Katie Mingle

Here's co-op city resident Charlie Rosen on NBC saying basically, hey, you are the ones who wanted to keep the middle class in the city, so put your money where your mouth is.

So the state held firm.

The mortgage was what it was, and the residents of Co-op City would have to find a way to pay it.

They called it a rent strike, but technically it was really more like a mortgage strike.

Every month during the strike, the steering committee collected the carrying charges from the residents.

So the state did what it could to stop the strike.

It assessed fines on the strike organizers, and it stopped providing certain kinds of maintenance to the buildings.

The residents would have to do some things themselves.

This is Noel Ellison.

He's lived in Co-op City since the days of the strike.

Noel remembers it all feeling really well organized, which makes sense because a lot of the residents of Co-op City belong to unions.

They knew how to run a strike.

After the residents took over Co-op City in 1976, the UHF would never build another cooperative.

It wasn't only that Co-op City had been a disaster for the UHF.

By the mid-1970s, the project of big government liberalism was over, and a small government neoliberal era had begun.

Abraham Kazin had died.

Robert Moses was more or less retired.

And although many of the existing Mitchell-Lama developments in New York would continue to receive government subsidies, nothing new would be built under the program after the late 70s.

Co-op City was no exception.

Early residents had been about 80% white, the vast majority of them Jewish, and about 20% people of color.