URBAN DESIGN COMMITTEE
What’s In My Back Yard (W.I.M.B.Y.) ARTICLE BY JANE MCGROARTY, AIA
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Is There A Future For Social Housing? In a recent NY Times Op-Ed, Gianpaolo Baiocchi and H. Jacob Carlson proposed that the federal government establish a Social Housing Development Authority. Dr. Baiocchi is a professor and director of the Urban Democracy Lab at New York University. Dr. Carlson is a postdoctoral research associate at Brown University’s Population Studies and Training Center, and Spatial Structures in the Social Sciences. The Covid crisis has resulted in financial distress for landlords. Particularly hard hit are small “mom and pop” landlords who operate in the affordable market. If these vulnerable properties go into foreclosure, they will be purchased by investors who will turn them into market rate housing. Baiocchi and Carlson maintain that there was a huge transfer of wealth from families and communities to Wall Street because of the 2008 fiscal crisis and that we need to foster and protect social housing to prevent a similar outcome again. Isn’t social housing just another example of creeping socialism? Not really. Housing cooperatives have been around in the United States for over one hundred years, and in Europe for even longer. In 1916, a group of Finnish families pooled their resources and built two co-operative apartment houses based on the European model of limited equity housing in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. It was an idea that caught on and the Finns built around 50 coop buildings between 1917 and 1940. Union organizations also built many limited equity apartment cooperatives in the first half of the 20th century in New York City. The Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union (ACWU) developed the union’s first cooperative housing in 1927 in the Bronx adjacent to Van Cortlandt Park. Over the years ACWU member Abraham Kazan built additional buildings on the Bronx site and today the complex houses 1500 families. In 1930, the Kazan went on to develop Amalgamated Dwellings on the Lower East Side. It is an attractive Art Deco complex modeled after the block housing in Vienna where the residential blocks faced the street and created a courtyard at the center. Other union sponsored cooperatives followed including Hillman Housing, Seward Park Houses, and East River Housing. Architect Herman Jessor (1894-1990) established a long association with the union, and he designed or was associated with the
