Homes for Living!

How do you make housing that's *permanently* affordable?

First: I’m so thrilled that we’ve raised a stunning $22,345 (!!!) for the Federal Unionist Network (FUN) to fight back against the latest layoffs. That’s $18,902 from Venmo, $2943 from Paypal, plus my $500 match. Venmo has paused my transactions after the first transfers but I’ll have full receipts on Sunday, and fuck yes and thank you to everyone who spared what they were able. I feel really lucky to be a part of this community.

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Second: in this week’s episode of

The Culture Study Podcast

, we tackle SO MANY of your follow-up questions to last month’s interview with

Dana Miranda, CEPF

re: budget culture, which has become of the most popular Culture Study interviews I’ve ever published. If you were one of those people asking “but wait, what about YNAB” — we talk about that and a whole lot more. Also: exclusive documentation of Melody cutting up her credit cards for a Dave Ramsey Class! You only see it here!

The Enduring Myths of Budget Culture

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And finally! I am so excited to share this interview with Jonathan Tarleton, author of Homes for Living — it’s ostensibly about co-ops, but it’s really about the actually-not-that-radical idea that homes don’t have to be profit centers…and what happens when we stop treating them that way. It’s wild! It’s not just a thought experiment! We can think of homes differently, and our recent past is proof! I’m so grateful for Jonathan’s generous answers here, and as always, I can’t wait for your thoughts, additions, and questions in the comments.

You can find out more about Jonathan Tarleton’s work here — and buy Homes for Living here.

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Your book has to do a bunch of things: document the battle over the future of one particular housing cooperative, but also explain cooperative housing to a contemporary audience whose understanding of a “co-op” is limited to a health foods store or REI. When I was in grad school, I had friends who lived in hippy co-ops, and when I lived in New York, I heard about people who wanted to buy apartments going before a “co-op board,” and I know about new (and often expensive) attempts to build cooperative housing. But I’ve only recently learned about the massive push — centered in New York, but not exclusive to it — to build housing for working people in the 1950s and ‘60s.

So: can you explain how co-ops were intended to work, how they actually worked, and how they work today? And, just generally, the idea that housing doesn’t have to be a profit center? I keep coming back to the line: “Social housing is decommodified housing.”

As your examples note, co-ops are a really flexible form of corporate organization. But their roots come out of a desire to push back against exploitation of middle and lower-income folks by owning and controlling the things we need, whether that’s housing, food, a job, or, to a significantly lesser degree, sleeping bags. The ideas that bind most co-ops together is their embodiment of a set of principles built into a food co-op in the mid-1800s in the UK outside Manchester: the Rochdale Principles.

As revolutionary as these were when promulgated, and as antithetical to prevailing corporate status quo as they remain, the principles are relatively simple: Anyone can join the co-op if they accept the responsibilities of membership, without regard to their identity. Co-ops are governed democratically—all members’ votes hold the same weight, no matter the scale of an individual’s economic contribution to the corporation. All members, however, must contribute some capital, on which dividends are equitably distributed. Co-ops should maintain their independence from outside entities while also cooperating with peers to broaden their movement—one that works for the benefit of the communities beyond the co-op. And co-ops should work to educate those communities on the benefits of cooperation, while also ensuring the necessary training of their members to carry on the co-op’s work in keeping with the principles.

These principles undergird so many cooperative entities, housing among them, and made their way to New York in a series of co-ops developed by Finnish immigrants in the early 1900s. Those were very different entities to what’s considered the norm today among New York housing co-ops. Think tony apartment buildings on the edge of Central Park known for their exclusivity and the black box of a process to approve willing new buyers (widely understood to be often discriminatory based on race, children, profession, you name it) —that’s where your “co-op board” comes in. In that case, the cooperative structure has been distorted to be just another tool of capitalism and profit via housing and speculation. These co-ops sell their shares for whatever a buyer will pay and exercise a kind of veto power over the kind of people that other residents want in their building—a surefire way for housing access to be stunted by all manner of bias, implicit and explicit.

Limited-equity co-ops—the kind of housing co-op that I’m concerned with in Homes for Living—live up to the original tenets of co-ops, crucially in that they limit appreciation on the value of a share (and thus an apartment) to ensure that those homes can remain affordable to middle and lower-income folks in perpetuity. Future residents also come off a public waitlist rather than be subject to the whims of a board looking for “the right kind of people.” That speculative co-ops are considered “normal” while we have to append the unwieldy qualifier of “limited-equity” on decommodified ones is a painful inversion of the purpose of co-ops.

Those co-ops are a form of social housing: housing that’s kept permanently affordable by insulating it from the market and not treating it as a commodity and which has some degree of resident control. The residents are the owners, and they govern their homes collectively through an elected board. Residents pay a monthly maintenance fee that goes to cover operating and capital costs (e.g., utilities, management, replacing the boiler) and may occasionally have a special assessment to pay for a big upgrade project (e.g., new windows throughout the building). But that maintenance fee isn’t there to make money; it’s just there to cover costs, and people buy in at a low price (we’re talking $30,000 - $50,000 to become a homeowner in New York, today).

They get that back when they sell, but not much more than an adjustment for inflation. They, as many folks put it, “get their benefits up front” rather than leveraging the rising value of their home through refinancings, reverse mortgages, or an eventual sale. No one there is interested in raising their monthly housing costs more than they have to in order to keep their homes in solid shape, and because of the rules of the game, there’s no incentive or possibility of using your home as a financial asset—that is, unless you privatize.

That’s not to say that everything is always perfect within a co-op. Self-governance is hard, and cooperators aren’t immune to the corruption scandals that arise in a real estate environment like New York’s. These limited-equity co-ops do require some ongoing subsidy to maintain their affordability and not jack up monthly costs to replace roofs or fix structural issues as they get old. That ongoing subsidy comes in the form of tax abatements and low-cost financing offered by the state or city.

But it’s always important to note that a vast majority of housing in the US is subsidized in some form, whether that’s through the mortgage interest tax deduction or something more direct, like operating subsidies for public housing. But instead of that public subsidy largely going directly into a private pocket in the case of the former, this subsidy is also keeping homes affordable for the long-term, and opening up opportunities for those of us who can’t afford a speculative co-op to live in safe, stable, affordable homes in places of great opportunity.

Okay let’s talk about St. James Towers and Southbridge Towers, the central case studies of your book. Can you situate them in co-op history — how the battle over its privatization dovetails with ongoing conversations about gentrification, the racial wealth gap, and the ever-more-inaccessible housing market?

St. James and Southbridge Towers are both products of the Limited Profit Housing Companies Law of 1955. Its legislative sponsors State Senator MacNeil Mitchell and Assemblyman Alfred Lama—the origin of the law’s Mitchell-Lama nickname—saw the buildings as gap-filler and counterweight in the housing market. Middle-income folks living in the state’s urban areas were too well-off to gain entry to public housing and too poor to afford quality apartments on the speculative market. The program’s supporters also hoped that this new affordable housing would attract the White families then being wooed by the expanding suburbs.

The Mitchell-Lama program sent a message to those families: We’ll see your cookie-cutter homes financed by cheap, subsidized mortgages tied to the city by interstates, and we’ll raise you a new kind of subsidized housing withincity limits, close to jobs and transit. Unlike many exclusively White neighborhoods in the sprawling burbs, these buildings did not have racial covenants and redlining to regulate their demographics. The approach wasn’t altogether novel, but the scale of Mitchell-Lama would soon make it one of the most ambitious programs of its kind in U.S. history.

Between 1955 and 1974, ground across New York City broke under the weight of almost one hundred co-ops with sixty-nine thousand apartments and over 170 rental developments with more than sixty-nine thousand additional homes to address a severe housing crisis. Underbuilding during the war had left New York City, and much of the country, in a crunch. In a turn soon to sweep the rest of country, New York policymakers also jettisoned direct public delivery of low- and middle-income housing in favor of ventures led by private developers, some mission-driven and union-backed, others out for profit, though with limits under the program.

Although this wasn’t always the case, St. James and Southbridge were both constructed in urban renewal areas: neighborhoods that had been designated slums, bulldozed, and remade, a process James Baldwin described as “Negro removal.” It’s notable that not a few residents of the co-ops forewent the opportunity to buy cheap real estate elsewhere in these areas — these were the days of “brownstoners” buying run down homes for $1 and back taxes that now sell for millions today — in order to move into these new, modern, middle-income buildings. They were a good deal and good quality, and they served families well over generations, with places like St. James and Southbridge now often housing three generations of a family under one roof.

These families got their benefits up front, but their peers in the suburbs saw their home values appreciate dramatically thanks to public subsidy. Many of those suburban homeowners were White, thanks to racism baked deep into the practices of governments and real estate: a lever shoved into any already existent racial wealth gap to widen it further and further.

Privatization only really entered the scene with the reversal of the real estate market in New York in the late 80s through early 2000s — that is, only when people were speculating on the value of housing as a means for profit. This and the processes of gentrification that went hand in hand began to show the value of limited-equity co-ops in two ways: one, they were able to insulate residents from the negative effects of gentrification, allowing them to remain in affordable homes while their neighbors were forced out, and two, the apartments themselves would clearly be worth a lot of money if that pesky resale restriction that kept them affordable for current and future residents was removed. Ironically, this decommodified housing was under threat of commodification through privatization precisely because they existed outside the market. That meant the profit potential was huge, not unlike how speculators buy up rent-stabilized apartments and then seek to deregulate them to charge significantly higher rents as a profit-making strategy. As one resident pitched another: “Well, you paid $35,000 for your apartment;” Under privatization “your apartment’s worth $1.1 million-something.”

Race inflects these debates over privatization, as it does almost everything in American housing. One potent argument for privatization at St. James among some Black cooperators was that profit from it would be a kind of reparations for their having been excluded from wealth-building through the real estate market because of their race. This, I’d argue is a very problematic form of reparations in that it’s highly individual, and the reaping of that profit would demolish a public good that is one of a few remaining bulwarks of affordability in a sea of broader housing crisis that preys first and foremost on middle and lower-income people of color.

These privatization debates lay bare the reality that as long as housing is treated as a commodity, someone has to lose out for others to profit. We must steward housing — especially the social housing we already have — to serve its primary purpose as containers for living, rather than pursuing them as assets for profit if we’re to ever actually close that wealth gap or provide security for existing residents when a neighborhood gets hot. We’re not going to solve the racial wealth gap by turning to the same thing that created it, not the least because the creation of lots of wealth through housing among White families was in large part predicated on the exclusion of others from that same opportunity. Housing appreciation is the other side of the coin of housing unaffordability when home is commodified. There’s no disentangling them without insulating more homes from the whims of the market.

Wenna is the first person we meet in the book, and as a non-fiction author myself, I understood immediately why: her story feels like the story, a way to illuminate so many of the tensions at play in the fight for/against re-commodification. I’d love it if you could introduce readers to her story and how it fits in the larger narrative of the book.

Well, the first thing people should know about Wenna is that she’s a firecracker. She’s in her late 80s now, but that didn’t stop her from taking the mic at my book launch recently and ensuring that everyone there knew her family’s story, which, as you say, does capture so many aspects of this larger narrative.

She also has about as strong a tie to a co-op as one can imagine: her father was one of the architects behind St. James Towers, but he was also dead set against living in it. Wenna’s father had initially put money down on land in the Bronx, only to have the owner (“Her name was Mrs. Wheeler,” she’ll tell you. Wenna’s memory is still sharp!) back out of the sale once she learned that Mr. Redfern was Black. When Wenna’s mom found the plans for the co-op on her husband’s desk, she cajoled him into shelving the drawings for the Bronx dream home he’d designed. She argued that they should instead construct a life and community in what he called a “glorified project.”

That’s what they did, along with many other Black middle-income families. And the story of why they bought into the co-op is key to how she and some of her fellow defenders of St. James against privatization continue to think of it today: in the midst of the aggressive gentrification of Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, she and her friends call themselves “leftovers.” St. James insulates them from both the pressures of a broader real estate market, rising rents and embedded racism included. After a long career delivering children at a hospital in the Bronx, Wenna is on a fixed income and plans to live out her days at St. James.

So even if she could personally profit from privatization, that would mean having to sell and leave. She asks everyone who was considering privatization and leaving, “Where you gonna go?” Even if a good chunk of cash was on the table, they still couldn’t buy something comparable in New York, and they’d still be entering into a market rife with racial discrimination. For those who wanted to stay, like her, their monthly maintenance charges would eventually have to rise to make up for lost subsidy from the city.

So she organizes with some of her neighbors, hosting info sessions and press conferences to push back on the privatization attempt. She runs for the board (“I’m going to kick ass!” she once told me), albeit unsuccessfully. But her efforts are rewarded with a return of her co-op to relative obscurity and banality: they beat back the privatization movement and are able to return the co-op to its workaday matter of housing folks. And that allows Wenna to comfortably keep to her weekly movies and trips to the fish market accompanied by Graham Hales, now the board president but, in the early days of the co-op, a kid that her mother looked after.

Wenna’s story is emblematic of the way that the decommodified structure of this housing provided a haven for many Black families (though that was hardly the intent of the original program) and allowed them to accrue wealth through a stable, quality, affordable home. They had the security of owning their own home, and they were saving every month with low monthly maintenance that allowed many to put their kids through college or even buy a vacation home, like Wenna was able to. It allowed them to maintain tight-knit communities of mutual care. And it will hopefully allow for Wenna to continue to age in place without concern of her housing costs rising to an unreasonable degree.

Can we talk philosophically about how commodification/privatization is often *intended* as a way to allow people to retire “comfortably”....but the end result is a building with accumulated maintenance that forces long-time residents to flee? I find myself reading these interviews with the remaining Southbridge Towers residents and thinking about how they’re part of a larger process that makes the city ever more hostile for anyone who wants to age in place.

For these co-ops, I’d argue that privatization was never intended — though the argument that it was is a very powerful one in these debates, and the very real financial needs of families as folks grow older is a compelling reason why some cooperators think they should be able to profit from the commodification of this public good.

And there are very clear reasons why people view housing in that way. Housing appreciation has increasingly been positioned as the substitute for a broader social safety net in the US. People are counseled to instrumentalize their homes as an asset to pay for their kids to go to college, for emergency medical care, for elder care for their parents.

But the key to your question is that folks who want to privatize are largely those who don’t want to “retire comfortably” where they live right now. If they were happy to stay, there’s really no better deal than a Mitchell-Lama with predictable maintenance increases; that’s why so many co-ops like it are termed NORCS: naturally occurring retirement communities.

Those that want to privatize often want to leave, which means they need a way of decoupling the value of their home—which in its current form isn’t in its exchange value but in its use value—from the place itself. And as you note, the process of doing so actually means putting people and the place they love—and I do believe even those who are bent on privatization love it—at great risk.

The broader trend of how the commodification of housing makes the city more and more hostile for others shows up in so many arenas. One I found particularly concerning is in affordable homeownership programs that are positioned as a kind of reparations for Black families locked out of housing wealth for so long. How many of these work is that someone can buy a home at a low, subsidized cost, then they’re required to live in it or sell it at a similar price for the first 10-15 years. After that, they can sell it for whatever they want. That individual family may benefit from the housing appreciation, but in selling they also pocket public investment AND that home becomes more expensive. Their “reparations” are predicated on the city becoming less affordable for the people that come after them. This is the trap of housing commodification—it can never be good for everyone; there have to be folks missing out for it to work.

The storied Penn South Co-Op in Manhattan

I recently interviewed a woman for my upcoming book about how she attributes her Manhattan building with fostering the best/closest group of girl friends imaginable — at this point, they’ve been friends for nearly 20 years. She started describing the buildings and their location, huddled under the Williamsburg Bridge on the Lower East Side, and I realized that I’d run by them dozens of times back when I lived in New York. They looked a lot like public housing, but also *different.* They are, in my interviewee’s words, almost aggressively charmless. But you could walk out your front door and not even have to cross the street to get to a park. They were designed by working people — more specifically, the members of the ILGWU, or International Ladies Garment Worker’s Union — *for* working people.

There’s a whole history of why ILGWU was forced to privatize the building and allow units to go on “the open market” in the early 2000s, which is when the woman I was interviewing was able to buy hers, and we can talk about that, too, if you’d like. But I just keep thinking about how the design is still so conducive to community, even though the units have been “recommodified.” (One thing my interviewee pointed out: everyone has basically the same kitchen and the same bathroom; some people have an extra bedroom but that’s it, all the bedrooms are the same size — you don’t have the same comparison bullshit). Can you talk a bit about how cooperatives are physically conducive to community?

Aggressively charmless is a perfect description! I have a good friend who says that once you know some of the key markers (deep, yet unglamorous balconies among them) you can pick out a Mitchell-Lama anywhere in the city. And I'm so glad you ask about the design here — as an urban planner and someone who used to write about architecture a fair bit, I don’t get to talk about it enough.

One caveat I’ll make is that scale really matters, as does how a co-op relates to the larger neighborhood. Southbridge Towers is by all accounts a wonderful place to grow up, in part because it was big, at over 1600 apartments, and it was built as kind of a village in the city. Its buildings curl up around a series of courtyards with built in commercial properties (I’m partial to Squires Diner) and communal spaces for residents, which originally stemmed from it being a rare residential outpost in Lower Manhattan when it was built.

That meant Southbridge’s buildings were almost coterminous with the residents’ communities. People fondly remember having parties in the halls and apartment doors always remaining open. There are now quite a few families who have three generations living inside, some now likely four, and kids spoke of roaming the complex, bopping from a game room to a basketball court to Burger King, then between their respective parents’ and grandparents’ apartments. Future spouses met in the since-disbanded youth committee through ski trips, a bowling league, a junior boardof directors, and Southbridge still boasts a famous Halloween party, Christmas tree– and menorah-lighting ceremonies, a photography club, five-days-a-week card-playing seniors, and free classes tai chi and yoga classes.

To put it more succinctly, co-ops often embedded both communal space and communal activities within their bounds, whether for reasons of building class solidarity (which was common in union-backed co-ops) or to hang out, or both. St. James is somewhat different. It’s smaller at 300+ units, but it sits in a row next to the Pratt Institute with two other, identical Mitchell-Lama co-ops. There was more going on in Bed-Stuy than Lower Manhattan, so there wasn’t a need to embed all the social functions of a community in the building. And still, they have a community room where people gather for memorial services and board meetings, and you’re sure to see your neighbors and the series of cafes directly across the street.

One nuance here is who is considered part of the community, and what I think it means for the sphere of concern that some cooperators had. Many folks in favor of the privatization of Southbridge were concerned strictly with the wellbeing of people inside — not the folks on the waitlist or future generations of New Yorkers. In fact, some saw profiting from privatization and making their homes more exclusive as the only way to keep up with the luxury turn in the neighborhood and to avoid “backsliding”—a fear of some White residents held of being seen as residents of public housing.

I think that reaction does have something to do with its design, and how it was always somewhat insular. St. James is, on the contrary, a 24-story tower sprouting up from a wider neighborhood whose amenities largely exist outside the building, or are integrated with the large community of Bed-Stuy, starting with the playground out front. The idea that privatization wasn’t just about current residents, but the wellbeing of a wider community, was a much more powerful strain there.

Final question for a little turn of the screw: at the end of the book, you quote sociologist Brian McCabe:

“the constellation of tax policies that reward American homeowners, including the mortgage interest deduction, contribute to the politics of exclusion by increasing the investment value of housing and encouraging homeowners to view their housing as a commodity to be bought and sold for a profit.”

At the beginning of the book, you quote Culture Study fav David Graeber:

“The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.”

What will it take for us to think about housing *differently*? And what is possible if we do?

In the book I go into the vast government and private campaigns that created our current understanding around housing today: that owning your own home is the American Dream and that profiting from it is the way to a secure, prosperous life. These same campaigns positioned cooperative housing as unnatural, as a dangerous stepping stone to communism. This narrative is extremely strong, and even those folks who were living a different dream at St. James and Southbridge are deeply affected by it, to the point that certain residents only think they can attain “true homeownership” if they privatize and profit. That viewpoint is considered non-ideological, whereas arguments that homes should be for living in, not for profiting from is considered so ideological as to be outside the realm of normal conversation. We called the book Homes for Living as an indication of just how backward that logic is; the very fact that the qualifier isn’t entirely redundant is a marker of just how warped our public narratives around housing are.

To think about housing differently, we need to change this narrative in as aggressive a manner as the current one was instituted. I’ve worked in a variety of roles in housing, among them a public housing authority and a community development corporation developing affordable housing. That narrative about housing appreciation and profiting from home as the desired end goal are embedded there as well. That’s a place to start: to bring the wider movement for people around housing crises along to the reality that we can’t solve those crises if profit is an embedded end goal of home. We need to reaffirm that home is about a place for living first and foremost, and that it’s a vital infrastructure we all need for our society to function.

Another step forward is to reveal, in our common conversations, that “subsidized housing” is really all housing in the US, as Brian McCabe makes very clear. Removing distinctions between public housing, middle-income housing like Mitchell-Lama, and other forms is an important step in building a broader political constituency for social housing models. We need to work to increase our supply of social housing to remove the justification of means testing it, and to make privatization of it politically untouchable.

But housing can’t be approached in isolation. As long as people must use their homes as a way to fill the holes in our social safety net, they’ll be forced into difficult decisions to do so. So a shift in thinking about housing and funding needs to be carried forward in concert with a broader social democratic political agenda that decommodifies healthcare and education, among other realms.

The original push to make the US a nation of homeowners came about at a time of great labor unrest. Yoking workers to a mortgage and getting them bought into housing appreciation as a means toward building wealth was a deliberate strategy to dull the collective power of the working class. You can’t afford to lose your job because of your labor organizing if you could lose all your wealth through foreclosure when the mortgage goes unpaid. It’s no coincidence that some labor unions were such big backers of cooperative housing models: they not only took care of workers, they also built their power.

My interest in housing has always been its centrality to so many systems that need broad reimagining in the US, and decoupling homes from profit is, to me, the path toward great investment in our common wellbeing. ●

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You can find out more about Jonathan Tarleton’s work here — and buy Homes for Living here.

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