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Life, Loss, and Cooperative Housing in New York

What forms of urban living, sociality, and security are enabled by social housing ? At once memoir and counter-history, Just City offers an evocative answer to this question based on experiences growing up in collective housing in 1970s New York.

Reviewed: Jennifer Baum, {Just City: Growing Up on the Upper West Side When Housing Was a Human Right}, New York, Fordham University Press, 2024

At a moment when selective nostalgia is being channeled to potent political effect, Just City : Growing Up on the Upper West Side When Housing Was a Human Right offers a compelling counterpoint. The book is a memoir detailing the author’s upbringing in and continued connection to publicly subsidized, cooperatively operated housing in New York City. The author, Jennifer Baum, offers an intimate account of a dynamic urban space over time, with a rich sense not only for textures of place, sociality, and everyday living, but also—and crucially—for the ways that these human-scale dynamics are bound up with larger political-economic and cultural-ideological formations. And counter to the kind of nostalgia currently peddled by those on the political right, the book shows how state and federal policies were historically pivotal to bettering the lives and prospects of whole communities of ordinary people, how abundant diversity and contact with difference generated value, and how enactments of cooperation and collectivity underwrote forms of financial and social security that are now unattainable for most working people. At the same time, Baum does not shy away from describing forms of displacement and inequity, disinvestment and mismanagement, struggle and loss that occurred in the same contexts. The result is a book that is at once tender and caring, sober and pointed.

At its core, the book traces two intertwined lives and histories. Of course, there is the memoirist herself : child of idealistic middle-class Jewish parents ; a filmmaker, wife, and mother ; now turned researcher, historian, and essayist. But Baum frames her own life, values, and sense of self as inseparable from the history of RNA House, an apartment block located at 150–160 West 96th Street between Amsterdam and Columbus Avenues on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. RNA House was one of 269 developments, totaling more than 105,000 housing units, constructed between 1955 and 1978 as a result of New York State’s Mitchell–Lama housing legislation. [1] Named after the legislators who sponsored the 1955 Limited-Profit Housing Companies Act, the Mitchell–Lama program offered developers incentives (including tax breaks and loans with favorable rates) to build apartments that were required to be sold below market value to owners who were then given favorable mortgages in exchange for agreeing to maintain limited-equity structures for at least 20 years. At the expiration of that term, cooperatively operated buildings could either vote to refinance under the same favorable conditions or opt out and privatize. The minimalist 207‑unit RNA House (RNA for Riverside Neighborhood Assembly, which was instrumental to its establishment) was created under these conditions, part of a larger 20‑block West Side Urban Renewal Area that included a total of 1,500 affordable units located in a mix of different forms of social housing including additional Mitchell–Lama and other publicly subsidized housing developments at the northeastern edge of the Upper West Side. Baum’s family was among the original cooperators to take ownership when RNA House opened in 1967. At that time, her father taught engineering at a community college, and the family of four met the income requirements. They moved into apartment 14E when Baum was four years old, and the book details the profound influence the environment and values of RNA House would have on her life and sensibilities.

The chapter titles of the book succinctly signpost the narrative arc. Chapters 1–4 (“Moving into the Just City,” “Community, Collectivism, and Tolerance,” “On the Street,” and “Breathing Life into the Sanitized Columbus Avenue Strip”) detail Baum and family’s early years and experiences in their new milieu. At a time when cities like New York were experiencing disinvestment and decline and other families were moving to the suburbs, Baum’s parents chose to move to RNA House because they valued tolerance, contact across difference, and collectivity—in short, urbanity. And indeed, drawing on interviews with others who grew up in public housing in the neighborhood at the same time she did, Baum makes a strong case that ordinary people’s enactment of these qualities of urbanity translated directly not only into improved conditions and quality of life for residents, but also acted as a kind of stabilizing force that—directly underpinned by public policy and subsidization—saw families through challenging circumstances and changed the fate of the neighborhood, eventually even to the point of lubricating its eventual gentrification.

On the theme of families dealing with challenging circumstances, chapters 5–6 (“Class Consciousness” and “Grappling with Death”) are incisive. Starting in middle school, Baum’s parents made the decision to send her to private school because they feared the reputation of the local public school (a choice that Baum does not shy away from questioning as contradictory, given her parents’ other commitments). Finding herself in a new social setting with peers who did not come from modest backgrounds, she spent several years yearning to live in more luxurious, market-rate housing. Then tragedy struck. Her father died with no warning. Under these circumstances, the security of living in price-controlled, collectively structured housing became fully apparent. The family was shattered, but not destitute, and her mother was able to go to school and gain financial and professional stability only because they did not live in market-rate housing.

These events instilled in Baum an enduring appreciation for both RNA House and collective values, about which we learn in chapters 7–10 (“Salvation in Socialism,” “Two Utopias,” and “Gentrification Turns into Revanchism”). Here the narrative shifts from one largely focused on childhood and personal memories to a more structurally focused account of the changing conditions at play in and through New York City, the Upper West Side, and RNA House over the course of several decades. Baum does not paper over the costs of the kinds of redevelopment that produced RNA House—the dismantling of communities and displacement that they caused. But she is steadfast that using such creative destruction to build affordable public housing that then rehouses many (though, she is careful to say, certainly not all) of the displaced and provides an affordable foothold for a diverse array of people who otherwise wouldn’t have a place in the central city is far more just—and frankly makes for far more interesting, vibrant urban communities—than the forms of displacement for upscale development that have come since. Here Baum does not attempt to intervene in any specific political or scholarly debates, instead offering rich description and case-based grounds for considering things like the ethics and outcomes of public versus private development, competing ideas about the right to the city, and different notions of freedom, rights, and security embedded in the different models and outcomes.

These sensibilities continue through the concluding chapters (“Could I Ever Return to Utopia ?,” “No Next Time,” “Relinquishing the Apartment,” “The Crucial Necessity of Affordable Housing,” and “Battle over Privatization”). Baum reckons in these chapters with some of the choices and trade-offs made in her own life journey, including moving away to follow a husband on an ambitious career path and raising a family of her own. And these autobiographical aspects are effectively used to reflect on the broader creep, over the same time period, towards what seems to be atomized neoliberal subjectivity (my imposition, not Baum’s language) in city planning, in US urban culture more generally, and within the sensibilities of and pressures experienced by people like those Baum grew up with at RNA House. Baum illustrates these shifts not only from the vantage point of New York City, but also comparatively as she moves to Los Angeles, Paris, and eventually Phoenix. She offers situated insights about the modes of life—and forms of policy and sociality that underwrite them—as she experiences them in these different cities. The contrast between Paris and Phoenix, for instance, evokes different possible relations between the state, private and public life in relation to housing security, modes of transit, provision of healthcare and forms of social welfare, and more. In those same contexts, the gratitude and grief that in previous chapters is framed in personal and autobiographical terms is expanded in these concluding chapters, turned outward toward the fate—and, in many cases in New York and elsewhere, the loss—of the sensibilities, policies, and institutional formations which once insulated families like Baum’s from precarity and desolation. As we learn about contemporary struggles over privatization that now bitterly divide neighbors into many of the (ever fewer) remaining cooperative buildings, there is a sense of grief for the social relations that shaped and sustained Baum and that her parents imagined and helped to bring forth in the city. And yet there is also an insistence that the struggle is not over, and the tide could yet shift back in the direction of increased social solidarity, not least through more honest reckoning with the accomplishments of the past.

Ultimately, this book will be of interest to a wide range of audiences. It bears mentioning that Baum was not an academic, and here that is not a critique. Having read many academic books about the themes and histories addressed in Just City, it was frankly a joy and a pleasure to read a rich account written in a compelling voice not weighed down by scholarly parentheticals. I suspect a broad range of readers would agree. Obviously, anyone interested in the histories and realities of housing—including public housing but also other socially subsidized and cooperative forms—or issues related to urbanization and policy in New York City will find much to appreciate. The book could also be quite effective in undergraduate classes about housing, policy, urban planning, and more. One of the most compelling aspects of the book is the way that it evokes urbanity as a whole way of life with many intersecting aspects, from housing and spatial design to education, to transit, to the rhythms and sociality of urban life itself—even structures of feeling in particular times and settings. As a result, as I was reading, I kept thinking of pairings where the scenes and contexts described in the book could anchor rich engagements with scholarly pieces diving more deeply into topics ranging from propinquity and contact to architecture and design, to urban policy, political economy, culture, and politics, and more. In sum, Just City offers much to recommend.


This work is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 (Attribution–NonCommercial–ShareAlike 4.0 International).

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Pour citer cet article :

, “Life, Loss, and Cooperative Housing in New York”, Métropolitiques , 11 mars 2025. URL : https://metropolitiques.eu/Life-Loss-and-Cooperative-Housing-in-New-York.html
DOI : https://doi.org/10.56698/metropolitiques.2146

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