Urban Design: W.I.M.B.Y

ARTICLE BY JANE MCGROARTY, AIA

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

design of numerous other co-operatives including Rochdale Village and Penn South.

In the post war period, the electrical workers union (IBEW) built Electchester, a large housing complex in Queens in 1949. It was the brainchild of Harry Van Arsdale, Jr., a powerful union man and one-time treasurer of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. According to Ari Paul, a journalist and labor historian, the second half of the title, “-chester …lends an air of gentility to what might otherwise evoke a rugged world of wire strippers and cable cutters inhabited by New York City electricians. Electchester, in short, is an estate meant for those workers without whom the city would be, quite literally, stuck in the dark.” Today Electchester is run by the cooperative company that has

Alky Tonien Cooperative c. 1916 823 43rd Street, Brooklyn Photo: Jerrye & Roy Klotz, M.D.

strong ties to Local 3, the electrical workers union. Today only about 50% of the 2500 units are occupied by union members and their families and the complex is much more diverse than it was in 1949 when most Local 3 members were white.

In 1954, Columbia University President Grayson Kirk and David Rockefeller teamed up to clear ‘slums’ near Columbia and replace them with a middle-income development called Morningside Gardens. It was the model that was used for the Mitchell-Lama program. Today, Morning Side Gardens and similar affordable housing have become N.O.R.C.s (Naturally Occurring Retirement Communities). This is a NYC Department of the Aging initiative to assist older adults in aging in their homes and communities. In 2015, Morningside Gardens voted to allow residents to sell their apartments on the open market.

Amalgamated Dwellings, Grand Street Designed by Springsteen & Goldhammer Photo: Joel Raskin

The Mitchell-Lama program was created by a 1955 New York State law intended to foster the building of low and moderate rate housing, both rentals and cooperatively owned. The meat cutters union developed a cooperative, Concourse Village, in the Bronx and the printers union, the International Typographical Union, erected six towers in Woodside, Queens under the Mitchell-Lama program. There were over 100,000 units built under Mitchell-Lama but a sunset provision in the law allowed rental building owners and co-operatives to leave the program after 20 years. By 2005, one third of existing Mitchell-Lama units had been privatized, and the number has likely grown since then. Alfred Lama, a Brooklyn architect and State Assemblyman, was the co-sponsor of the Mitchell-Lama bill. Lama was a member and president of the Brooklyn Society of Architects.

The Penn South complex in Manhattan was a cooperative housing project of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) that was completed in 1962. In 1951, Abraham Kazan had formed the United Housing Foundation whose mission was to provide broader sponsorship for cooperative housing. In an improbable alliance, Kazan teamed up with Robert Moses and together they created Rochdale Village, a large housing complex in southern Queens that provided integrated cooperative housing for low and middle-income families. When it opened in 1953, it was the largest cooperative in the U.S.

The so-called “father of US cooperative housing,” Abraham Kazan, was born in the Russian Empire and emigrated with his family to the Lower East Side around 1904. After a short time, the family moved to a Jewish agricultural community in Carmel, New Jersey (there were close to one hundred Jewish agricultural settlements formed in the US during the late 19th and early 20th centuries). The Carmel community also engaged in cooperative garment production and through that enterprise, Kazan met labor organizers and went on to a career in the ACWU. Developing co-operative housing was only the beginning of Kazan’s vision. He wanted to have co-operative businesses, stores and factories, and imagined a whole sector of society that was cooperative.

The philosophical divide between the cooperative movement and private market housing has widened significantly since the early 20th century. The association of the cooperative housing movement and socialism began in the aftermath of the 1917 Russian Revolution. As communism took hold in Russia, there was widespread international fear of Bolsheviks and anarchists. As US labor unions gained power and went on strike for better

President John F. Kennedy Speaks at International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union Housing Project (Penn South) Dedication, May, 1962 Photo: Cecil Stoughton. White House Photographs. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston

President John F. Kennedy (at lectern) delivers remarks at the dedication of the Penn Station South Cooperative Houses, a cooperative housing project of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU). Also pictured: Governor of New York, Nelson Rockefeller; former first lady, Eleanor Roosevelt; Executive Vice President of the ILGWU, Louis Stulberg; Vice President of the ILGWU, Luigi Antonini; President of United Hatters, Cap, and Millinery Workers International Union, Alex Rose. New York City, New York.

conditions and higher wages, the press blamed strikes on immigrants who were threatening the American way of life. This sentiment intensified during the Cold War and many citizens became convinced that the “Reds” would take over the country as they had done in Europe and Asia.

Anything that smacked of ‘cooperative’ housing or worker owned enterprises was questionable except for the luxury co-operative apartment buildings on Fifth Avenue and Central Park West. The first luxury coop was built in 1883 on Gramercy Park. It was followed by the Dakota at 72nd Street, so far north of the city it was like being in the ‘Dakota Territory’. Coop apartment buildings designed by Rosario Candela, Emery Roth and others were built on the Upper East and West sides of Manhattan. Not just anyone can live in these cooperatives. Prospective buyers are screened to make sure they are suitable for the building and have the right pedigree.

The Dakota Apartments Photo: By David Shankbone

Founders of IMPACCT (Pratt Area Community Council) in 1964. IMPACCT was founded by citizens living in Fort Greene, Wallabout, Clinton Hill and later Bedford Stuyvesant. Founders included Reverend Richard Johnson, Amos Taylor and Furman Walls. In 1963 Professor Ron Schiffman founded PICCED (Pratt Institute Center for Community and Economic Development) to provide community-based organizations in low-income neighborhoods in the Pratt area and throughout New York City with access to the technical resources of its faculty, staff, and students. Photo: IMPACCT Brooklyn

Over the past twenty years, exclusivity has become more expensive as large apartments in the “best” buildings sell for as much as $70 million dollars. The high price tag apartments, especially in newer buildings that are mainly condos, are being sold to very wealthy buyers from overseas. These “safety deposit boxes” in the sky are seen as a safe (and untaxed) place for entrepreneurs, oligarchs, and political figures to keep their funds away from the prying eyes of government.

By all accounts, New York City has a severe shortage of low and moderate rate housing units. Forty-four percent of all New York City families are rent burdened, meaning that they pay more than 30% of their income for rent. Half of the 44% are severely rent burdened since they pay more than 50% of their income for rent. Overcrowding is a problem in neighborhoods such as Jackson Heights, Elmhurst, Bushwick, East New York, Sunset Park and Borough Park. New affordable housing has not been enough to meaningfully reduce homelessness. There just is not enough of it and too much of what is built is not affordable for the poorest families. It is only recently that the city has come to understand the relationship between domestic violence, mental illness, and incarceration as triggers for homelessness.

What can we do? I think we just need to look at some past examples that have been successful.

One is the impressive effort by IMPACCT Brooklyn (originally the Pratt Area Community Council). A model of comprehensive community development, IMPACCT was founded in 1964 and initially worked to fight demolition of existing buildings. It went on to renovating buildings, assisting tenants in becoming homeowners, and developing supportive and new affordable housing. Along the way, IMPACCT fought for services such as libraries, better police protection, and economic development opportunities. The fact is that in NYC, the squeaky wheel gets attention. Under the Bloomberg administration, the City was vastly improved for its wealthy inhabitants while poor communities did not fare as well.

Breaking Ground is another successful model of a nonprofit that develops and maintains supportive housing to homeless people with mental diseases, veterans, recovering

The Schermerhorn Ennead Architects, 2009

Developed by Breaking Ground, this was a public-private collaboration with Hamlin Ventures, LLC and Time Equities, Inc.

This is an award winning 217-unit residence in Downtown Brooklyn with 116 units for formerly homeless individuals with special needs and, including individuals living with HIV/AIDS. The remainder of the units are for low-income community residents, the majority of whom are actively pursuing careers in the performing arts and entertainment industries.

Photo by Breaking Ground

drug or alcohol users, and formerly incarcerated people. Their philosophy is that “everything begins with having a home” and that rehabilitation will not take place without a safe, supportive home.

The first project of Breaking Ground was the renovation of a one-time grand hotel in Times Square in 1991. Since then, the non-profit has built over 4000 units of permanent supportive and affordable housing and over 300 units of transitional housing. Breaking Ground estimates that it costs $24,000 per year to provide a single adult with supportive housing compared to $56,000 - NYC’s annual cost for a homeless person, ranging from $74 per night to house a single adult in shelter, $125 per night to imprison someone in a NYC prison, and $1,185 per night to treat an inpatient in a New York City hospital.

Another model like IMPACCT Brooklyn is the Fifth Avenue Committee (FAC), that was formed in 1978 as a community development corporation (CDC). To date, the Fifth Avenue committee has developed more than 600 units of affordable housing for low and moderate-income families in over 100 buildings and has brought more than $300 million in direct investment for community development into South Brooklyn neighborhoods. Fifth Avenue’s affiliate, Brooklyn Workforce Innovations, a social purpose staffing company, helps more than 750 individuals a year to access decent jobs.

WIMBY isn’t convinced that we need another agency, such as a Social Housing Development Authority, as much as we need to revamp and streamline the agencies that exist such as HUD, HPD, NYC Department of City Planning and the NYS Division of Housing and Community Renewal. We need to fund and assist those successful organizations and non-profits who can make a tremendous difference in providing housing, support, and economic development in low-income communities in New York City.