Roman Mars

A worldwide recession meant that it was a period of austerity for the whole country, and certainly for New York.

The city pulled back on essential services like police and firefighters.

Unemployment and crime went up.

People who could leave the city did, and the white flight that Robert Moses had tried to stave off finally came knocking.

While the Orthodox synagogue on the grounds of Co-op City scaled back services for lack of congregants, the cooperative's own Harry S. Truman High School began offering a class on African-American studies, and the development became a hub of early hip-hop culture.

And crime did go up some in the 1980s, as it did all over New York City.

But a lot of this decline that people worried about at Co-op City, Anne-Marie says it just never really came to pass.

Emory says that Co-op City's ability to stay middle class, even as it went through a big racial transition, may have had something to do with that equity deposit, the thing that the UHF had always been so adamant about.

In the early years, that deposit had been a barrier to people of color.

But by the mid-1970s, the black middle class had grown and more families could afford the upfront investment.

There was a period during and after the rent strike when Co-op City was looked at as a failure.

The state had subsidized the building of this massive and many thought ugly cluster of skyscrapers.

And then its residents refused for over a year to pay their own mortgage.

There were politicians and pundits during the strike that suggested that government should foreclose on the mortgage and evict the residents.

Walk away from this expensive project and cut its losses.

Speaking of ambition, the new mayor of New York, Zoran Mamdani, has a plan to build 200,000 units of affordable housing over 10 years.

It's a goal that former Mayor Bill de Blasio also had, but failed to accomplish.

It won't be easy.

99% Invisible was produced this week by Katie Minkle and edited by Christopher Johnson.

This episode was mixed by Martín González with music by Swan Real and George Langford.