![]() A retired engineer looked over the plans for the power plant, a bus driver with no engineering or building management experience, took over the problem of the broken laundry machines in building basements. In a 1977 interview, the cooperator leader Charles Rosen explained: “Did you ever meet any of those dopes that run big corporations? The only difference between them and us is that they got a chance to do it and we didn’t.” Rosen commissioned tenants from a variety of backgrounds to do the work of managing the development. SCIII repeatedly referred to the corruption, mismanagement and waste in Co-op City and other UHF developments. The SCIII recognized that their first task was to put Co-op City’s finances on a solid footing. However, when Co-op City’s residents assumed control of the development, they also agreed to assume control of its debt and, although they didn’t realize this at first, their negotiating position was now considerably worse.Īt first, all sides, but especially Co-op City’s resident Steering Committee (SCIII), were optimistic about their ability to manage the cooperative and pay down debt better than the UHF. ![]() Much of Co-op City’s leverage during the rent strike came from the size of this mortgage - Co-op City was (to use today’s language) too big to fail. It was this inexorable carrying charge increase that led to the rent strike. This had led to a series of carrying charge increases that meant that by 1975, Co-op City residents faced costs that were approximately twice what had been promised when the development was first proposed a decade earlier. Due to a combination of factors including inflation, rising interest rates, and most likely corruption, Co-op City officially ended its construction period in December 1972 with a mortgage of $390 billion, over one and a half times the size of the originally planned mortgage amount of $250 billion. As the name “Co-op City” was meant to imply, it was the size of a city, the largest cooperative development built by the UHF - a cooperative housing organization that was financed by the New York Mitchell-Lama law that offered developers tax abatements and low-interest-rate mortgages in exchange for the promise to provide affordable housing. Rather than rent, residents paid “carrying charges” that covered their mortgage, utilities and maintenance charges. Rather, Co-op City’s over 50,000 residents were technically cooperators, or co-owners of the development. After all, while Co-op City’s rent strike of 1975-76 was the largest rent strike in American history, it was not actually a rent strike. To understand why debt would be such a millstone around the necks of Co-op City’s residents, it is important to explain briefly what Co-op City was. And as the scope of Co-op City’s construction defects continued to emerge in the years after the rent strike settlement was announced, the size of the development’s financial obligations and its economic troubles would mount. Desperate to stabilize their own credit situation, neither the City nor the State was in any mood or position to offer relief to strapped tenants of a “troubled” housing development. ![]() The only difference was that now the cooperators were in charge of finding a solution. The financial bind that Co-op City found itself in - and that had led to the rent strike - had not gone away. And that - whatever your political sympathies - is a human spectacle on the grand scale.” In a rare moment of agreement, the Village Voice and the Wall Street Journal shared the sense that Co-op City’s rent strike victory and the achievement of tenant control was the first step in a new political order in New York.Īs Co-op City’s cooperators would soon find, the achievement of cooperator control was a pyrrhic victory. Vivian Gornick introduced the drama of the rent strike to readers of the Village Voice by writing “What is happening in Co-op City is what happens when the resigned become resistant, the scattered become organized, the meek become militant. This vision of a state devoid of power and a citizenry run amok that struck terror in the heart of landlords and the Wall Street Journal was celebrated by others.
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