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

Cooperative housing in New York City was a movement from the 1920s through the 1970s to provide decent housing at a reasonable cost for working-class families. Robert Fogelson's book, Working-Class Utopias, tells the story of this movement, including the construction of Amalgamated Houses and Co-op City, the world's largest housing cooperative. The book highlights the ambitious efforts of labor unions and the state and city to build large-scale cooperatives, but also notes the fiscal problems and eventual demise of the cooperative housing movement.

Format: Hardback
Length: 408 pages
Publication date: 18 October 2022
Publisher: Princeton University Press

As World War II drew to a close and Americans shifted their focus to domestic issues, union leaders and other prominent New Yorkers began to believe that cooperative housing would be the solution to the city's century-old dilemma of providing affordable housing for working-class families.

Working-Class Utopias chronicles 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 vividly brings to life a tumultuous era in New York's history, drawing on a wealth of archival materials, including 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 a must-read for anyone seeking to understand the housing problem that continues to plague New York and cities across the nation.

Weight: 774g
Dimension: 163 x 244 x 30 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780691234748