THE HOPE OF HOUSING

...Kansas City, Missouri, and dozens of other communities...

...A start had been made by the Cooperative League in 1958 when the first national conference on cooperative housing was convened by that organization in Washington, D.C...

...The Amalgamated project turned out to be a brilliant success...

...Not the least important reason for this was the fact that monthly charges, including the upbuilding of equity ownership, were, and are, in such projects between twenty and thirty per cent less than simple rentals would be in comparable commercial housing...

...That is, $720 to $840 a year...

...No subsidy would be involved...

...Not until the postWorld War II years did the tempo of development become more rapid...

...Builders or investors saw in section 213 their best opportunity to build housing, sell it expeditiously and under the most favorable financing arrangements...

...A whole section of New York's lower East Side has been changed from a slum into a beautiful, law-abiding community of neighbors by this method...

...Few other states have the same type of law...

...Families with incomes as low as $4,000 can afford such costs for their homes without incurring burdensome debt...

...The Foundation for Cooperative Housing provided in many respects the counterpart to United Housing Foundation...

...On the one hand were A. E. Kazan and his close associates who were rigidly unwilling to compromise any of their thoroughly cooperative principles...

...Others were purely luxury apartments...

...Nor is there anywhere any special tax provision for cooperative housing...

...By 1959, 12,000 families in New York were housed in beautiful, and remarkably inexpensive, apartment buildings, which they themselves owned as a result of UHF activity...

...Some insurance companies also joined in financing some of the projects...

...But the task of helping them to realize what cooperative ownership could mean to them remained almost wholly to be done...

...FCH was fathered—and largely financed—by Winslow Carlton, public-spirited civic leader and president of a consumer-oriented health insurance company...

...It provided for insurance by FHA of loans to cooperative housing projects...

...But only a minority of American families have incomes of $7,000 a year...

...This, of course, is some help in keeping the monthly charges low, but it is no "special privilege" for cooperative housing...

...Who was going to perform this task...

...By 1959 there were some three hundred cooperative housing projects in the United States, 150 of them in New York State, with perhaps four hundred thousand people living in them...

...The clothing workers figured up how much they were paying in rent on the rather shabby apartments their families occupied...

...The net result was three organizations, all centered in New York City, but all working independently of one another and in somewhat different ways...

...So did some of the larger credit unions and other membership organizations...

...JERRY VOORHIS is executive director of the Cooperative teague of the U.S.A...

...Under such circumstances no high-pressure sales efforts are needed...

...They capitalized this amount...

...Partly because good homes in good neighborhoods are the outstanding unmet economic need of middle and lower-income families in the United States today...

...It worked less intensively than United Housing Foundation, and was less insistent on application of all the cooperative principles to the projects with which it worked, but it spread its work and influence more broadly...

...Interest was fairly widespread...

...They concluded from all this that if they could become their own landlords, that is, build and own their own homes, they could save money and have far better homes...

...The executive secretary of the National Association of Housing and Redevelopment Officials declared at the same conference that cooperative housing is the master key to good urban renewal programs...

...And pride in appearance and in "keeping up" the cooperatively owned properties have held maintenance costs to half what they normally are in either conventional "landlord's" rental housing or in publicly owned housing...

...It proceeded along the lines that had already been proved so successful to develop one housing cooperative after another in metropolitan New York...

...The need increased with each passing month...

...and a couple of other places, organized cooperative associations and bought the homes they had been renting from the government...

...If cooperation were to be employed by municipal authorities to meet as much as possible the housing needs of groups heretofore requiring partially subsidized public housing, there could be a great increase in cooperative housing in this critical field...

...He announced that this group of homes would be named Rochdale Village, in honor of the twenty-eight poor weavers who founded the first consumers' cooperative at Rochdale, England, in 1848...

...Seventy-five per cent of the families now resident in the Van Cortlandt Park homes are either the same families or direct descendants of the families who went to live there in 1926...

...And a basic reason these savings are possible is that cooperative housing is consumer-directed production of housing...

...And the cost of this housing is twenty-five to thirty per cent less than comparable commercially built housing...

...Amortization and interest provisions were among the more favorable terms provided by the national legislation...

...It followed with Chatham Green housing cooperative sponsored by city and state credit unions...

...But under New York law, non-profit housing is permitted to pay the same taxes for a period of twenty-five years as were collected upon the same property before the new construction took place...

...Sponsor, builder, and developer of this, the largest single cooperative housing project in this country and perhaps in the world, would be United Housing Foundation...

...Not only did it provide good housing at considerably reduced cost, it created a true neighborhood in the midst of America's largest city...

...It is probable that good housing at costs they can afford is the most serious unmet economic need of Americans today...

...All this a national federation for cooperative housing could do if the diverse elements in the field could be reconciled, the various viewpoints brought into reasonable harmony, and if enough of the cooperative homeownership groups could be persuaded to join and pay dues to finance the work of the national organization...

...And many families have escaped this fate only by spending far more in purchasing their homes than they could safely afford...

...Franklin D. Roosevelt, and many other state and national leaders...

...On May 11, 1960, a meeting of established cooperative housing leaders was held in New York City and the National Association of Housing Cooperatives became a reality...

...Yet in some of our major cities there is considerable unemployment in the building trades...

...Then other strong labor unions such as International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and International Ladies' Garment Workers become interested...

...It is a special provision of New York law for any non-profit housing...

...Goods or services so produced in effect are already sold before they are even produced, just as was the case with the homes in the yet non-existent Rochdale Village...

...Such an organization could set standards of proper cooperative operation for its membership...

...Most of them were projects that developed something like this...

...who knew how to do the job, and who refused to be pushed into a program so broad that it would endanger their established standards for every project they undertook...

...They had been told only approximately what the down payments would be or the monthly payments once they were living in their new homes...

...Comparatively few of them cost less than $15,000, and a family should have an income of at least $7,000 in order safely to afford a home that expensive...

...It brought into being a neighborhood in which forums and lecture courses would be held on all manner of subjects, where nursery schools and summer camps would be organized for children, where cooperative food stores, credit unions, and insurance services would be organized by the neighbors for mutual benefit of the neighbors...

...At least the municipality would collect some $50 million in taxes which it would not otherwise get, and since the equity down payments would be made at the outset, some $20 million of the estimated $138 million cost would be immediately recovered for use elsewhere...

...On the other hand were people who, while recognizing the extreme value of the accomplishments of the Kazan group, felt that an attempt should be made to extend the benefits of cooperative housing beyond New York, and who, in general, were less insistent on application of pure cooperative methods so long as more and more housing could be obtained...

...So much interest was shown that the League immediately announced that such conferences would be held annually...

...In these latter cases the families had new houses to live in, and that was good...

...They found out how much mortgage financing would cost...

...But two days of experience-sharing and discussion among a group of cooperative housing leaders once a year, is hardly adequate to convey to several hundred thousand resident-owners the meaning and value of cooperative housing...

...This is in no sense a tax exemption...

...The houses belong to the families who are going to live in them before they are even constructed...

...And there has yet to be recorded a single case of major crime or even of serious juvenile delinquency among them...

...These people had never seen plans or pictures of the buildings...

...Cooperative housing of the United Housing Foundation type was definitely accepted as a most important, constructive factor in American urban life...

...Second, the houses that have been built have been mostly luxury housing...

...The reason for all this is twofold...

...And it converted to cooperative ownership houses in Bridgeport, Connecticut...

...It equipped itself to assist and counsel in the development of cooperative housing almost anywhere...

...So a few intelligent people have had the idea of reversing this process and building the kind of homes the people do need at prices they can afford...

...So did the savings of many families...

...Throughout most of 1959 and early 1960 work to these ends went forward, through initiative of the Cooperative League, UHF, and FCH...

...Some of them were thoroughly cooperative communities, both economically and socially...

...And not only was this interest shown in the sponsoring of projects, but in their mortgage financing as well...

...Some had hardly any of these aspects...

...Gardens and shrubbery and vines on the brick buildings have come to be prized by these families...

...Nowhere except in New York had there been a demonstration of cooperativehousing success from bare land to happy neighborhood, and nowhere else was there an A. E. Kazan...

...Their world was New York City...

...South Bend, Indiana...

...The early ones were sponsored by Amalgamated Clothing Workers and financed by savings banks whose complete confidence Kazan had gained...

...It pays the same taxes exactly as do other kinds of housing...

...First, we have not been building enough new houses nor doing nearly enough to cure big-city blight...

...So many families needed housing that they readily bought shares in cooperative housing of this type— particularly since down payments were in many cases quite small...

...Much of the activity centered in the lower East Side of the city...

...People had confidence in United Housing Foundation...

...Encouraged by the success of the first venture, there followed, slowly at first, similar projects in other parts of New York City...

...And partly because Rochdale Village was to be another project of United Housing Foundation, which meant that the homes would be built not for sale at a profit but to give as many families as possible good homes in good neighborhoods at costs they could afford...

...Dallas, Texas...

...But what is perhaps most remarkable— though hardly surprising, really— about the Amalgamated homeowners and other similar groups who have followed in their footsteps has been the record of unbelievably low incidence of crime or delinquency among them...

...But nowhere else were the laws as favorable as in New York...

...Within twenty-four hours after Governor Rockefeller's announcement more than two thousand applications had been received by United Housing Foundation...

...It is true that in New York cooperative housing can have some tax abatement along with any other type of non-profit housing...

...Two points of view emerged...

...William Reid, national credit union leader and later to become chairman of the New York City Housing Commission, became president of the Middle Income Housing Corporation...

...In other words, to organize a cooperative of the home needers, build homes tailored to their needs and pocketbooks, and enable them to own their own homes, cooperatively, after they are built...

...Cooperative housing got its start in the United States in 1926...

...The scope of the work of such a national organization will be limited only by the available resources, for there is no longer any doubt at all that "cooperative housing" in all its aspects and all its various degrees of real cooperation will dot the nation in the years ahead...

...It is production geared to real needs by the people who have the needs...

...They came from people who wanted to live in and share ownership in the Rochdale Village...

...This, then, is the kind of situation in which cooperatives have their clearest reason for existence, their best chance to show the benefits they can bring to a whole society, and the best opportunity to win broad public acceptance...

...The result was that "cooperative housing" of many shapes and sizes began to spring up all over the nation...

...Some fourteen million American families are living in substandard or slum homes today...

...People in New York City had learned from experience that consumersponsored cooperative housing is built to meet the needs of people for homes—and for no other purpose...

...It was well known that serious social problems had been arising in connection with so-called "public housing...

...Several of them centered in the Corlears Hook section of the lower East Side, where by 1960 a whole area, once a miserable slum, had become known as Cooperative Village, with 5,000 family-owners of the apartments, a number of credit unions serving these family needs, a fine cooperatively owned supermarket for their shopping, and excellent playgrounds for the children...

...Tenants in government housing, built for war workers in Dayton, Ohio...

...And as peace finally came, the stage was set for a surge of activity...

...It could work at the development of more "United Housing Foundations" and "Foundations for Cooperative Housing" in other parts of the country...

...The decision of the New York City Housing Commission opened a huge new door for cooperative housing...

...THE HOPE OF HOUSING by JERRY VOORHIS ON February 16, 1960, Nelson Rockefeller, governor of New York, announced that 6,300 home units would soon be built on the site of the Jamaica (Long Island) race track...

...Why did this happen...

...They investigated costs of construction of apartment buildings in the New York area...

...Robbins stated that the New York City Commission had decided to build eight projects with homes for more than seven thousand families, and instead of maintaining them as publicly-owned housing, to sell them as cooperatives to the families who would live in them...

...The first and strongest of these was United Housing Foundation under Kazan...

...It began with a remarkably logical decision on the part of some members and officials of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers' Union...

...In 1950 an event took place in Washington which was to confront all three of the organizations as well as the Cooperative League of the United States and everyone else concerned with the cooperative movement with an almost overwhelming challenge...

...A three-day training institute for cooperative housing managers sponsored and conducted by the Cooperative League dug somewhat more deeply and brought demands for more of the same kind of activity...

...But in this postwar period the United Housing Foundation people were not working alone...

...Our construction industry is building the kind of houses it wants to build, at prices it wants to charge, without much direct reference to what people generally need or can afford...

...International Ladies' Garment Workers union sponsored and provided a $15,000,000 mortgage loan for a lower East Side project known as ILGWU Village...

...It was, however, evident that the answer to the over-all problem could be found only in a national organization of cooperative housing associations...

...Present at its dedication in 1956 were both United States Senators from New York, the mayor of the city, the president of the Borough Council, several Congressmen, the president of the American Federation of Labor, Mrs...

...The Middle Income Housing Corporation got its start by guiding construction, development, and occupancy of Morningside Heights Housing Cooperative, sponsored by a number of religious and educational institutions...

...Such projects, as the law came to provide after some amendments, could be sponsored either by the consumers or by builders or by investors...

...It could do its best to insist on adequate educational programs for owneroccupant-members of cooperative housing projects...

...Perhaps some of these could be solved by a new and extended use of cooperative methods and cooperative ownership...

...It could provide assistance and advice in problem solving...

...Indeed, at the annual Conference on Cooperative Housing in Washington in February, 1960, the conservative commissioner of the Federal Housing Administration stated that for millions of families in the nation in the middle and lower-income groups the one real hope of homeownership and good housing lies in cooperative housing...

...Such housing represents one of the most dramatic examples of "consumerdirected production...

...It centered, still, in New York City...

...In that year Congress enacted into law section 213 of the Federal Housing Act...

...The war years, of course, saw little housing construction...

...FCH looked across the nation and thought generally about the national housing problem...

...Other labor unions besides Amalgamated Clothing Workers took an interest...

...Some of these projects were genuinely cooperative in their major "aspects, particularly some of those guided by one or another of the service agencies mentioned above...

...Average monthly charges including all costs in these cooperatives is $60 to $70 for four-room apartments...

...It could conduct training conferences and institutes...

...Still fewer realized the potential values and benefits of cooperation, not only in home ownership, but in neighborhood development and in obtaining of needed supplies, services, and recreational facilities...

...Greenbelt, Maryland...

...But in New York any kind of non-profit housing, including cooperative housing, can qualify for tax abatement for a period of twenty-five years...

...It was evident that within a very few years this number would be trebled...

...The surest way to be certain you are doing this is to let the people who need the homes do the decision making...

...They appointed a committee to plan further and especially to see if money could be borrowed...

...Few of these people understood well what they were doing...

...This article is adapted from a chapter of his new book, "American Cooperatives," published by Harper's...

...Few of them knew, despite information sheets prepared and recommended by FHA for distribution among them, just what a cooperative was or what their obligations and responsibilities as cooperative owners entailed...

...Fortunately, they selected as manager of the enterprise a tiny man with a giant's vision, Abraham E. Kazan, now president of United Housing Foundation, who has been the genius and spearhead of American cooperative housing ever since...

...At this conference, also, Ira Robbins, a member of the New York City Housing Commission, made an announcement that could have tremendous meaning for the future in the use of cooperative ownership in securing good homes for American families...

...The result of the pioneer effort was Amalgamated Housing Corporation, builder and sponsor of an apartment building on the border of Van Cortlandt Park...

...But they were ready in most cases to make their down payments right then...

...But the borrowing power of the city would make possible less costly financing and could thus bring the monthly charges to the new cooperative owners within range of lowermiddle income families...