Roman Mars

State officials could hardly justify giving more money to a middle-class housing development.

In response, the residents of Co-op City decided to strike.

In 1975, after years of cost increases and no progress negotiating with the state, residents began withholding their monthly carrying charges.

Of course, New York needed those checks, rather desperately.

The strike lasted 13 months.

In the end, the state agreed to help with some large repairs that were needed on the buildings.

But the residents didn't get any significant relief on their mortgage.

They did, however, get control of Co-op City.

The United Housing Foundation was out.

Mitchell-Lama was not the only thing to lose funding in the 1970s.

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.