Katie Mingle

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.

This story begins with a Russian immigrant named Abraham Kazin.

In the early 1900s, Kazin was a young socialist and a union organizer.

But what he was really passionate about actually went beyond the normal work of unions.

This is Joshua Freeman.

He's a historian who's written about labor and housing.

By 1920 or so, Kazin 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.

But Kazin said, at first, the union brass wasn't all that interested in his cooperative housing idea.

Here he is in an interview that he did late in his life.

Haters be damned by the late 1920s, Kazin and various union partners had built three new cooperative buildings that housed more than 850 working-class families.

Which is why, after World War II, New York, along with a lot of urban America, found itself in a pretty acute housing shortage.

In 1949, the federal government passed the American Housing Act to help fix it.

The new legislation had provisions to promote homeownership and the construction of public housing.

And it also provided a bunch of money to clear blighted neighborhoods, or so-called slums.

That, of course, is Robert Moses, New York City's most prolific and problematic city planner.

Part of what Moses wanted to do was replace these blighted buildings with public housing.

And in the post-war years, he did oversee the construction of a lot of public housing for low-income renters.

This is Anne-Marie Sammartino.

She's a professor of history at Oberlin College.