Co-op City
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is 99% Invisible. 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.
I remember the first time I saw these buildings, riding a Greyhound bus into the city from Worcester, Massachusetts.
99PI producer Emeritus Katie Mingle is back to tell our story this week.
I was in my early 20s at the time, and I'd never really seen skyscrapers that weren't office buildings.
What is Co-op City and why is it significant?
These buildings, I could tell, were people's homes. I could see laundry hanging on balconies way up on like the 22nd floor. There was something thrilling but also almost frightening about contemplating the number of individual lives playing out in just one of those skyscrapers. It had the effect of making me feel very small and insignificant, the way looking at something incomprehensibly large can sometimes do. I think I assumed at the time that what I was looking at was a public housing project, but I know now that it wasn't. This cluster of high-rises was and is the largest housing cooperative in the world, Co-op City.
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.
Those comments... are exactly why Co-op City is the best kept secret, because it's like hiding in plain sight.
This is Diane Patrick. She lives in Co-op City.
You look at the exterior, you make your judgment, and you just keep moving, and you don't give it another thought.
Diane moved into her Co-op City apartment in 1978.
I think I paid $2,500 for the apartment.
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.
Do you feel like you're an owner? Like, does that?
Yes. We can do things inside our unit, whatever we want. We do our own painting and flooring and whatever improvements we want to do.
On top of that initial $2,500 investment, every month Diane pays what are called carrying charges. For Diane, these are about $800 a month, and they cover the mortgage and utilities like heat, electricity, and air conditioning. How big is your apartment? Like, what does it look like?
It's gorgeous. I think it's like 850 square feet. It's large and it's beautiful. And it's large and it's beautiful.
Diane used to work in real estate, so she's particularly aware of how lucky she is to have a place she likes at a price she can afford.
I saw what people were paying for tiny, teeny, teeny little apartments in Manhattan. You know, you'd have to have a big pile of money. Endless money because they're not made for people who are just ordinary people.
Not made for ordinary people. I know what Diane is getting at here. In major cities like New York, sometimes it feels like there's public housing for low-income families and market-rate housing that is insanely expensive with not much in between.
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.
This story begins with a Russian immigrant named Abraham Kazin.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:01–0:44
2
What is Co-op City and why is it significant?
0:44–8:20
3
How did the design of Co-op City receive public criticism?
8:20–12:47
4
What is the cooperative ownership model and how does it work?
12:47–27:41
5
Who was Abraham Kazin and what was his vision for housing?
27:41–37:25