of affordable housing over 10 years—a goal former Mayor Bill de Blasio also had but failed to accomplish. The last time anyone built housing on this scale in New York City was after World War II, spearheaded by people like Robert Moses and Abraham Kazin. They made extremely harmful mistakes: bulldozing neighborhoods, displacing residents, treating whole communities as expendable. But the ambition to solve a housing crisis wasn't a mistake. In a city once again wrestling with how to house the people who keep it running, the question isn't whether government should attempt something that big again—it's whether it can afford not to.

Conclusion

What stays with the listener is the paradox at the heart of Co-op City: a project born from socialist idealism and carried out through the brutal machinery of urban renewal, which then survived its own near-collapse through a militant tenant strike that destroyed the very movement that built it. The episode matters because it offers a concrete, decades-long case study of what happens when government commits to building middle-class housing at scale—the mistakes, the costs, the unintended consequences, and the eventual, improbable success. Co-op City is neither a utopia nor a failure; it is a deeply imperfect but functioning community that has housed generations of New Yorkers who would otherwise have been priced out of the city. In an era of renewed housing crises, its story is both a cautionary tale and a source of hard-won lessons about what it actually takes to build and sustain affordable housing for ordinary people.

Key takeaways

• Co-op City is the world's largest housing cooperative, with 35 high-rise buildings housing more than 15,000 families in the Bronx.
• The cooperative model allows residents to buy shares in a corporation rather than own their units outright, with monthly "carrying charges" covering mortgages and utilities.
• Abraham Kazin and the United Housing Foundation built Co-op City through the Mitchell-Lama program, which provided low-interest mortgages and tax breaks for middle-class housing.
• Building Co-op City on a swamp drove construction costs from $235 million to $391 million, leading to higher-than-promised monthly charges for residents.
• In 1975, residents launched a 13-month rent (mortgage) strike, withholding payments until they gained control of the cooperative from the UHF.
• The strike destroyed the UHF, which never built another cooperative, and marked the end of the era of large-scale government-subsidized middle-class housing in New York.
• Co-op City underwent a dramatic racial transition from 80% white in the 1960s to majority-Black by 1990, but remained a stable middle-class community.
• The equity deposit requirement, while initially a barrier to people of color, may have created stability by giving residents a financial stake that made them less likely to flee during white flight.
• Co-op City is now the largest naturally occurring retirement community in the United States, providing affordable housing for seniors on fixed incomes.