An Overlooked Bronx Tale Gets a Fresh Telling
Co-op City: It could be a pocket-sized city in its own right, with its own schools, shops, houses of worship, and 35 high-rise towers, home to 40,000+ people on Pelham Bay. It’s the largest housing development in the U.S., and the largest cooperatively owned development in the world. We talk with historian Annemarie Sammartino – who spent much of her childhood there – about Freedomland (Three Hills – Cornell University Press), her new book about Co-op City’s early years, and its role in New York City’s fiscal crisis of the 1970s. (The book’s title derives from the name of an early 1960s amusement park that failed on the Co-op City site.)
Urban Matters: Staggering size makes Co-op City stand out. But it’s not completely unique. Electchester and Rochdale Village in Queens; Starrett City in Brooklyn; Roosevelt Island; Penn South in Manhattan: Like Co-op City, all big high-rise developments that went up post-World War II. How should we think about them, historically and also as part of the living fabric of New York?
Annemarie Sammartino: Huge housing developments are a feature of postwar housing in New York City. Urban planners, developers, and ordinary New Yorkers were concerned with rising prices and the lack of affordability. They worried about the siren song of the suburbs but also (especially after the 1960s) about rising crime. Co-op City and all these other developments you mention were a monument to New York as a city for the middle and working classes, what Co-op City’s builder, the United Housing Foundation (UHF), activists with close ties to the labor movement, called “people of moderate means.”
They were designed to be cheap – quick and easy to build, but also with amenities that rivaled those that more affluent New Yorkers could enjoy, sometimes including balconies with amazing views, air conditioning, and large closets. Planners, developers, and residents all saw these as a means to combat inequality in America’s largest city and retain its urbanity in the face of increased suburbanization.
UM: Many such developments got “Mitchell-Lama” subsidies (named for two legislators responsible for creating them) to keep construction costs down. At one point, there were more than 100,000 Mitchell-Lama apartments in the city. Did the program have a lasting impact, or has it eroded with time?
Sammartino: There were two Mitchell-Lama programs, one run by New York State (it financed Co-op City) and one by New York City. They provided low-rate mortgages backed by the State or City along with tax abatements to developers and a guaranteed rate of return on investment – all financed by publicly traded bonds – so long as developers promised to build housing designed to cost no more than six-seven times the average salary of residents. The subsidies were open to non-profit developers such as the UHF, and also for-profit developers, such as Fred Trump, father of the 45th President.
By 1974, a staggering percentage of Mitchell-Lama projects were in arrears or experiencing significant financial strain, and were one of the major causes of the City’s near-bankruptcy the following year. These problems stemmed from several issues. There was always corruption in the program. But also it was designed for a situation where the greatest need with regards to affordable housing was lack of supply. It provided subsidies to construction, but not to operating expenses after construction. Inflation and rising interest rates meant that by the 1970s, these developments were in dire need of ongoing support – something the State and City simply couldn’t or wouldn’t provide.
For some, Mitchell-Lama became a symbol for the well-meaning folly of New York’s overly generous welfare state. But equally, I believe it could be a symbol for the devastating turn to austerity politics in the 1970s that victimized many New Yorkers.
I would not be so quick to call it a failure. There are still long waitlists to get into remaining Mitchell-Lama developments, and almost 50 years after the program’s seemingly ignominious end, there has not been any program that produced this quantity of affordable housing for middle-class New Yorkers.
UM: Just years after it opened, Co-op City was the site of America’s largest rent strike. Residents won their major goal of replacing UHF-designated managers. What caused the strike, and how did it relate to the City’s fiscal crisis at that same time?
Sammartino: Co-op City’s rent strike between June 1975 and July 1976 was supported by over 75 percent of residents. It nearly bankrupted the New York State Housing Finance Agency. It ultimately led to resident control of the development. Yet it has nearly disappeared from the historical memory of New York.
Actually, it wasn’t technically a rent strike. Co-op City was a cooperative (hence the name) owned by its residents. Their monthly “carrying charges” paid the mortgage and ongoing maintenance and administration.
Between 1964, when planning for the development began, and the mid-70s, carrying charges rose 250 percent above original forecasts. This was very scary and frustrating for a lot of residents – people of moderate means, many older and on fixed incomes – who felt that they had been lured in by the promise of cheap apartments only to be subject to a bait and switch. They were also largely from the unionized Jewish Left; militancy and ultimately a strike was a natural response.
But the success of the rent strike was also due to another feature of Co-op City: Size. Co-op City was, quite literally, too big to fail. Its carrying charges made up about one-third of the State Housing Finance Agency’s monthly receipts. When residents refused to pay, this put enormous pressure on the HFA and the State as a whole. This made Co-op City different and more successful, at least in the short-term, than the many other New Yorkers who resisted austerity during the fiscal crisis.
UM: Reading about Co-op City’s construction is like opening a time capsule from pre-environmental impact statement days. It went up at warp speed on hundreds of acres of wetlands, on sand landfill barged in from offshore Coney Island.
So: Quite a few environmental and construction corners got cut. What was the effect?
Sammartino: The corners cut are indeed shocking from a 21st century perspective. The UHF never consulted with experts in wetlands construction. Perhaps even more remarkably, State oversight officials never demanded this from them!
Builders slapped mortar on bricks so quickly that they did not always leave weepholes clear so the building could expand and contract with moisture. As costs began to mount well beyond initial estimates – the original mortgage of $235 million ballooned to $390 million by the end of construction —the UHF began to make even more compromises, such as turning townhouses from “fully” to “partially” fireproof structures. (As someone who grew up in one of these townhouses, I was particularly alarmed to discover this). All of this was signed off on by the State, which was eager to see residents paying off this huge mortgage.
Problems became obvious early on. There were cracked sidewalks, and some balconies swayed alarmingly in high winds. The rent strike final settlement had a clause that Co-op City could withhold mortgage payments to the State to cover construction defect repairs. However, the extent of the problems only became clear in the late 1970s after a construction audit revealed huge problems -- such as the fact that the entire plumbing system needed to be replaced. The sheer scale of defects made it nearly impossible for Co-op City to dig out from massive financial and repair obligations, as costs mounted into the nine figures. And as it remained a perpetual construction site, it had trouble attracting new residents, leading to a vacancy problem in the early 1990s.
Today, Co-op City’s finances and physical plant are both more stable, in part because New York State has finally invested money to make it so, but it was not easy to get to this point.
UM: You concede that many architects and City planners abhorred Co-op City’s massive high-rise design, pronouncing it alienating, and predicting it would produce alienated residents. But you disagree. Why?
Sammartino: I do disagree, mostly because this is not only what resident after resident said in interviews, but also because of what I experienced growing up in Co-op City myself.
As one former resident told me, Co-op City was “the largest small town in the world.” Many residents already knew each other from before they moved there. Over 50 percent of original residents moved there from around the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, alongside family members and friends. Those who moved from other parts of the Bronx and New York City, such as the family of Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, also often came with extended family. The fact that all the initial residents moved in in a very short period of time encouraged community as well; people shared the trials and tribulations as well as the excitement of living in a new place.
Co-op City’s relative isolation (a perennial and ongoing complaint is the paucity of public transit connections) had something of a fishbowl effect. People interacted with each other because, well, there weren’t a lot of other people to interact with. People took elevators together, they ran into each other in hallways and lobbies, they went to schools together, their kids were on playgrounds together.
To be honest, the community in Co-op City wasn’t always a great thing. A lot of small indignities and conflicts became personalized and the vituperative nature of Co-op City’s internal politics was in part a result of all of this interconnectedness. I was also not alone in finding it a somewhat stifling environment to grow up in. But while Co-op City may fairly be attacked for many reasons, alienation is not really among them. All of this shouldn’t have been surprising. After all, New Yorkers of all social backgrounds have long found their apartment buildings and dense high-rise neighborhoods a source of community. Co-op City may have been larger than most, but in this way, it was not unusual at all.