Co-op City

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. If you've ever driven into New York City from the north, there's a good chance you pass by a massive cluster of high-rise apartment buildings just as you enter the Bronx.

35 buildings in total. All of them with identical brick facades, all over 20 stories tall. I remember the first time I saw these buildings. a Greyhound bus into the city from Worcester, Massachusetts.

99 PI producer emeritus Katie Mingle is back to tell our story this week. I was in my early 20s at the time and I'd never really seen skyscrapers that weren't 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. 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 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 shutter when they pass it. Those comments are exactly why Co-op City is the best kept secret, because it's like hiding in plain sight.

This is Diane Patrick. She lives in Co-op City. You look at the exterior, you make your judgment, and you just keep moving, and you don't give it another thought.

moved into her co-op city apartment in 1978. I think I paid $2,500 for the apartment. 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. Do you feel like you're an owner? Like, does that? Yes, we can do things inside our unit or whatever we want. We do our own painting and flooring and whatever improvements we want to do. On top of that initial $2,500 investment, 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?

What does it look like? 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. 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. 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 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.

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. This story begins with a Russian immigrant named Abraham Kazan.

In the early 1900s, Kazan was a young socialist and a union organizer. But what he was really passionate about actually went beyond the normal work of unions. He was very interested in cooperatives. This is Joshua Freeman.

He's a historian who's written about labor and housing. This was a viable alternative to capitalism, to market systems that you could sort of develop within an existing capitalist society. Kayeson 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. These garment workers were mostly living on the low-ease side in these cramped, unhealthy,

rundown slum tenements. By 1920 or so, Cazen 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. This was cooperative housing, and it was actually a concept that New Yorkers already understood. 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 100 of us residents, we collectively They own this building but it's a middle class, an upper middle class building and if someone moves out they sell their apartment where they think of it 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 got to keep the money. But that's not how Kazan envisioned his co-ops working. In 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.