Joshua Freeman

He was very interested in cooperatives.

this was a viable alternative to capitalism, to market systems that you could sort of develop within an existing capitalist society.

These garment workers were mostly living on the Lower East Side in these cramped, unhealthy, rundown slum tenements.

The origins of co-ops don't come from the working or radical milieu.

This was something that 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 own this building.

But it's a middle class, an upper middle class building.

And if someone moves out, they sell their apartment.

What they think of as selling the apartment, they're really selling the shares and the corporation, you know, on the open market.

And if they sell it for more than they bought it, more power to them, they have to keep the money.

Kazin and Moses were quite closely together, and they realized that in a lot of ways they had overlapping visions for the future of the city.

That both of them wanted to replace slums with better housing.

And it's an alliance, basically, of existing cooperative projects, of unions, and working class fraternal groups.

So, you know, they band together to create the UHF.

And Kazin is like, you know, the leader.

I mean, he's got lieutenants, but he's the guy.

Penn South, an extraordinarily ambitious project, was built to provide decent housing for garment workers who could then walk to work, right?

You know, talk about an urbanistic utopian vision.

You know, that was it.