New York City’s history is full of examples of how to build, preserve, and expand affordable housing, including through the creation of union-backed co-ops.
Even by its own dizzying standards, New York City is in a state of flux. Ongoing political uncertainty, with Mayor Eric Adams’s administration deep in crisis, is now compounded by the return of Donald Trump. Several horrific incidents on the subway confirm the general sense of a city in a state of fear and distress. Lying beneath these tensions is, invariably, housing — the problem NYC is no closer to solving for most of its citizens, despite the unveiling of the “City of Yes” zoning initiative.
I spent August to December living across the Hudson in Newark but made frequent trips into the city, researching for a book on the life of Abraham E. Kazan and NYC’s labor-union-inspired cooperative housing. This included several visits to Chelsea, which I came to see as the neighborhood where NYC’s possible housing futures — one good, one bad — intersect.
The blocks between West 23rd Street to the south and the entrance to the Holland Tunnel to the north, bordered by Eighth Avenue and the Hudson River, present starkly different ways a city can house its people. They also represent the results of clear political choices, not simply market outcomes. At one extreme sits a model based on the private consumption of housing as a speculative commodity. At the other lies housing treated as a social need, removed from the vagaries of the market.
As one real estate slogan puts it, the “real estate capital of the world” can be found among the steel and glass towers of Hudson Yards that dominate the Midtown Hudson riverfront. The funding and policy mechanisms used to bring about this massive urban transformation are familiar, but they also provide a warning about the unforeseen consequences for a “City of Yes.” There, formerly publicly owned land has been parceled up and sold to private developers, together with the promise of rezoning to enable their profit-seeking plans to come to fruition. The phony promise of “mixed use” is then mobilized to sanitize a massive corporate land grab, creating sterile, monochrome urban landscapes, devoid of the vitality and diversity that make New York City special.
Continuing a long-standing practice in NYC and beyond, Hudson Yards has come at enormous public expense — about $2 billion, according to a 2018 New School estimate — all to build a place where very few New Yorkers could ever afford to live.
Farther down, between West 25th and 27th Streets, with Hudson Yards looming menacingly above them, are the Elliott-Chelsea Houses, two New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) developments, home to 2,400 working-class people in 1,000 apartments. NYCHA’s problems are well-documented, although mainstream media accounts rarely focus on the intrinsic part played by public housing in the city’s makeup and survival. Since 2019, Elliott-Chelsea has been at the forefront of NYCHA’s misguided attempts to solve its public housing problem by demolishing and privatizing public developments, particularly if they sit on high-value land.
Here, NYCHA is following a failed formula attempted in many other places, particularly the UK. My hometown, London, has witnessed mass clearances of urban communities living in council housing (the rough equivalent of public housing). Like NYCHA tenants, UK council tenants have been told that in exchange for the transfer of their homes to a private company, they will receive the standard of housing to which they’re entitled. The results have been disastrous and predictable — higher rents, weaker legal protections, displacement, the loss of a publicly accountable landlord, and an increase in housing need and homelessness.
However, just across Ninth Avenue from Elliott-Chelsea is a place that, like public housing, offers an alternative to the capricious private market. Penn South is home to approximately 5,000 people living in 2,820 apartments. It was built in 1962 as a limited-equity housing cooperative through the efforts of Kazan and the United Housing Foundation (UHF), an alliance of NYC labor unions. The UHF was responsible for building 30,000 similar homes across the city, intended for people with moderate incomes. The founding principle of Penn South and its counterparts was that they excluded the possibility of residents selling their homes for profit. Instead, they would receive security of tenure and a comprehensive repair and maintenance service at charges significantly below the market rate. In addition, they would live in an environment that deliberately nurtured a sense of community and solidarity. In the words of one Penn South resident I spoke to, it worked so well that the political establishment made sure it would never be allowed to happen again.
But in 1987, the ideal of housing as a social — not individual — asset was tested at Penn South. As at other co-ops before it, residents were presented with an option to privatize their homes when tax abatement agreements expired. Several, like Kazan’s developments in the Lower East Side, chose to cash in on apartments that could be sold for many times the amount paid for them. A heated debate raged at Penn South on whether it should also opt out of the mutual system. Leading the fight to preserve limited-equity status was longtime resident and union member Dave Smith. In the pre–social media age, Smith’s daughter, Katya de Kadt, recalls that her father knocked on every door, urging his neighbors to choose community over greed. In the same year that Oliver Stone’s Gordon Gekko declared that “greed is good” on the silver screen, Penn South residents decided it wasn’t, in fact, and voted to continue as a non-profiteering co-op, a status it will now preserve until 2057. As de Kadt puts it, “It was a remarkable achievement. My dad persuaded his neighbors to look beyond their immediate economic interests and think about the future. Thousands of working-class families have benefited as a result, able to afford to live and work in a city many others can’t afford.”
Katya de Kadt and the other Penn South residents I’ve met all attest that the benefits of a genuinely affordable home go far beyond financial considerations. They all speak of how not having to constantly worry about rent hikes or the threat of eviction has allowed them to live richer, more complete and creative lives.
As NYC stares into seemingly endless housing misery, it is critical to remember that it doesn’t have to be this way. Public housing and union-backed co-ops weren’t perfect, but they have enduring qualities. First, they were built to a scale proportionate to the size of the housing problem. The relatively small number of scattered homes envisaged by the “City of Yes,” even if they materialize, will only scratch the surface of NYC’s housing needs, particularly if more isn’t done to insist on private developers producing homes for people on low or moderate incomes.
Secondly, the UHF built quickly and built well. There were delays, but nothing like the glacial pace of the dysfunctional twenty-first-century construction industry. At Kazan’s first co-op, the Amalgamated Housing Cooperative in the Bronx, 303 high-quality homes were completed and occupied in a year. But the third critical element in the success of Kazan and the UHF was building political consensus for an alternative to the private housing market, backed with public funding. Three different sitting US presidents publicly praised their work, with John F. Kennedy giving the complex’s inaugural speech at Penn South. This reflected high-level buy-in when labor unions were insisting on better conditions for their members, at work and at home. Much has changed since the slow demise of the UHF in the mid-1990s, but the underlying forces that drove its success have not. If we are to see a future that looks more like Penn South than Hudson Yards, the whole labor movement will need to demand and fight for it.