It might be the country's most successful affordable housing project. And it is in the Bronx. CityLab reports on the place and its people:
Highly visible to passersby on the I-95 expressway, yet unknown to most New Yorkers, Co-op City confounds many of the stereotypes associated with high-rise housing projects. The community is proof that with well-designed apartments, sufficient public investment, and an engaged, politically mobilized community, large-scale affordable housing can work.
As Linda Berk, president of Co-op City’s board of directors, said at the anniversary party, to enthusiastic applause: “We are a success story, not a failed experiment.”
Developed in the late 1960s by a coalition of labor unions, Co-op City was explicitly conceived as an antidote to the ills of city life, with bright, spacious apartments, oodles of open space, and, perhaps most remarkably, a racially integrated tenancy. It was the crowning achievement of the Mitchell-Lama program, a New York State affordable-housing initiative that financed more than 140,000 apartments in the city in the postwar decades.
