"As opposed to the co-ops and condominiums that we might think of today-buildings built by speculative developers, sold to well-to-do Americans, and conceived of as an integral part of the capitalist market-the country's first cooperative housing was conceived of as an effective way to address the problem of housing low- and moderate-income Americans. Built in the 1960s, Co-op City in the Bronx, New York, remains the one of the largest housing cooperatives in the world. Created by the United Housing Foundation, which for more than a decade had built and managed smaller cooperative housing around New York City, this "city" was designed to accommodate between 55,000 and 60,000 people, an extraordinary population. Working Class Utopias tells the story of Co-op City and the larger cooperative housing movement in New York City from the 1920s to the 1970s, when financial struggles between the UHF and Co-op residents proved to be the beginning of the end of non-profit cooperative housing not only in New York, but elsewhere in the United States. While Co-op City and other non-profit cooperatives still served tens of thousands of people, they were no longer viewed as a solution to the problem of housing working-class Americans. In examining this history, Robert Fogelson allows us to better understand the rise and fall of a once-promising idea-providing insight into the intractability of the housing problem still faced by cities around the country"-- Provided by publisher
