Amalgamated Housing Cooperative

The Amalgamated Housing Cooperative is a pioneering limited-equity cooperative in New York City. Organized by the Amalgamated Clothing Workers (ACW), a Manhattan-based socialist labor union, the co-op's original cluster of Tudor-style buildings was erected at the southern edge of Van Cortlandt Park in 1927. Additional buildings were added in the post-World War II period, and in the 1970s.

The Amalgamated's delivery of attractive, affordable housing for working-class New Yorkers; its remarkable survival through the Great Depression; and its continued success and growth earned it praise from Franklin D. Roosevelt, among others. While it first served as a proof-of-concept for a self-help model of urban affordable housing, it later became a model for the much larger, state-sponsored limited-equity housing co-ops built in New York City during the post-World War II period. These included its sister co-op, Park Reservoir (the state's first Mitchell-Lama co-op, with buildings on Sedgwick and Orloff Avenues); as well as Penn South in Manhattan, Rochdale Village in Queens, Co-op City in the Bronx, and others. Amid the decline and abandonment that plagued much of the West Bronx in the 1970s and 1980s, the Amalgamated remained an anchor of stability.

As of 2024, the Amalgamated comprised 11 residential buildings, with 1,468 units, ranging from studio to five-bedroom apartments. It forms the core of the Van Cortlandt Village section of the Bronx, situated between Van Cortlandt Park, to the north, and the Jerome Park Reservoir, to the south and east.

History
In the 1920s, Abraham Kazan served as president of the ACW's cooperative credit union. The son of Jewish immigrants from Russia, Kazan had grown up on the Lower East Side. An ambitious labor activist, he sought to apply a version of the Rochdale principles to the urgent need for affordable housing in New York City. Along with other labor leaders, Kazan lobbied the New York State legislature to enact a framework that would facilitate construction of affordable new apartments, which came to fruition in 1926 with the Limited Dividend Housing Act, providing 20-year tax abatements to new buildings aimed at low-income tenants, with profits limited to six percent. ACW leaders established the Amalgamated Housing Corporation to take advantage of the new law, to develop housing for qualifying union members.

Although the Lower East Side was the center of the union's membership, its overcrowded blocks of aging tenements presented few opportunities for new development. Instead, Kazan and ACW president Sidney Hillman chose a canvas in the northwest Bronx, on the suburban outskirts of Van Cortlandt Park. Financed with a combination of union funds and a $1.2 million loan from Metropolitan Life Insurance, the first units were completed and occupied in 1927.

The Amalgamated Co-op was the first housing complex in the United States founded under limited equity rules -- a model that would ultimately be used to develop more than 40,000 units of affordable, owner-occupied and self-governing apartment co-ops in Greater New York. The original buildings were designed by an architectural team that included Herman Jessor, who would go on to design the bulk of the New York City's housing cooperatives in the post-war era, in partnership with Abraham Kazan and (at times) with strong support from the controversial New York urban planning power broker, Robert Moses. It has been suggested that the scale of these later developments, and their state sponsorship, may have diluted the communitarian and self-governing characteristics that had contributed to the early success of the Amalgamated.

The Amalgamated, itself, grew from an original 300 units in its initial phase to a complex of 1,468 units, across 11 buildings, in 2022. The newest building, the second of two 20-story towers, was occupied in 1971. The Amalgamated's sister co-op, Park Reservoir, located across several buildings in the blocks west of Jerome Park Reservoir, was New York's first Mitchell-Lama cooperative. As of 2024, it comprises an additional 273 units.