Homes for Living: The Fight for Social Housing and a New American Commons

In this captivating debut study, urban planner Tarleton explores the tensions that emerge when owners of New York City cooperative housing, which by design has a limit on its resale value, consider reaping a financial windfall by putting their property up for sale on the regular housing market. He studies two such cases: Southbridge Towers, a 1,651-apartment complex in Lower Manhattan, which voted to exit the state-run co-op housing program in 2014, and St. James Towers in Brooklyn, with its 326 apartments, where residents voted to remain in the program in 2017. Combining a fine-grained history of N.Y.C.’s unique affordable housing systems and in-depth interviews with the complexes’ residents, what emerges is a critique of the moral quandary regular people face when they have to choose between what they perceive as the net good of mutually owned, cost-controlled housing and their own family’s need to build personal wealth. Tarleton’s colorful, drama-filled narrative suggests that such a tension is unsustainable for the social fabric of the country, as he recounts the interpersonal strife that the privatization debate provoked (a pro–co-op candidate for St. James Towers’ board elections even alleges at one point that the vote has been rigged against her). It’s a damning vision of an America with once great social ideals slipping into an era of narrow self-interest. (Feb.)