![]() The Urban League filed a formal complaint of discrimination with the New York State Division of Housing, which oversees state-funded Mitchell-Lama projects such as Co-op City. In response, the board passed Resolution 131 prioritizing relatives of current residents in the allotment of vacant apartments. At the time, the waitlist was ninety percent Black and Latino while the community was approximately sixty-five percent white. The first time followed Co-op City’s infamous rent strike in 1976, which centered on conflict over rising maintenance costs. In the late 1970s and 1980s, however, Co-op City’s board of directors twice sought to manipulate the waitlist to “preserve racial balance” by favoring white applicants. Typically, as in all publicly financed housing co-ops, the waitlist operates on a first-come, first-served basis. To move into Co-op City, prospective residents apply to the cooperative corporation that governs it, called Riverbay, and, if their eligibility meets Mitchell Lama criteria, wait until a suitable apartment becomes available. To do so, they turned to the most potent tool at their disposal: the list that prospective residents joined while waiting for an apartment vacancy. Initially, this shift was a source of significant consternation on the part of many Co-op City residents, of all racial backgrounds, who worried that racial turnover was a harbinger of decline and tried to slow it. And like the city and borough, it became majority non-white in the ensuing decades. Still, it wasn’t exactly a racial fortress: its share of people of color roughly reflected that of both New York City and the Bronx. When Co-op City was first fully occupied in the early 1970s, it was approximately three-quarters white, and more Jewish than almost any other neighborhood in New York City (Figure 1). ![]() Its stability, while other neighborhoods in the Bronx, and across urban America, experienced socioeconomic decline and strife, marks a path rarely taken and even more rarely analyzed in the history of U.S. In this article, however, I turn to a much less discussed aspect of Co-op City: how it became majority non-white in the 1980s-without social turmoil or a change in its economic status. Much like former resident Sonia Sotomayor, I see in the complex’s early years a story of a functioning, multicultural, middle-class community. This narrative is overly simplistic, as I argue in my recent book. As Evelyn Gonzalez writes in her history of the borough, Co-op City “allowed fearful white Jewish residents to abandon Grand Concourse neighborhoods almost overnight” which, according to a former resident she quotes, “helped undermine the rich and integral fabric of Bronx neighborhoods.” With their departure, the population of the Grand Concourse became poorer, and predominantly Black and Puerto Rican. The Jews that made up seventy percent of Co-op City’s initial population largely came from the West Bronx neighborhoods around the Grand Concourse. ![]() Like previous UHF developments in New York City, a majority of Co-op City’s initial applicants were working– and middle-class Jews. I argue instead that Co-op City be recognized as a model for relative interracial cooperation and comity. And few places have come to stand as a symbol of white flight, at least for New Yorkers, more than Co-op City, the huge project, with over fifteen thousand apartments, mostly in high-rise towers, built for people “of moderate means” in the Northeast Bronx by the labor-backed United Housing Foundation (UHF) with funds from New York State’s Michell-Lama program.Īlmost since its inception, in the mid-1960s, especially as the Bronx became America’s poorest urban county in the 1970s and 1980s, Co-op City has stood as a paradigmatic example linking white flight to urban disinvestment and decay. It was both cause and symptom of the broader urban crisis of the second half of the twentieth century. White flight destabilized neighborhoods, and entire cities. There are few trends in urban America that were more detrimental, especially in the Northeast and Midwest, than post-World War II white flight. ![]()
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