Roman Mars

The housing development itself is a corporation, and when you buy a share, you are buying the right to live in a specific unit.

Together, all the residents of a cooperative collectively own the corporation that is their building.

Co-op City, though, is that in-between in a couple of different ways.

It's in-between renting and owning, and it offers some of the perks of both.

It's also in-between in terms of cost.

Co-op City was specifically intended to be affordable for middle-class New Yorkers.

In fact, it was part of a whole movement to build this kind of in-between middle-class housing.

Co-op City was the crowning achievement of that movement, and also the end of it.

Kazin pursued a few different cooperative ventures before turning his attention to the thing that would become his life's work, housing.

At this point, he's an organizer for the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union of America, which represented garment workers.

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.