2 NYC housing co-ops debated whether to privatize. Only one chose profit over public good

You’d be forgiven if you passed by St. James Towers in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, or Southbridge Towers in Lower Manhattan without noting their exceptional qualities or sensing the tumult within. The former is a domino-like tower with generous, inset balconies; the latter is a warren of interconnected buildings curled inward around a series of interior courtyards. Both are—or were—limited-equity cooperatives constructed under the aegis of New York’s Mitchell-Lama program, one of the United States’ greatest success stories in social housing.

As cooperatives, St. James and Southbridge are peopled by their owners, families with shares in the company that holds title to the buildings and the land they sit on, those shares entitling owners to apartments and a say in governance. As limited-equity co-ops, the price of those shares—the cost of buying a home—is kept affordable to middle- and lower-income families by restricting their resale value.

These share prices don’t follow the jagged rise and fall of a stock market; they largely track with inflation, ensuring that families can leave with the value they put in, plus all the years of a solid, stable, safe affordable home. That limit on resale maintains the same opportunity for the next family in their wake. This is social housing: kept outside the market, decommodified, permanently affordable, and controlled by its residents.

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At least, that’s how it’s supposed to be. A programmatic change meant to spur more rental development under the Mitchell-Lama program early in its existence had unintended consequences for these co-ops. The controversial loophole allows for cooperators to collectively vote whether to leave the program—or “privatize”—once the building’s mortgage is paid to its public lenders.

Leave the program, and cooperators can sell their share for whatever they can fetch in the market—no small amount in the rabid real estate market of New York. But leaving also means the loss of affordability for the next generation of owners, and the threat of rising costs at home for those who don’t wish to sell out. This is the choice put before the residents of St. James and Southbridge in my book Homes for Living: The Fight for Social Housing and a New American Commons.

Turbo-charged by potential profit and cut through with the ethics of consuming the public goods that support us, the stories of the fraught privatization fights within these co-ops—seen at eye-level from the perspective of the residents—reveal themselves to be deeper than simple morality tales of profiteering vs. altruism, more complex than a battle between selfish privateers and idealistic defenders of the public realm. Rather, the sides that cooperators take in these community-shredding debates, how they construct their arguments—how they justify their positions to themselves and the pitches they make to sway others—all hold key information on the fervent contest over space across the country.

The human perspectives of Southbridge and St. James serve as a prism through which to better distinguish the consequences of how we govern, the language we use, and the rights we feel entitled to—and what they mean for our ability to create and sustain cities that approach the ideal of equity, which, though increasingly invoked, remains painfully out of reach.

The fights within these co-ops, and the paths their residents ultimately choose, diverge in key ways. We pick up, here, in the aftermath.

Right around the time that St. James cooperators voted down privatization, David Madden and Peter Marcuse, two scholars of urban studies and sociology, published the book In Defense of Housing, which lay bare the contemporary politics of the places we call home. The authors take issue with the dominant narrative of “a system in crisis” that took hold after the crash of 2008. “We need to be careful with this usage of the concept of crisis. The idea of crisis implies that inadequate or unaffordable housing is abnormal, a temporary departure from a well-functioning standard.”

That isn’t what is happening, say Madden and Marcuse. They add: “Housing crisis is a predictable, consistent outcome of a basic characteristic of capitalist spatial development: Housing is not produced and distributed for the purposes of dwelling for all; it is produced and distributed as a commodity to enrich the few. Housing crisis is not a result of the system breaking down but of the system working as it is intended.”

In short, the very causes of the crisis are one and the same with the central ideology of homeownership. When that ownership carries a perceived right to profit from housing, without any responsibility for the collateral damage, crisis will be perpetual. Housing becomes a commodity, but one that has no rivals in its importance for organizing our lives and our politics. That is distinct from the role of housing that needs defending: housing as home.

Structuring housing as a limited-equity co-op, as the Mitchell-Lama program did, is a defense of home. The program sought a path to sheltering middle-income folks that was different from the exclusive suburbs supercharged by government-backed mortgages—subsidies immediately privatized and transmogrified into morally deserved earnings. The permanence of this defense can, however, never be guaranteed. At the program’s outset, co-op privatization wasn’t a possibility, but then laws and politics changed. The bulwarks against commodification need to be continually maintained, rebuilt, occupied, and augmented.

A total of 194 St. James cooperators, with their votes on Feb. 23, 2017, managed to preserve their collectively owned social housing. Southbridge’s defenders were unable to do the same. That fortress against commodification in Lower Manhattan was transformed into a pillar of the housing system it had once stood against. How, exactly, did the Concerned Shareholders of St. James, with so many prevailing winds blowing against them, achieve their victory?

There is no exact formula or single answer. But we can learn lessons from how the battles at St. James and Southbridge diverged and in their different qualities as places and communities. These are applicable to how we might preserve other social housing in the future. As Madden and Marcuse point out, housing can be “a vehicle for imagining alternative social orders. Every emancipatory movement must deal with the housing question in one form or another. This capacity to spur the political imagination is part of housing’s social value as well.” The lessons of Mitchell-Lama extend beyond the housing sphere. Any attempt at realizing a truer, deeper form of our commonwealth must heed them.

Where Southbridge’s defenders spoke solely of the financial side of privatization—countering its alluring rewards with the specter of its risks—St. James’s concerned shareholders broadened the frame. They stressed that privatization wasn’t just a financial decision but a moral one: a statement about who the city was for, what recipients of public support owed to future generations, and how their own lives and choices intersected with those around them. They coupled this altruistic message with information that showed how privatization presented a financial risk—not only to the wider community but to the cooperators themselves.

They activated three different forms of unselfishness: empathic unselfishness through identification with future beneficiaries, communitarian unselfishness through identification with their neighbors who feared maintenance increases, and moralistic unselfishness through arguing that privatization was, in a sense, theft. In doing so, they triggered a key causal mechanism of collective action: a shared narrative, with which defection (privatization) was incompatible.

St. James’s predominately Black cooperative body, situated in a neighborhood where gentrification and displacement had transformed the streets for all to see, was particularly well primed to hear these messages. Many of the cooperators had themselves experienced discrimination in the housing market. Even among those who hadn’t, most knew the history of Bed-Stuy and could see where its future seemed to be heading if action wasn’t taken. Moreover, that future was not abstract but proximate, already right outside their doors.

The prospect of big money through privatization came with an asterisk: They would still be Black in a real estate system that had racism baked into its core. They’d internalized the need for social housing. At Southbridge, Lower Manhattan’s luxury turn didn’t have the same effect on the residents. The already-insular community remained at a remove from the rest of the neighborhood. As the prices on everything from groceries to movie tickets shot up with the glossy skyscrapers catering to capital, they felt under siege.

Privatization beckoned as a bulwark against those high prices. If you can’t beat them, the pro-privatizers seemed to say, join them. This call simply did not appeal to the residents of St. James in the same way. Because they had connections to their wider neighborhood, joining “them”—the monied companies and individuals snapping up buildings for passive profits—would have meant selling out their very sense of community.

Just as St. James’ defenders didn’t see their privatization decision as only about their individual well-being, they also didn’t go it alone in the debates. Where Southbridge’s pro–Mitchell-Lama residents considered it too risky to bring in outsiders, their counterparts at St. James heard those critiques and pushed through anyway, calling on the solidarity of citywide advocacy group Cooperators United for Mitchell-Lama (CU4ML) and local officials. In doing so, they gained access to crucial resources while also broadening the debate. CU4ML brought tactics, expertise, and the kind of political education that both Southbridge and St. James were internally starved of.

Public Advocate Tish James and her coterie of other officials packed up their bully pulpits and stationed them onsite, driving home the need for cooperators to consider a “we” beyond their own building. They connected the struggle at St. James to other struggles, and the strugglers to one another, activating another causal mechanism for collective action—what sociologist Charles Tilly calls “straightforward coercion by outsiders.”

Southbridge’s privateers had been able to keep most politicians out of their debates by wielding the sheer heft of their voting bloc. That complex is roughly 4.5 times as populous as St. James. It was thus much more difficult, and ultimately impossible, for the St. James privatizers to drown out the local politicians speaking to the clear public interest of preserving social housing amid a housing crisis that they had been elected to address. Southbridge board president Harvey Marshall, looking on from his now-privatized home across the East River, considered the politicians’ involvement at St. James to have been instrumental in defeating privatization there.

One can’t say what the outcome of the final Southbridge vote would have been if the anti-privatizers there had recruited nonresidents to their fight or if they had added moral, normative arguments to their rhetoric. But if Daniel Brampton can wring his hands over the additional flyers that his Venice vacation left unwritten, it’s also valid to speculate that those approaches may have closed the paltry 11-vote difference by which Southbridge’s privatization passed. Then again, it’s worth recalling that Southbridge had thwarted an earlier attempt at privatizing their co-op years before. At any Mitchell-Lama co-op, voting down privatization is never a permanent solution. Within a year, the whole process could start again. St. James remains an island of social housing, destined to be eroded if its floodwalls aren’t maintained.

For that reason, Madden and Marcuse endorse some skepticism around housing models like Mitchell-Lama that both oppose and exist within a larger system of commodification. “Human relationships cannot be confined to the boundaries of a housing estate. It is not possible to insulate a small group from what goes on in society as a whole; any such group is likely to be shaped by broader patterns of oppressive relationships. And islands of residential liberation will have limited impact in a sea of housing oppression and commodification,” they write.

Islands are good locations for lighthouses, though. They continue: “But experimental dwellings and emancipatory movements have wider significance as living demonstrations of housing’s potential. They should be seen as beacons pointing towards a broader possibility: that housing might support non-oppressive social relations, not in some utopian realm but in everyday life.”

That is one of the beauties of social housing: The models exist, and they work, even here in the capitalist United States. Activists like Graham Hales, Tia Ward, and Wenna Redfern have managed to keep the light on at St. James. And across the country, interest has grown in establishing new limited-equity co-ops, community land trusts, rent control, and public housing at a level that, less than a decade ago, seemed politically untenable. But as with all infrastructure, just building these refuges in a sea of commodification is not enough.

Our public goods need to be maintained, and central to the maintenance of social housing is a wholesale transformation of the prevailing American conception of homeownership. We must abolish the notion that ownership includes a right to profit. The defenders of St. James and Southbridge point the way toward an ethic to install in its place. Those who claim that ownership endows one with absolute control over some definable thing—a piece of land, a house, an instrument, a toy—are preachers of isolation.

As I took in the stories of Southbridge and St. James, I was struck by how pro-privatizers willingly curtailed their perception of the spheres of their influence and concern. They didn’t consider their neighbors or even friends with whom they’d built a community over decades. They denied any ties between their own decisions and the well-being of their fellow New Yorkers, save for the hypothetical rich family who would now have another housing option at their disposal, possibly at a slightly lower price.

Their sense of entitlement to profit overpowered any sense of connection to a public program that had provided them a most fundamental need: a safe, stable, affordable home. They were under the sway of what Rebecca Solnit calls the ideology of isolation. “If you forget what you derive from the collective, you can imagine that you owe it nothing and can go it alone,” she writes, but “we are nodes on intricate systems, synapses snapping on a great collective brain; we are in it together, for better or worse.”

Those who fought the privatizers largely bought into an ethos of connection. Their definition of ownership, of course, was still not entirely devoid of rights and entitlements. Just as James Szal could decide to paint his walls a screaming shade of red to complement his shoe-shaped furnishings, he could also tell you to get the hell out should you find his aesthetic, or the barking of his senior shih tzu, to be too much. But he and his allies also saw the layers of responsibility that came with owning something.

As residents of social housing, they knew this entailed more than just paying their share of collective costs or ensuring that their leaking toilet was fixed before the apartment below suffered a collapsed ceiling. They recognized their responsibility to steward the public good they’d been given control of, even if that meant declining a major influx of personal wealth. They operated on a different spatial and temporal scale. In doing so, they fulfilled their responsibility as stewards of not just a building but a neighborhood, a city, and, crucially, the future inheritors of their homes, be they a family member or a stranger pulled from a list.

For the pro-privatizers, their right to profit came first, and their responsibility to care for their asset—to “conduct your business well,” as Lester Goodyear put it—came in service of realizing that right. For those who believed in social housing, ownership was bundled up with a responsibility to steward. This understanding is similar to the idea of reciprocity in gift economies that predominate in Indigenous societies. As Potawatomi writer and scientist Robin Wall Kimmerer describes it, “Responsibilities and gifts are understood as two sides of the same coin. The possession of a gift is coupled with a duty to use it for the benefit of all.”

A safe, stable, affordable home is a gift, just as land and life are, and residents’ fulfillment of their responsibility to steward that gift is what made their ownership real. When pro–Mitchell-Lama cooperators stood up for their co-op as a public good, they affirmed their ownership of their homes, their communities. “True ownership,” to borrow a phrase from an exasperated Goodyear, isn’t achieved when the possession can be sold off at any price. True ownership is consummated with care, maintenance, and preservation—with faithful stewardship.

Pro–Mitchell-Lama cooperators weren’t the only stewards in those communities. Folks like Lester Goodyear had also done their part, serving in service organizations and advocating for what they thought was right. Goodyear and other pro-privatizers worked to keep St. James a great place to live despite the tumult outside its doors. This was its own kind of stewardship, even if these residents eventually wanted to transform it into undue profits. Casting a narrative of heroes vs. villains is easy. Less so is highlighting the gray areas—all the folks who struggled with this decision and all the reasons why supporting privatization is understandable though unjustified.

Those personal decisions are indicative of the wider difficulty of maintaining commons, but this hardship doesn’t alone stem from the prevailing commodification of place and home across the United States. It’s also born of narrative, held up by ideology, supported in policy, and fueled with the scraps of a collapsing safety net. Buying and selling a home for profit is held up as the American Dream. It’s positioned as the way to attain full citizenship and a voice.

Home equity is the only tool many Americans have to attain economic, educational, and aspirational family goals at a time when wages aren’t what they should be, work security is nonexistent beyond unions, and higher education is dependent on increasingly large sums of cash in its own commodified hellscape. Equity in a place one calls home is the backstop for disaster, for the unexpected or inevitable.

Excerpted from Homes for Living: The Fight for Social Housing and a New American Commons by Jonathan Tarleton. Copyright 2025. Excerpted with permission by Beacon Press.

This article originally appeared in Yes! Magazine at https://www.yesmagazine.org/economy/2025/02/11/homes-for-living-excerpt.

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