Co-op City?

Urban Omnibus, May, 2019

From Amazon’s foiled bid for Long Island City to the chorus of critics of Hudson Yards, people are losing patience with development projects that make wealth for their developers, but offer little to the city’s longtime, and often long-suffering residents. As the development pressures that have transformed other parts of the city, and exacerbated displacement and inequality, make their way to the Bronx, is there another path to build wealth that benefits the borough? The Bronx is frequently associated with a decades-old history of disinvestment; less familiar to outsiders is a rich tradition of cooperative development and a deep contemporary network of community organizations. Here, Oksana Mironova probes the past, present, and future of cooperative economics in the Bronx, asking: When the profit-driven status quo loses its luster, what does it take to build a real alternative? Read more.