Working-Class Utopias: A History of Cooperative Housing in New York City

One of the nation’s foremost urban historians traces the history of cooperative housing in New York City from the 1920s through the 1970sAs World War II ended and Americans turned their attention to problems at home, union leaders and other prominent New Yorkers came to believe that cooperative housing would solve the city’s century-old problem of providing decent housing at a reasonable cost for working-class families.Working-Class Utopias tells the story of this ambitious movement from the construction of the Amalgamated Houses after World War I to the building of Co-op City, the world’s largest housing cooperative, four decades later. Robert Fogelson brings to life a tumultuous era in the life of New York, drawing on a wealth of archival materials such as community newspapers, legal records, and personal and institutional papers.In the early 1950s, a consortium of labor unions founded the United Housing Foundation under the visionary leadership of Abraham E.Kazan, who was supported