A new book reminisces about Mitchell-Lama affordable housing — and helps point the way forward.
Home is formative, and the particularities of home especially so. In her memoir “Just City: Growing Up on the Upper West Side When Housing Was a Human Right,” Jennifer Baum narrates the ways she and her family were shaped by their unique home: a Mitchell-Lama cooperative she was raised in as a child, that served her as a backstop and crash pad when a young adult, that provided a foundation when she became a mother and that still plays the role of touchstone. RNA House, which stretches its honey-combed facade for nearly half a block of West 96th Street between Amsterdam and Columbus, is a creature of a singular moment in New York City history. It was built as social housing in 1967 within an urban renewal area that, unlike many of its predecessors, sought a gentler, if still disruptive, approach to upgrading a neighborhood, sidelining full-on urban clearance for a mix of rehabs, more contextual public housing and new middle-income buildings.
Everyone involved in today’s conversation about how to produce new and more affordable housing in New York City — organizers of community land trusts, advocates and foes of Mayor Eric Adams’ City of Yes rezoning, the YIMBYs, those who point out that even “affordable” housing is affordable to far too few families — needs to understand how such housing came to be, how to preserve it and how to build on its legacy.
What Mitchell-Lama meant, and still means
Back in 1955, a coalition of state and city politicians, unions and developers (particularly large not-for-profit outfits like the United Housing Federation) met a dire need for more affordable units accessible to New Yorkers by pushing through the Limited Profit Housing Companies Law. Mitchell-Lama, as it’s better known, was designed as the gap-filler between public housing owned and operated by government-run housing authorities and market-rate homes. Offering new builds at affordable prices, the program aimed to keep mostly white, middle-income families in the city — a counterweight to the lure of a new suburban dream. By offering developers low-interest-rate mortgages that covered up to 95% of project costs, generous property tax breaks that reduced operating costs over time, and, sometimes, a ready-made site to build on, New York City and State funded the creation of permanent units, kept so by limiting developers’ profits and, initially, placing perpetual restrictions on how much a co-op share could be sold for and how much a rental apartment could be rented for.
A permanently affordable home outside the market under community control: This is the promise of social housing, and that of Mitchell-Lama co-ops. And it remains the promise, for all those that remain in the program. A legislative change in 1959 meant to spur the construction of more Mitchell-Lama rentals, then erroneously applied to the very different context of co-ops, means that the rental owners (mainly large real estate firms) and co-op owners (the residents themselves) can opt to exit the program if they pay off the state or city mortgage and vote to leave. Many co-ops have stayed true to the program — only 10% of the roughly 69,000 cooperative apartments built between 1955 and 1974 through Mitchell-Lama have privatized, but more than 50% of the rental units, some 36,000, have flown the coop.
A permanently affordable home outside the market under community control: This is the promise of social housing, and that of Mitchell-Lama co-ops. And it remains the promise, for all those that remain in the program.
Despite Mitchell-Lama’s success in building social housing on a large scale, this loss to the speculative market of apartments once meant to be permanently affordable — and with them the public subsidy that made them possible — makes the program as much a cautionary tale for our current moment as it is a pinnacle of a brighter past. Today, we are engaged in a perpetual scramble to build enough affordable homes to replace what we lose as affordability restrictions on publicly subsidized homes sunset. Mitchell-Lama was in some ways a harbinger of this present, an example of how government shifted from building upon its own investments through the maintenance of public goods to a recurring crisis of letting those investments wither, necessitating additional, more expensive ones anew.
More than a morality tale
This aerial view — an understanding of the scale of the challenge or analysis of how we got here — gets inconsistent attention in Baum’s memoir-cum-argument for replicating the likes of RNA House. But her reminiscences of that building, and the many kinds of structure it provided, are both useful and necessary. They serve as a kind of oral history of the lived experience of a housing program, injecting the less quantifiable components into a policy conversation so stuck on numbers that we too often talk about housing as units — even widgets — and not as homes.
Baum’s view of her home, be that RNA House or the wider neighborhood, is unquestionably nostalgic. Her memories, and those she sources from former neighbors through Facebook reconnections, are imbued with an “everything was better then” gloss that allows her to look back at her beloved city and claim that “nowhere had the unified effort to provide a decent home for all been as comprehensive or successful as in New York City.” As the title states, she considers the era that gave rise to her home as one “when the idea that housing is a human right was a guiding principle of politics, urban design and planning.”
These sweeping statements are historically questionable — not the least summing up the multifaceted, watershed Housing Act of 1949 as “inspired yet flawed” — but Baum the memoirist can be forgiven for extrapolating from the often inspiring snapshots of her co-op and her neighborhood. There’s the uncannily heartwarming image of the group of neighborhood kids of many colors tipping a departed pet into the building incinerator in a makeshift funeral. Down the hall, a group of mothers distribute food among themselves after a pre-dawn trip to buy from wholesalers at Hunts Point, a co-op operating within the co-op. Upstairs, Baum’s mother studies, taking advantage of the low maintenance to go back to school after Baum’s father tragically dies on a visit to her fifth-grade classroom.
This death understandably reverberates through Baum’s life, and its echoes reveal the contours of her home’s significance. RNA House “provided a ballast” when her father passed, though at the time “she had no sense how important Mitchell-Lama’s social justice values were to our mother or that our father's spirit lived on in the building.” This link between Baum’s father and her co-op is made first by his involvement on its board. With his death, it’s cemented in the way that RNA House can be said to care for her. The loss of his income doesn’t lead to an eviction; rather, it results in a reduction in her family’s housing costs. When she’s yearning to return to New York with her future husband and their child, RNA House provides a leg up: Her name rises to the top of the waitlist, and she’s able to buy into the co-op herself. For Baum, the state, in the form of this publicly subsidized opportunity at middle-income homeownership, isn’t a nanny. It’s a dad.
The way the Mitchell-Lama model adapts to the changing circumstances of Baum’s family should be instructive for any housing policy. But what does Baum have to say about how we get there, and then, how we maintain such decommodified housing in an era of runaway housing costs? In her telling, the answer is ethical, inspired individuals. She largely gives credit for the success of Mitchell-Lama, and the vitality of her neighborhood, to “enlightened politicians, urban planners and architects,” and frequently ascribes normative value to the formal aspects of the spaces they shaped, referring to her parents’ pursuit of the “morality of modernism” — so much so that modern architecture “was her [mother’s] god.”
For Baum, the state, in the form of this publicly subsidized opportunity at middle-income homeownership, isn’t a nanny. It’s a dad.
As for maintaining this housing, little attention is paid to the ongoing acts of governance of the co-op, by its resident-owners or the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development. Instead, she emphasizes the background and morals of RNA’s cooperators, with particular reverence given to Jewish families like hers schooled by labor unions. For Baum’s family and city alike, the halcyon days of social housing’s arrival on the Upper West Side are presented as the progressive summit of a family and of a city. Everything that follows — Baum’s moves to Vancouver, Paris and Arizona, and New York’s turn towards luxury and unaffordability — is a downward spiral.
This lament is both warranted and damaging. Her focus on individuals is similarly both helpful, in documenting the way good housing policy shapes lives, and harmful, in attributing the success of that policy almost solely to personal initiative. The utopian rendering of RNA House and the Upper West Side obscures the contentious, impure politics that brought it into being. Baum does acknowledge the role of community organizations like Strycker’s Bay Neighborhood Council and her building’s sponsor, the Riverside Neighborhood Assembly, in realizing, for a time, a racially and economically integrated Upper West Side. But that acknowledgment pales in comparison to her lionization of bureaucrats, who, without the agitation of the likes of Strycker’s Bay, would have planned for the kind of luxury-tinged Upper West Side she now rails against.
Her depiction of the 60s and 70s as an era in which housing justice was broadly accepted and enshrined in policy like Mitchell-Lama transforms what was, in truth, political pragmatism within a substantially different economic landscape into a too-tidy narrative of moral uplift. It is true that a different idea of what housing is for is embodied by the social housing that came from the program. But in this retelling, the less straightforwardly progressive aspects of the program aren’t given the necessary attention. For instance, the integration that occurred under the program ran counter to the policy’s original intent of keeping the white middle-class in city limits. Mitchell-Lama’s incentives were also so generous that it made for low-risk, if “limited,” profits for the developers that employed the modernist architects Baum’s mother deifies.
In so doing, Baum, like others who exclusively lament the state of the city, pays too little attention to the workaday governance and strategic organizing that has allowed elements of the era she reveres to endure, just as new policies and politics that could usher in a renaissance of social housing in New York begin to take root.
A gift of honesty
In the course of the book, Baum does, however, deliver key information to aid the cause of preserving the social housing we already have. In recent decades, the question of privatization has raised its head at RNA House, presenting the possibility that cooperators could vote to leave the Mitchell-Lama program and remove the resale restrictions that have kept their homes affordable for generations. These homeowners could then sell their shares for any sum they’d like, and future generations would lose out on the opportunity that served, and shaped, her family so significantly. This variety of privatization is meaningfully distinct from the kinds of real estate transactions among large corporations that led to the erosion of other key sources of housing built for the public like Stuyvesant Town, or the growing role of private operators in the renovation and management of public housing through programs like NYCHA’s Permanent Affordability Commitment Together (PACT). In the case of Mitchell-Lama co-ops, the greatest beneficiaries of this already privately owned and managed social housing are the possible agents behind their elimination, and with them, the public purpose enshrined in their construction.
In this context, Baum’s greatest gift is her honesty about her changing relationship to her co-op, from embarrassment in youth, to reverence during her political awakening, to the more complicated ambivalence of adulthood. Late in the book, she sits on the floor of her childhood home waiting to turn it back over to the co-op. The inevitability of her mother’s passing means her apartment at RNA will now be passed to the next family on the waitlist. She shares, “As my mother aged, the reality that we'd lose the apartment became more pronounced, and I'd found myself partially holding out hope for privatization, not due to the attraction of a real estate sale windfall, but to keep the apartment in the family.” She adds: “Morally, philosophically, intellectually, I understood the building should stay public; privately, though, I was already mourning the loss of my childhood home.” Years later, with no RNA shares to her name and thus no skin in the game, Baum “learned the family who moved into our apartment were in favor of [privatizing], leaving me gasping, as though I’d lose #14E all over again. If RNA remained public, my mother’s common good values and spirit would live on, and apartments would continue to go to families in need. If it were to privatize, all that my mother stood for would vanish.”
In telling her family history as the housing history that it is, and owning up to how her personal attachments to home collide with the prerogatives of the housing policy she desires, Baum in fact demonstrates the need for more than just enlightened individuals to realize her vision. The same ethical individuals who once built a co-op can also, in other circumstances, destroy it. Which is why collective action, state regulation and an ecosystem of support are needed to sustain housing that properly serves its role as a public good. Which is also why housing policymakers must also talk about more than units. In crafting good policy, they must reconnect with the fact that such units are in fact homes, imbued with emotions and meaning that deeply affect the success of the programs that aim to build and maintain them.