Rochdale Village
Dan Clore
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
http://www.hnn.us/articles/131999.html
10-04-10
Rochdale Village: Blueprint for a New Housing Option?
By Peter Eisenstadt
Peter Eisenstadt is the author of Rochdale Village: Robert Moses, 6,000
Families, and New York City’s Great Experiment in Integrated Housing
(Cornell University Press)
Few areas of New York City have had as many housing foreclosures in
recent years as the neighborhoods in southeastern Queens, such as
Jamaica, South Jamaica, St. Albans, and Laurelton—all with large tracts
of modest private homes and a predominantly minority population. But
one large area of southern Queens, Rochdale Village, has not had a
single defaulted mortgage. All of its residents own their homes, and
like the surrounding neighborhoods it has an overwhelmingly minority
population, modestly middle class in its income and aspirations. What
makes Rochdale different is that it is a limited equity cooperative,
whose residents chose their management and govern themselves
collectively. The 6,000 apartments, in twenty large apartment
buildings, cannot be individually resold. If its residents cannot
profit from real estate investments, they also cannot lose their homes
and much of their savings when the market turns on them.
Rochdale Village, standing on the site of the former Jamaica Racetrack,
opened in 1963. It was built by the United Housing Foundation (UHF),
and followed the vision of its longtime leader, Abraham Kazan, who
believed in creating attractive, affordable housing, for families of
moderate income, all owned by their residents. Kazan was a product of
the anarchist wing of the Jewish labor movement in the early twentieth
century, and had been building cooperative housing for workers since the
1920s. Under the auspices of the UHF, largely a consortium of labor
unions, he built over 30,000 units of cooperative housing in New York
City from the early 1950s to the early 1970s, which made him the most
successful developer of cooperative housing in the country.
Before Rochdale, most of Kazan’s cooperatives had tended to draw heavily
from the Jewish labor movement, and Jewish families in general.
Rochdale Village was different, and from the beginning had a substantial
black population (and unlike previous UHF cooperatives, was in a
predominantly African American neighborhood.) Rochdale Village touted
its achievements as an integrated cooperative, and through the 1960s it
was the largest integrated housing development in New York City, if not
the United States as a whole.
Alas, this did not last, and the whites started to move out in the early
1970s, and in time Rochdale would become almost entirely African
American, and today it remains the largest predominantly minority-owned
cooperative in the country, a tribute to the determination of its
residents to defend what is unique about Rochdale, and the flexibility
and relevance of Kazan’s original cooperative vision.
The UHF built only one more cooperative after Rochdale, the gargantuan
15,000 unit Co-Op City in the Bronx, but after completing it in the
early 1970s, it laid down its shovel and never built another unit of
housing. The reasons for this are complex. One factor was the
conviction of Jane Jacobs and her legion of followers that large scale
superblock housing projects were sterile and dehumanizing, incubators of
urban anomie, a reality belied by the generations of families of modest
means who had cherished their homes in UHF-built cooperatives.
But the real question came down to money. By the early 1970s many had
concluded that cooperatives such as Rochdale Village and Co-op City,
privately owned but government sponsored, were costing the taxpayers too
much money, and that in a time of inflation, revenues were not keeping
up with expenses. The fiscal crisis of the mid-1970s seemed to confirm
the prevailing wisdom; the government should, as much as possible get
out of the housing biz. And so New York City was launched on the
vertiginous explosion of housing prices that has largely priced the
working, middle, and moderate classes out of New York City. If there
was grumbling, most bought into, in more ways than one, the underlying
rationale; that as long you own your place, and the prices appreciate,
you could more than recoup your investment by selling to the next
purchaser. But a system based on beggaring one’s neighbor could not
last forever, and of course it came crashing down in 2007 and 2008,
toxic asset by asset.
The Obama administration is currently wrestling with the problem of
housing prices that continue to fall. Whatever is done, and this is a
very serious problem, we need to reconsider the alternatives to the
speculative housing market such as limited equity cooperatives, which
for many decades have afforded families of modest incomes a way to own
their homes without personal mortgages and high levels of individual
indebtedness. Building affordable, attractive housing is not cheap, but
neither is the $14 trillion or so in net worth the United States has
lost since 2007 as a result of the burst housing bubble. Residents of
Rochdale Village and Co-op City have both considered the path of
privatization, and both have rejected it, and they remain places where
three bedroom apartments are available for well under $1,000 in rent a
month. A stay on the waiting list for a vacancy can stretch into the
decades. Limited equity cooperatives have prospered, quietly, in the
decades when the American dream seemed to be reduced to everyone
becoming a real estate speculator. As we move forward, let us make room
in our housing mix for new Rochdales and Co-op Cities, appropriately
refashioned for the twenty-first century. Sometimes, Santayana to the
contrary, only those who have learned something from history can know
enough to repeat it.
--
Dan Clore
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--Censor (Gianfranco Sanguinetti), _The Real Report on
the Last Chance to Save Capitalism in Italy_
David Chesler
> News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
>
> http://www.hnn.us/articles/131999.html
> 10-04-10
> Rochdale Village: Blueprint for a New Housing Option?
> By Peter Eisenstadt
>
> Peter Eisenstadt is the author of Rochdale Village: Robert Moses, 6,000
> Families, and New York City’s Great Experiment in Integrated Housing
> (Cornell University Press)
Response to Peter Eisenstadt's article, also made to his HNN blog:
1. You say Rochdale is the largest predominantly minority-owned
cooperative. Setting aside the question of whether Jews are minorities
and assuming you meant non-white and/or hispanic, Co-op City is
majority black with a large hispanic population (2000 census.)
2. You seem to ignore the failure of Co-op City as a factor in the end
of the UHF. Massive cost overruns (the mortgage estimate tripled from
$250M to $750M, but this wasn't announced until residents had moved
in, leading to the rent struck) and construction defects dues to
corruption due to poor management led to the rent strike and
associated problems.
3. Jane Jacobs was right, especially as concerns something as large
and artificial as Co-op City. That many people, that much real
estate, without any clear owner is a recipe for corruption and anger.
(It seems every three years a new slate of directors is elected to the
board on a platform of clearing out the corruption from the prior
administration.)
4. You can't ignore the taxpayer cost when discussing $1000/month
rents. Of course there is a waiting list when moving in means one is
getting a $2000/month apartment with the government covering half the
rent.
5. It is true that limited-equity cooperators were immune from the
housing bubble, but the same could be said for tenants and the
homeless.
The equity buy-in for Co-op City (I don't if Rochdale is similar)
would have been enough for the downpayment on a modest home, which in
almost any other time period has increased in value.
My family left a $100/month rent-controlled apartment for a $150/month
apartment in Co-op City. The alternative was to wait in the apartment
another year to save enough to buy a $25,000 home. By the time the
increase in carrying charges for Co-op City were announced, the same
homes were going for $40,000, and my parents felt just barely priced
out of the market until as empty-nest retirees they bought a condo in
New Hampshire. (They were risk averse -- if they'd taken the plunge
like so many who were hit by the latest bubble did, they'd have seen
their house increase in value many times over, more than offsetting
the drop in prices of the past few years.)
The "real estate speculators" make the headlines but people who
bought houses within their means, with the intention of living in
them, have done OK. The net worth that has been lost since 2007 was
largely illusory. If you're going to count the collapse of the bubble
you ought to offset it against the growth of the bubble. Where is net
worth, especially in real estate, now? Somewhere around 2004 levels?
[I was a resident of Co-op City from 1970 until 1986; my parents kept
our apartment until 1991. I've just married a woman who lived in
Section 5 from 1972 until 1983. We remain friends with other people
from Co-op City, and have found nobody understands it who did not live
it.]
--
- David Chesler <che...@post.harvard.edu>
New York's home, but it ain't mine no more