Public housing is by far the biggest and most important social housing program New York has ever produced. With over 150,000 apartments in hundreds of developments across the five boroughs, the New York City Public Housing Authority’s program is the largest in the country. This is true not only in terms of the number of apartments—which may not be surprising, given that New York City is the largest municipality in the United States—but also by percentage of the total housing stock. Ninety years ago, the city made a commitment to public provision of affordable housing, and while 13 percent of the stock has since been brought under private management through a local version of the federal Rental Assistance Demonstration program, New York has refused to follow the mainstream American program of demolishing or privatizing most or all of its public housing.
Unlike most other cities, New York got its start with public housing before the federal government took on—and later abandoned—this role. The first public housing in New York City was municipal social housing. Originally planned as a conversion project, a stretch of Lower East Side tenements was purchased by the city from the Astor family. When renovation plans turned too costly, the city instead tore the buildings down and built new, similarly proportioned and aligned buildings known as “First Houses.”
The model took off. The New Deal initiated a particular mode of public housing that emphasized “urban renewal” (or demolition of existing residential and industrial areas, often low income and home primarily to Black and immigrant households) and construction of low-income housing, with a one-to-one ratio of public demolition to public development. Left-oriented New York City mayors, like Fiorello LaGuardia, and Communist and Socialist Congress and city council members, like Vito Marcantonio, Ben Davis, Pete Cacchione, and Baruch Vladeck (for whom a Lower East Side public housing development is named), might have wished for a different model—one in which public housing was able to outbuild private housing, and with a broader share of the city housed under its auspices. Instead, the federalized system guided cities toward a tear-down and build-up model. This created a flood of internally displaced residents at a pace that constantly overwhelmed the city’s resettlement authority. But it also built up an enduring bulkhead of working-class communities spread across four-fifths of the city’s community districts, and forming as much as a third of the rental-housing stock in neighborhoods like East Harlem.
Since the program began, public housing has had its haters, and while it has valiantly persevered in New York, the model remains beleaguered. From the right, there are those who think the government has no business building, owning, or operating housing in the first place. From the left, there are those who say (fairly, in my opinion) that the program never went far enough, with design and budget guidelines that dictated cheap construction methods and led to segregation and substandard quality. Some public housing projects initially lacked such basics as toilet seats or closet doors. Coming from a mix of both perspectives, many espouse what urban critic Owen Hatherley has diagnosed as “the New York ideology,” a semiconscious bias that sees big planning and big projects as inherently doomed, favoring instead the slow and iterative development its adherents depict as more organic.
Indeed, chronic federal underfunding has led to a self-fulfilling prophecy, with deferred maintenance leading to dangerous and sometimes deadly conditions in some developments. Rather than understand this as the consequence of stingy and regressive budgeting, however, mainstream politicians and pundits have cast it as the inevitable outcome of public ownership.
But, like rent regulation, public housing is essential to New York City as we know it. According to official statistics—which are universally understood to be an undercount—nearly 300,000 New Yorkers live somewhere in the public housing system. If we are ashamed that New York City’s homeless population is roughly the size of Boulder’s entire population, we should be proud that the population living in New York City’s public housing is roughly the size of Pittsburgh. Public housing provides a tremendous amount of stability to New York City’s working class, and thus to the city as a whole.
Alongside public housing stand other models of purpose-built social housing in New York, some of which preceded even the development of First Houses. The first social housing developments in New York were limited-equity cooperative projects sponsored by working-class institutions in the central Bronx, the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and Sunset Park, Brooklyn. This model coalesced into the union cooperative movement, led by the garment workers and their United Housing Foundation (which built Bayard Rustin’s home in Penn South) and joined by electrical workers, butchers, typesetters, furriers, and health-care workers. All together, the model produced roughly 50,000 homes, designed to be affordable for working-class residents to buy, live in, and then pass on to other households in their same class position.
Many of these projects turned into cooperative villages, with not only shared open spaces and cultural facilities (like theaters, libraries, and meeting rooms) for residents to enjoy, but an entire solidarity economy ecosystem. Although none of these facilities existed all together in the same projects, New York City cooperative developments collectively maintained pharmacies, health clinics, daycare facilities and nursery schools, school buses, groceries linked to politically aligned farms upstate, furniture stores, bakeries, Kosher butchers, sports clubs, energy purchasing (and later power generation) schemes, newspapers, and—at least in one case—the development’s own community alternative to the municipal police. Writing about the electricians’ cooperative development built over a golf course near Utopia Parkway in Queens, the labor journalist A. H. Raskin described its union sponsor as “the operator of an industry-financed welfare state that supplies cradle-to-grave protection for the families of 30,000 members.”
In addition to these union- and worker-centric cooperatives were projects developed by other limited-profit corporations, with similar affordability guidelines. Under the state’s Mitchell-Lama program, union developers, nonprofits and other firms willing to limit their profits could develop limited-equity cooperatives and limited-cost rentals with public support in the form of tax breaks, bond financing, and low-interest loans. From the mid-1950s to the early 1980s, the program produced 69,000 cooperative apartments and 66,000 rental homes.
Looking back at her time growing up in a Mitchell-Lama cooperative, the author Jennifer Baum subtitled her book Growing Up on the Upper West Side When Housing Was a Human Right. This is a bit of knowing hyperbole—housing has never truly been treated as a human right in New York City—but this era of mass social housing production was perhaps the closest we have ever been, not only because social housing was plentiful, but because that very plentitude fostered a culture of care among those who enjoyed it.
Crucially, however, the Mitchell-Lama program contained what policymakers call a “sunset” clause, allowing owners to exit the program after the mortgage is paid. Tenant activist John Leyva, however, urges us all to stop using this language to paint something so destructive and destabilizing as natural and inevitable. “I don’t call it a sunset because sunsets are beautiful,” he often says. “I call it a ‘doomsday’ clause.”
Subsequent laws have made it harder to abandon affordability, but before those reforms were made, more than half of rentals and approximately 10 percent of co-ops left the program. Some have gone into rent stabilization, while others rent or sell for as much as the market allows.
Mitchell-Lama housing and union cooperatives remain extremely popular models in New York City, and this support stands as evidence that New Yorkers could embrace a return to large-scale social housing construction. Hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers have put themselves on waiting lists for social cooperative and public housing developments, each hoping their number is called so they can exit the anti–social housing landscape of profit-seeking landlords and grueling shelter stays. When cooperatives had lower barriers to exiting the program, the fact that few did suggests that most residents understand how the use value of home and community can outweigh the potential exchange value of windfall profits. (The fact that so many Mitchell-Lama rental landlords opted out of the program demonstrates the opposite: that for landlords, their building’s use value is its exchange value.) Every four years, mayoral candidates pledge to establish a “Mitchell-Lama 2.0,” though none yet has followed through to deliver it.
As New Yorkers revisit past models of social housing construction, we also look abroad to cities and countries with far stronger track records of social sector development. In 2022, I was invited to join a delegation of New York City housing activists, including homeless and tenant leaders, organizers, politicians, and researchers, to spend a week studying Vienna’s famously successful social housing model.
I was hesitant to attend; as a Jew, I was never comfortable celebrating twentieth-century Austria. I might have preferred a trip to Uruguay, where, since 1970, the Federation of Housing Cooperatives for Mutual Aid has presented one of the strongest—if less widely heralded—legacies of self-built cooperative social housing on the planet.
But I knew that the Vienna trip would become a touchstone of future housing politics in New York, and indeed, for its participants it has. We were exposed not just to well-designed, well-built, and well-maintained municipal social housing, some of it nearly 100 years old, but so much of it, seemingly everywhere throughout the city. Suddenly our 9 percent social housing stock seemed paltry compared to their 43 percent.
The numbers only begin to capture the feeling of being in a city that treats housing as a human right—and, notably, a city with an even higher proportion of immigrants than our own. In Vienna, homelessness is, indeed, rare and of short duration. Social housing is eligible to all after two years of stable residency, including in emergency shelters. The city is adding social housing all the time, and the old stock is not only maintained but improved, with rents falling over time as construction debts are repaid.
One day during the visit I set out on my own to look for a Jewish cemetery (which turned out to be fenced off because of repeated anti-Semitic graffiti attacks) and accidentally stumbled on a building that looked something like my own walk-up tenement in New York. But this one was owned by the city, and they had built an exterior glass elevator to make its upper floors accessible to elders and anyone who might struggle with multiple flights of stairs. Looking at that lift, I thought of my across-the-hall neighbor, Hassan, an elderly man who valiantly trudged up and down the stairs each day—increasingly with assistance from his family or me and my wife. Our building is too narrow for an internal elevator, but it had never even occurred to me that, with the proper resources and regulations, we could put one outside and punch through the walls to create new entrances, saving Hassan (and eventually all of us) the struggle and danger of all those stairs.
Meanwhile, Vienna’s new social housing developments—mostly limited-equity cooperatives built by highly regulated nonprofit entities, but also some built and owned by the city’s housing authority—were decadently gorgeous. Chosen through a competitive process that values design as well as affordability, they often featured car-free streets, verdant balconies and roofs, energy-efficient building materials, solar power, communal kitchens and children’s playrooms, and, in nearly every case, a sauna, a pool, or multiples of both. And perhaps most bafflingly, the Vienna model demands less subsidy on a per-resident basis than New York’s housing. Why? Because, we were told by local planning officials, Vienna takes active measures to cool land and property values, then buys land and subsidizes construction for housing that is never meant to turn a profit—whereas we construct subsidy schemes meant to ensure profits for an array of stakeholders, from landowner to landlord.
On a trip to the museum inside Karl-Marx-Hof, the preeminent social housing development of the “Red Vienna” period (1918–1934), I remember stopping and staring intently at a photographic portrait of the project’s self-defense brigade. They stood in a military formation with rifles in hand, aware enough of the fascist menace to start preparing but seemingly self-confident in their ability to ward it off. The past we know too well was their still-undetermined future. It was as humbling as it was horrifying to imagine what became of these young men just a few years later, and to contemplate our own existential ignorance of whatever future awaits us.
When our delegation returned home, it was clear to us that we had a long way to go to match what our comrades in Vienna had shown us. But it was also clear that for every aspect of the Vienna model, we had a diminished corollary. “New York as shitty Vienna,” I began to call it in my head. We have public housing, but it has never been as well designed, built, or maintained. We have limited-equity co-ops built by limited-dividend companies, but we built far fewer of them, and we allowed some to go private. We have inclusionary zoning, but whereas their model requires two-thirds of the development to be social housing, ours only demands that one-third be targeted to tenants under a certain household income. We have rent control, but it covers less than half of the private rental stock. We spend city capital on housing, but we get less for our money because we refuse to decommodify most of the homes we invest in. We have a city-chartered nonprofit that can temporarily hold tax-foreclosed land and buildings, but we do not have a proper public land bank whose mission is to compile and acquire parcels before their value rises and put them toward social housing production.
Tenant and homeless groups got to work on envisioning a new social housing model for New York State, which could build on the successes of the past while improving on their shortcomings. The result is a bill that would create a Social Housing Development Authority for New York State, a democratically operated public entity designed in the spirit of the Labor Housing Conference. It could build new social housing as well as acquire buildings and oversee conversions. It would offer a way out of the interminable cycles of disinvestment and gentrification that have turned housing into a vehicle for upward and racialized wealth redistribution. It is not perfect, and as I write this it remains far from passing, but it is the first time in a generation (if not longer) that the New York housing left has collectively asserted a positive vision for new housing construction.
And we were not alone in doing so: Around the country, city and state initiatives of various kinds have been experimenting with how to restart social housing production, from my birth state of Rhode Island—where Reclaim RI is fighting to transform the state’s Department of Housing into a public developer with the power to build mixed-income public housing and preserve existing buildings—to Seattle, Washington, where residents voted to create and fund a new municipal social housing developer. In all these cases of grassroots mobilization for social housing, organizers are rethinking the role of the state in housing and pushing back against a century of racist policy design and implementation.
The capitalist state is not going to simply embrace this transformation because it is the right thing to do. In fact, the state as we know it is constructed specifically to avoid this outcome. It could, however, be pushed into this position by an organized working class, who suffer under the status quo and are uniquely situated to both transform the state and to deliver on the full promise of democracy. As the British sociologist Ralph Miliband argued decades ago, although a “deep malaise, a pervasive sense of unfulfilled individual and collective possibilities penetrates and corrodes the climate of every advanced capitalist society,” people still sought political transformation, in their homes and workplaces but also from the governments they live under. “It is towards the state,” Miliband wrote, “that they are increasingly driven to direct their pressure; and it is from the state that they expect the fulfillment of their expectations.” If this state will not deliver a right to housing, we must do the work to bring about a state that will.
