Roman Mars

This was cooperative housing, and it was actually a concept that New Yorkers already understood.

But that's not how Kazin envisioned his co-ops working.

In the kind of co-ops he wanted to build, when people moved out and sold their share in the corporation, they'd get back the money they'd put in, but they wouldn't make a profit.

Removing profit would ensure the building stayed affordable into the future.

During the Great Depression and World War II, the work of building cooperative housing, or any housing for that matter, mostly just stopped.

As diehard fans of the show will know, Robert Moses did more to reshape New York City in the 20th century than probably any other single person.

After the American Housing Act was passed, Moses became head of New York City's slum clearance committee.

But he and others in government also wanted housing for the middle class.

Then in 1955, New York State created a program called Mitchell-Lama.

It gave private developers like the UHF more incentive to build middle-class housing by offering them low interest rate mortgages and tax breaks.

Absolutely.

Oh.

That's me, baby.

Moderate.

Mitchell-Lama was launched in an era of big government liberalism.

The state was subsidizing not just housing for the poor, but for people of middle income, like construction workers and teachers.

In the Mitchell-Lama years, the program would finance over 100,000 units of affordable housing for the middle class.

Many of them would be cooperatives built by the United Housing Foundation.

By the late 1950s, they had finished a project called the Penn South Cooperative.

Ten buildings, all of them about 20 stories tall.