Katie Mingle

But it wasn't easy to find developers who wanted to get into the business of slum clearance in order to build homes for the middle class.

On the short list of groups willing to do the work were the unions and socialists.

They'd already started building housing cooperatives in blighted neighborhoods and were anxious to build more.

And the person most associated with this movement was our guy, Abraham Kazin.

In 1951, Kazin created an organization dedicated to doing just that.

It was called the United Housing Foundation, or UHF.

For a wonky government program, Mitchell-Lama is still weirdly well-known in New York.

And one of the many answers people might give to the question, where did you grow up?

Like, I grew up in a brownstone.

I grew up in the projects.

I grew up in a Mitchell-Lama.

If I may take us on a very quick digression to prove my point.

Here is Timothee Chalamet on Theo Vaughn's podcast back in 2024.

Mitchell Llama is like... At this point in the interview, Timothy does a pretty bad job of explaining what Mitchell Llama is, but he gets one of the main things right.

It was meant to be housing for people of moderate income.

The United Housing Foundation started relatively small.

They put up a couple of buildings in the Bronx, about 400 apartments in total.

But at the opening ceremony for one of the buildings, Robert Moses said it wasn't enough, that at the current rate, it would take 50 years to clear the city's slums.

Abraham Kazin got the message.

The projects would only get bigger from there.