Roman Mars

I'm Roman Mars.

If you've ever driven into New York City from the north, there's a good chance you've passed by a massive cluster of high-rise apartment buildings just as you enter the Bronx.

35 buildings in total, all of them with identical brick facades, all over 20 stories tall.

99PI producer Emeritus Katie Mingle is back to tell our story this week.

When Co-op City opened in the late 1960s, people hated the way it looked.

Journalists and architecture critics thought the buildings embodied everything that was wrong with modernist architecture.

Newsweek said, quote, The towers of New York City's Co-op City rise bleak and spectrally through the smog, a prospect so remote and cheerless that affluent commuters often shudder when they pass it.

Diane doesn't pay rent, but she doesn't exactly own the unit either.

Technically, when she handed over that $2,500, she was buying a share in a corporation.

This is how co-ops work.

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.