“Bulwarks” in “Solidarity Cities”
Chapter 6
Bulwarks
Build and Defend the Solidarity City
In the previous chapter, we explored cooperative economies along the peripheries of segregated neighborhoods. Such edge-zone geographies, we suggested, should be understood not only as spaces of division but also as diverse spaces of possibility. They provide unique contexts for assessing cooperatives’ transformative potential and capacity for edgework, the important but often fraught and indeterminate work of forging solidarity within divided societies. In this chapter, we continue to make the case for the existence and potency of the Solidarity City, but we do so through a different lens. Instead of focusing on edge zones and the transformation of fault lines, this chapter adopts a more protective stance and explores the idea of solidarity economies as bulwarks that build and defend communities.
In racialized contexts of division, segregation, and exploitation, organized forms of economic cooperation and solidarity offer vital means of symbolic and practical resistance. They provide essential avenues both for protecting communities and for building postcapitalist futures, with potentially powerful rippling effects on the wider economy. By centering practices of solidarity and cooperation, solidarity economy initiatives can concentrate social power and mobilize communities to defend themselves while seeking changes to the structures of oppression. We saw evidence of this in the introduction as gardening communities acted to defend the land from developers. Practicing economic cooperation and solidarity in the present can also be a crucial way to prefigure social relations sought for in the future. Together, these elements constitute what we call the “bulwark pattern,” defined by both defense and the building of new social realities along communal, collective, nonhierarchical, and self-managed lines.
To explore this bulwark pattern more deeply, this chapter turns again to cooperatives, but this time in New York City. Given the city’s larger scale, we focus not on the entire cooperative landscape as we did for Philadelphia (in chapter 5) but instead on three core economic domains: work, housing, and finance. In each of these domains, we examine cooperatives that defend vulnerable populations from the detrimental effects of racial capitalist dynamics. In the domain of work, we examine how worker cooperatives have shielded women of color from high rates of exploitation in caring labor industries. We also use payroll data and economic impact models to estimate the local multiplier effects that worker cooperatives have on the New York City economy. We show not only that many workers choose to create worker cooperatives precisely to escape exploitation but also that this ends up being better for local economies in terms of spending effects.
In the other two domains, we examine cooperatives that protect communities from what is identified as “secondary exploitation”—say, when workers get squeezed by rising rents or financial predation.1 In the realm of housing, we explore New York City’s massive sector of low-income housing cooperatives. We trace the historical development of this sector through different phases of urban crisis, illustrating both how these cooperatives were initially designed to protect against “slumlords” and disinvestment and how they currently protect lower-than-average income residents from gentrification-induced displacement. And last, in the domain of finance, we examine how some communities have used credit unions to defend themselves against “banking deserts” and predatory lenders that would deny them access to safe and affordable credit because of historical and continuing forms of redlining.2 Credit unions associated with Black churches of New York receive particular attention, since they reflect how solidarity economies are undeniably shaped by factors of race and poverty on an urban scale.
Although these cooperatives and the forces they contend with differ significantly across these sectors, we find value in studying them together in a single chapter as a way to feature bulwarking as a general pattern within the solidarity economy. Studying them together is also to refuse the sort of compartmentalization of alternative economies that has undermined wider forms of comprehension and cross-sectoral solidarity. More fully realizing the Solidarity City requires thinking beyond silos to find common ground in shared commitments to cooperation, democratic governance, and solidarity. It also requires adaptation of methodologies to accommodate the diversity. Understanding how the bulwark pattern works in the arenas of production, housing, and finance necessitates multipronged approaches and techniques, as seen in the chapter’s embrace of historiographic, geospatial, qualitative, and quantitative approaches.
New York City offers an especially interesting context for this study. The city has an exceptionally large number of cooperatives, allowing us to see in one place how different types (worker, housing, and financial) defend people from racial capitalist forces that prevent them from accessing decent work, housing, and fair finance. Additionally, there is something peculiar about what New York City represents in our imagination, as an epicenter of global capitalism and an exemplar of a hypersegregated city. This chapter reveals a very different side to the city, one of creative protection and world-building traceable to a recent past filled with strong labor unions, fights for extensive progressive policies around housing and education, and powerful, mobilized communities. We find it inspiring to illustrate that even in the proverbial “belly of the beast,” and maybe especially because of the high pressures of living there, urban communities have engaged in generative dynamics and defensive contestation over the basics of life. We find in both New York’s past and present what Massimo De Angelis and David Harvie term an “alternative trajectory,” a pathway to the Solidarity City.3
Many Bulwarks Are Needed for Our Many Problems
The term bulwark has a long etymological history tied to the evolution of defensive technologies. The term was originally associated with physical objects that perform functions such as protecting people from washing overboard on ships or protecting city walls against assault.4 Bulwarks were often built because humans needed defense against other humans. In the face of many forms of oppression, there has also been defensive communal resistance rooted in solidarity. We use the metaphor of bulwarks to emphasize how solidarity economy initiatives and practices not only defend against many different forms of harm but also protect and care for communities. The resistance to the negation of life and the endeavor to create more equitable alternatives are themes that pervade our examinations of bulwarking by Black and Latinx communities, working-class populations, and unionized labor groups in New York City. Too often, such populations are portrayed only through the lens of deprivation—they are defined by what they lack. This misses how, within the same spaces, people “create life and make bare needs into an arena of elaboration.”5 Beautiful experiments in communal abundance arise side by side with and against stark and brutal social displacement and violence. This is what we think the bulwark spatial pattern of solidarity reveals about urban placemaking and creation of solidarity cities.
Here, we concentrate on the type of bulwark that is organized by and deepens emancipatory postcapitalist politics. Our approach aligns with the “build and fight” strategy of Cooperation Jackson that we mentioned in the introduction.6 For Cooperation Jackson, “fight” refers to the long history of resistance in Mississippi against the disposability of Black life, which Cooperation Jackson seeks to confront and defeat as part of any urban commitment to human rights. “Build” refers to a multipart, expansive regional plan.7 Cooperation Jackson offers one powerful instantiation of a theme that has shown up in multiple social struggles, places, and movements. “Build and Fight,” “Oppose and Propose,” “Resist and Build,” and similar expressions have become mottos for campaigns that combine anticapitalist politics with postcapitalist world-building.8 There are shades of meaning separating these expressions. There are, for instance, many ways to resist, not all of which involve fighting, and proposing something is only one step in the process of building it. Such distinctions notwithstanding, all of these mottos and campaigns are rooted in opposition and defined by visions of solidarity as a generative power. To these we add the reframed expression “Build and Defend” to draw greater attention to the needs and creative forces of communities and to emphasize the imperative not only to build for the future but also to recognize that which has already been built and is in need of support and protection. We see this as a complementary intervention. There is a place for all of these mottos and strategies within the Solidarity City.
It is precisely because of the multiplicity of problems generated by racial capitalist dynamics that the forms of defense have to be multiple, and this is why we do not believe there is only one feature or function of the bulwark pattern. Rather, there are diverse modes through which solidarity economy initiatives act as bulwarks. Our analysis in this chapter is guided by this core idea: a multiplicity of cooperative solutions are required to address our many social needs and problems. We use diverse methods—including geospatial analysis, historical process tracing, interviews, surveys, and input-output modeling—to explore how these initiatives defend the communities in which they are located and build anew in the process. Figure 2 displays the types of bulwarks examined in this chapter, what they resist and create, and the methods and data we use for analysis.
Bulwark Types | Resist | Create and Protect | Data and Methods |
|---|---|---|---|
Worker cooperatives | Against exploitation, especially in caring labor industries | Workplace democracy, development of capacities, boosting local economies, long-term job stability | Survey data on industrial and demographic composition + input-output modeling of payroll info and total revenues + interviews |
Housing cooperatives | Against high rents, slumlords, deteriorated housing, disinvestment, and gentrification | Stable and affordable urban housing, allowing people to stay in place despite various forms of dislocation | GIS analysis of locational data + historical analysis + interviews |
Credit unions | Against effects of redlining, exclusion from credit in banking deserts, and predatory lending | Collective community credit, access to fair place-based finance | GIS analysis of locational data + data on assets and membership + historical analysis |
Figure 2. Bulwark types of the solidarity economy. This figure summarizes how three types of cooperatives (worker cooperatives in care work, affordable housing cooperatives, and faith-based credit unions of Black churches) have played roles as bulwark institutions resisting racial and gendered capitalist exploitation and exclusion while also protecting communities. Methods used to study this role of the solidarity economy are included in the last column.
Geographic patterns, as we treat them here, are defined by repetition but can also be repatterned. While social patterns are often perceived as fixed and predictable, we emphasize that bulwark patterns, like the fault-line and edge-zone patterns examined previously, are actually dynamic processes. In showing how bulwarks fortify communities against racial capitalist processes, we are describing processes that require continuous engagement within evolving urban environments. The bulwark pattern exhibits particular spatial expressions influenced by community needs and urban fault lines. In each section, we remain attentive to the emergence of racial and socioeconomic divisions within each sector, as cooperatives grapple with various pressures that challenge their collective missions. Ultimately, we point to diverse forms of cooperation in the city that serve as vital support systems and that protect from the many cross-cutting pressures exerted by racial capitalist forces.
Worker Cooperatives as Bulwarks against Exploitation
We begin with worker co-ops. An expansive literature has investigated the topic of worker cooperatives from a variety of disciplinary and practical perspectives.9 For advocates, worker cooperatives exemplify a radical form of economic democracy that subverts class division by refiguring workers as worker-owners and institutionalizing democratic decision-making.10 Workers regularly assemble to collectively make decisions about what, how, and where to produce, with voting and decision-making organized around the principle of “one member, one vote.” Additionally, workers elect management and exercise control over the surplus or profit produced.11 Whereas in conventional capitalist firms, capital rents labor for the sake of profit, in worker cooperatives, labor ostensibly rents capital for the sake of jobs. The literature has both theoretical and empirical sides, variously addressing the subjective transformations and the material, household, and other rippling changes for people who form and run worker cooperatives.12
We offer a very specific insight into a voluminous field: an examination of the bulwark function that worker cooperatives can perform for women of color in care-work occupations. Our project emerged from a survey of New York City worker cooperatives that we co-organized in 2015. At the time, a nascent worker cooperative coalition was seeking to gauge the impacts of the city council’s first funding initiative directly supporting worker cooperatives. We partnered with this coalition and the influential nonprofit organization the Federation of Protestant Welfare Agencies to survey every worker cooperative in the city on their economic fundamentals and the demographics of their workforce.13 The resulting report contains valuable data on the payroll, employment, and revenues of worker co-ops in the city. Although the data provide just a one-year snapshot, they hold significant value as a baseline from which the worker cooperative landscape was subsequently shaped by additional city council funding. Our 2019 data showed the number of worker co-ops had grown to 115, as we mapped in chapters 1 and 2 along with all other solidarity economy types.
A team of researchers, including faculty and graduate and undergraduate students, administered the survey to twenty-two cooperatives using a combination of survey delivery methods in English and Spanish: online surveys, telephone, and in-person visits to worksites. Twenty of the cooperatives responded to the survey. The results represented in Table 4 and Plate 5 are based on these responses. While the overall number of worker cooperatives surveyed is small relative to New York City’s overall economy, we report some astounding findings that demonstrate distinct industrial and demographic patterns. There is one notable outlier in our study: Cooperative Home Care Associates (CHCA), until recently the largest worker co-op in the nation, had 2,300 workers at the time of the survey, far exceeding the average cooperative firm size. To account for this, we present results with and without the inclusion of CHCA data.14
Sector | Average workers per co-op | Percent workers | Percent women | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
with CHCAa | without CHCAb | |||
Construction | 11 | 1.0 | 11 | 10 |
Care work | 268 (14)b | 97.0 | 63 | 99.5 (91.5)b |
Food/accommodation | 5 | .6 | 8 | 67 |
Media and tech | 5 | .5 | 8 | 29 |
Other | 6 | .7 | 10 | 68 |
All worker co-ops | 118 (9)b | 100 | 100 | 98 (73)b |
Average size, distribution, and gender of worker-owners by sector. This table includes the results of a survey of cooperatives in New York City conducted together with the Federation of Protestant Welfare Agencies (FPWA) from 2014 to 2015.
Quite clearly, women predominate the cooperative sector, making up 98 percent of its workforce. This gender pattern exists in mutually constitutive relation with the fact that the largest share of cooperatives, both by number of workers and number of cooperatives, are in care-work occupations (97 percent of workers if we consider our large outlier, and 63 percent of co-ops excluding it). Feminist economist Nancy Folbre defines care work as “work that involves connecting to other people, trying to help people meet their needs, things like the work of caring for children, caring for the elderly, caring for sick people or teaching.”15 Accordingly, we include cleaning, health care, home health care, childcare, older adult care, education, and pet services under the umbrella of care work. The baseline clearly displays the prevalence of feminized occupations (where women are the majority of the employed and unemployed labor force) among New York City worker cooperatives.
Other findings reveal that 99 percent of worker-owners in New York City are nonwhite (Plate 5). Hispanic people are the majority group at 70 percent, followed by Black people at 28 percent.
The most common face of workers creating, developing, and maintaining worker cooperatives in New York City is the face of a woman of color in caring labor occupations.16 It is important to note that rates of exploitation are particularly high in caring labor occupations.17 Stories told by women cooperators (particularly in caring labor industries) confirm that the widespread pattern of wage theft and employer abuse in the wider industry are two of the primary reasons why women got together to create worker cooperatives in the first place.18 Here, we see evidence of worker cooperatives acting as a bulwark against high rates of capitalist gender-based exploitation. With the help of cooperative incubators—nonprofit organizations supporting co-op creation—women formed cooperatives in the same industry to defend against the abuses they knew before, creating a cooperative structure that would protect their work instead of exploiting their labor.
Over the years, we have spoken to hundreds of people in worker cooperatives, and the firsthand stories always indicate significant personal transformation. For example, when we spoke with Brightly cleaning cooperative (the first worker co-op in the United States to create a franchise model extending benefits to new cooperative branches), cofounders Araceli and Cirenia Dominguez told us that they found themselves working just as hard after they founded the co-op as before, except in ways that stretched their capacities by being spokespeople, leaders in their community, participants in public meetings and panels, and helping other people start “sister” cooperatives.19 Being in a cooperative meant being part of a movement. They said they were showing their children every day that one can be a lifelong learner, since growing doesn’t stop with school. Additionally, for years, women in caring labor cooperatives have noted the importance of both flexible scheduling that allows for their own childcare arrangements and the ability to decide on healthier cleaning methods to protect their own health. Significant case study evidence from our and others’ research in New York City points to the ability of workers to reconfigure relations of production to be better for them.20
We can see that one dimension of bulwarks involves protecting a meaningful life for workers, where it is possible to have a reliable wage and attend to cares beyond work, including family and personal health. We understood from cooperators that their lives are both different and better than they would otherwise be if they worked for a capitalist firm. While spaces of cooperation within the solidarity economy have an immediate impact on the people who work in them, what about those outside? What is the significance of worker cooperatives for the rest of the city? What world is being built here, and how does that affect local cities? Using modeling methods described in the section that follows, we offer evidence that cities where worker co-ops operate are also better off.
Further analysis of our survey data suggests that worker cooperatives serve additional bulwarking functions with potentially profound regional and urban implications. The analysis not only confirms that worker cooperatives prioritize labor and employment over profit maximization typical of capitalist firms, it also provides evidence that worker cooperatives build up local economies in ways that exceed comparable capitalist firms. To show this, we utilize economic impact analysis and input-output modeling. This technique enables us to use data on payroll, revenues, and total employment to parse out some of the economic ripple effects of worker cooperatives.21 The model in general is based on regional input-output tables that capture interconnectedness by estimating all firms’ economic impacts on one another. Practically speaking, this method is widely used for guiding local economic development. For our analysis, we used IMPLAN, the most widely accepted economic impact software, which combines comprehensive data on American firms, nonprofits, and households from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Bureau of Labor, and the Census. By inputting economic data on wages, payroll, and total employment into IMPLAN, the input-output model arrives at average parameters specific to each type of industrial possibility.22 This is a method that many new businesses use to forecast their impact on the local economy in terms of gross revenues. For example, the average capitalist cleaning firm in a specific city with x number of employees will on average spend y amount on supplies, and the suppliers in turn spend z amount on hiring and paying workers. Additionally, the same cleaning firm’s employees, if they are average households, will go out and spend r amount on food, shelter, education, clothing, heating, etc., generating further impact. The input-output models generate estimations of total impact by accounting for all local iterations of spending.
Unlike conventional applications of such input-output models, we use ours not for future prediction but rather to identify patterns in the present. How much do urban worker co-ops affect the local economy, and how do they compare with capitalist firms? This is novel in a variety of ways. Prior studies of cooperatives’ economic contributions have mostly concentrated on rural cooperatives, with a strong focus on agricultural midwestern states.23 Researchers have not typically considered worker cooperatives in service areas (such as childcare) as “engines of growth” because they serve local instead of export markets.24 All of this means an urban analysis of worker cooperatives that include many care-work co-ops is both novel and revealing of certain biased trends in what is and should be considered engines of growth in a particular place. Additionally, since worker co-ops in the United States rarely achieve sizable numbers in the same industry and location, it is difficult to arrive at a sufficient empirical sample size as required by conventional comparative analysis. At the most, the economics literature has examined the impacts of plywood cooperatives in the Northwest that achieved some concentration before largely demutualizing.25 More commonly, comparisons have been undertaken largely through qualitative case studies, such as Daphne Berry and Myrtle P. Bell’s study of Cooperative Home Care Associates in New York.26 Ultimately, we are offering an assessment of the aggregate output of worker co-ops in one city in comparison to capitalist firms, something no one has done before to our knowledge. We present our findings in Table 5.
Data from our survey show that worker cooperatives in New York City directly employed 2,486 workers and generated approximately $59 million in revenue in 2015, primarily by selling services. Practically all revenue (approximately $57 million) was paid to workers as wages. By entering these data into the IMPLAN model, which accounts for the multiplier effects of economic interdependence, we are able to estimate wider economic impacts. In addition to their direct impact through wages, the co-ops produce an indirect economic impact on the suppliers from which they purchase. This amounts to an estimated $18 million in revenue for suppliers, 101 jobs, and approximately $7 million in payroll. There is also an estimated induced effect of $49 million when workers in the co-ops, and the workers in the supplier firms, go out and use their wages to buy products from other businesses, which in turn supports an additional 305 jobs. In sum, worker cooperatives’ total output is approximately $125 million.
In a straightforward way, multipliers allow us to estimate the ripple effect of cooperatives throughout the regional economy. The output multiplier on the co-op data estimates that one dollar of worker cooperative activity in New York City generates $2.14 of output in the economy. This kind of impact analysis addresses a common critique of worker cooperatives as benefiting only their own members. Although the majority of co-op revenue is paid to workers as wages, about half of the total output generated through worker cooperative activity actually goes to other local businesses.
In fact, there is evidence that worker cooperatives are better for the local economy than capitalist firms in the same industries and with the same revenues. We wanted to know how economic performance would differ if these firms had been not worker cooperatives but rather traditional capitalist firms with the same annual gross revenues. We used the model’s built-in parameters for the average payroll and workforce size to see how such a firm, with the same prices for their services and volume of business as the co-ops, would make decisions about payroll and workforce. The model uses average profit ratios to produce estimates for labor income, indirect, and induced effects for the average capitalist firm with those same revenues in each corresponding industry (see last set of columns in Table 5).
NYC cooperatives (data from authors’ survey and IMPLAN calculations) | Average capitalist firms with same revenues and in same industries as surveyed co-ops (IMPLAN data and calculations) | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Impact type | Employment (# of jobs) | Labor income ($) | Output ($) | Employment (# of jobs) | Labor income ($) | Output ($) |
Direct effect | 2,486 | 57,276,284 | 58,685,930 | 1,163 | 40,790,873 | 56,868,347 |
Indirect effect | 101 | 7,118,358 | 17,587,401 | 98 | 6,897,889 | 17,042,427 |
Induced effect | 305 | 18,619,057 | 49,036,723 | 226 | 13,750,251 | 36,198,647 |
Total effect | 2,892 | 83,013,698 | 125,310,054 | 1,487 | 61,439,013 | 110,109,421 |
This table shows a result of modeling the economic impact of worker cooperatives using data from a survey of New York City cooperatives and comparing it to the impact of typical capitalist firms with the same revenue. IMPLAN modeling software and data on cooperative firms were used to model these results. Source: Pavlovskaya, Hudson, and Safri, “NYC Worker Cooperative Survey.”
Here is how we read this comparison between actual cooperative data and the average capitalist firms with the same revenues in the same industries as presented by IMPLAN. The model assumes the same expenditures on supplies, so the estimated indirect effect is largely the same. The biggest difference is that worker co-ops appear to maximize employment. Across the board, worker cooperatives hired more workers than conventional capitalist counterpart firms would have. Worker co-ops hired 2,486 workers and paid them approximately $57 million (channeling surplus to keep wages and employment the priority), whereas capitalist firms would have hired 1,163 workers with a lower total payroll of $41 million.27 Because worker cooperatives are devoting more to payroll ($16 million), they are generating a much larger induced effect as workers go out and spend that money. Since co-op workers largely spend their wages inside the city where they live, they localize and grow the economy more than capitalist firm activity would. When combined with the other measures, cooperatives’ larger induced effects compared to capitalist firms is dramatic: cooperatives generate more total local economic output than the average capitalist firms would in the exact same lines of business.
This difference cannot be explained in terms of the quantity of business the firms do—our IMPLAN model holds revenues constant—but is instead a result of differences in how income is distributed between laborer and proprietor. In the worker co-op economy, an additional $16 million goes to more workers as part of wages, whereas in the conventional economic model, that amount goes to enterprise-owning capitalists as profit. By putting that much more money in the hands of workers, co-ops generate a much larger forward impact on spending. More workers employed by worker co-ops spend more money in the economy than the workers and firm owners combined of average capitalist firms, which makes sense given that people with lower incomes tend to have a greater “propensity to consume.”28 And considering the majority demographic profile of women of color, we can also use work by other feminist economists to borrow the point that women tend to spend most directly on household needs.
Our data and impact analysis affirm that worker co-ops in New York City are bulwarks in the realm of production. Cooperators prioritize payroll, which ends up building up economic power at the very base and also boosts local spending and well-being effects. While based on modeling and estimations, our work is especially important for anyone interested in care-labor industries infamous for superexploitation. The vast majority of the worker co-ops at the moment of our surveying were in industries where the wage structure is low and tilted (for reasons related to race, language, and immigration status) toward undervaluation of this labor. Worker co-ops are one manifestation of a bulwark process defending against racialized and gender-based exploitation, to build and engage in class transformation with potential network effects as worker cooperatives connect and advocate together.
Government officials in New York and elsewhere have taken notice of the power of cooperatives. Recently, many new worker cooperatives have sprung up in New York City, partly through the efforts of a coalition that has successfully gained city council funding for incubation and growth.29 The coalition encouraged the city council to recognize the cooperative advantage in terms of stable, long-term jobs not dependent on tax breaks and to understand co-ops as a relatively inexpensive “employment-creation” program—an understanding supported by our findings. Starting in fiscal year 2015, when the city council allocated $1.2 million for supporting twenty-four existing worker cooperatives and incubating twenty-one new ones, there has been a growth in supporting organizations delivering services to worker co-ops. City council funding grew to $3.8 million a year in 2022.30 By official estimates, the number of worker cooperatives has more than tripled; however, the exact number is a matter of some contention, as directories continue to list cooperatives that ceased operations or are in start-up phases. The industrial spread has also widened significantly. Today, for example, a new taxi driver’s cooperative in New York has exceeded CHCA in terms of workforce size, becoming the largest worker co-op in the country.31 Still, the focus on labor-intensive industries remains because the money allocated by the city council cannot go as far in more capital-intensive industries. Three and a half million dollars divided between creating new businesses and supporting all existing cooperatives means that the per-job investment is too low to start a capital-intensive cooperative firm requiring tools or expensive means of production.
Can we say worker cooperatives as solidarity economy bulwarks exist without contradiction or without problems? Not really. Divides and fault lines are evident not only in the disproportionate presence of worker co-ops in labor-intensive industries but also in the occupations themselves. The fact that women of color form cooperatives does not necessarily contest the reality that women of color still concentrate in relatively low-paid caring labor occupations like childcare, cleaning, and care for older adults, all segregated so-called pink-collar jobs. The fault lines of occupational segregation by gender and race do not disappear within worker co-ops. However, for the workers themselves, there is a great deal of transformation. In class terms, structural change occurs when workers step into the role of appropriating, distributing, and deciding what happens to surplus value. And there are a lot of changes that begin to happen when workers exert collective power; they can begin to engage in visionary and progressive politics at the city level that are about much more than the cooperative form.32 It starts to be about making sure everyone, including the worker cooperative member who is undocumented, has a right to the city. And this almost always means joining and working inside much larger political coalitions capable of affecting deep changes in city decision-making. That same bulwarking process echoes in solidarity forms of housing, to which we turn next.
Housing as Bulwark against Bad Living Conditions and Displacement
Work is not the only space where people get squeezed by contradictions generated by racial capitalism, become fed up, and then create something else that is collectively managed and sustained. Now we turn to another crucial human need—shelter—to examine how people in the housing sector have constructed solidarity economy bulwarks to resist various problems: high rents, deteriorated living conditions, residential segregation, and displacement as processes of gentrification take hold. These pressures converge tightly in New York’s housing markets to affect more people than average for an American city: two-thirds of the city’s households are renters (by contrast, 66 percent of all Americans are homeowners, however precarious that condition is) and housing prices are the second highest for any city in the country after San Francisco. Even before the Covid-19 pandemic, 56 percent of renters in New York were officially rent-burdened by paying more than 30 percent of their income in rent, with low-income people much more likely to be severely rent-burdened by paying three-quarters of their income to rent.33 Culturally, New Yorkers quickly connect through sharing bitter stories of housing precarity and predatory landlords. Efforts to put housing outside of pure market mechanisms, including through public housing, rent-stabilized housing, a housing voucher program (Section 8), and affordable housing cooperatives are the only ways that people without high wealth can avoid being rent-burdened. While the situation is particularly bad in New York, we here arrive at a much bigger truth: there is a crisis in affordable housing in almost every single global metropolitan area, one that requires solutions that privilege housing as a right and need, not profit.
In this section, we focus on collectively self-managed affordable housing cooperatives, an important part of New York City’s solidarity economy landscape.34 Affordable housing cooperatives intentionally suppress housing prices (either for rent or sale) to allow affordability. They also require proof that residents’ income is at or below the median income for the neighborhood. High flip taxes (taxes upon sale of the housing unit), a binding commitment to sell at prices determined by a formula to limit the equity that can be gained, and common rules against subleasing all return housing to the purpose of shelter rather than financial gain or speculation. These co-ops affect a lot of people. In 2018, an estimated 20 percent of people with low to median incomes who would otherwise be rent-burdened were living in affordable cooperative housing in New York City.35
Limited-equity housing cooperatives (LECs) are a subset of affordable housing that allow for homeownership. In their in-depth study of such housing cooperatives in the late 1990s, Susan Saegert and colleagues found that LECs continued to be affordable to residents with lower-than-average incomes, despite the gentrification that had been pushing up average housing prices.36 Lower-than-market costs meant that “working class and lower paid white-collar workers . . . artists, actors, musicians, teachers, and public agency employees [were] able to work at jobs they consider[ed] personally fulfilling and still live in Manhattan.”37 We build on Saegert et al.’s work by reexamining the situation some twenty-five years later, this time differentiating between two types of affordable housing co-ops: Mitchell-Lama co-ops and Housing Development Fund Corporation co-ops (HDFCs). Mitchell-Lama cooperatives are much larger institutions, averaging 718 units per building, compared to 20 units for HDFCs, and offer both rental and for-sale housing. They are more spatially concentrated, whereas HDFCs have more locations throughout the city and are owned by residing members. As we will discuss, both sets of housing co-ops emerged out of the city’s racialized political economy as a way to create and protect affordable housing. They nonetheless originate in two different eras and in response to different problems. In the first case, Mitchell-Lama buildings (represented by yellow dots in Map 22) were developed in the 1950s and 1960s by a nexus of organized labor, the state, the city, and nonprofit housing organizations as a response to cramped tenement housing. In the second case, HDFCs (represented by orange dots in Map 22) emerged in the 1970s and 1980s as a grassroots defense against forces of organized abandonment and disinvestment. These differences illuminate how bulwarking functions can vary even in the same cooperative sector.
Map 22 shows the current distribution of housing co-ops relative to Black and Latinx neighborhoods. The map makes it evident that affordable housing cooperatives are highly concentrated in neighborhoods of color, especially in Harlem, the Bronx, and the northern half of Brooklyn (see Map 5). In the following sections, we explore this pattern more deeply by examining the housing co-ops’ histories and structures.
Mitchell-Lama Co-ops: Historical Bulwarks against Low-Quality Housing for the Working Class
Mitchell-Lama co-ops were born in the industrial period of the 1950s as a deliberate policy initiative of urban renewal intended to address labor demands. This policy initiative resulted from a confluence of a strong labor movement, a responsive state, and a pro-cooperative mindset. The United Housing Foundation, established by a coalition of labor unions and credit unions to build affordable cooperative housing, was the key fiscal sponsor. As ground was broken on the first project (the East River Co-op), the head of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, David Dubinsky, addressed a group including thousands of garment workers, Robert Moses (the city planner infamous for entrenching divides), Eleanor Roosevelt, and Abraham E. Kazan, leader of credit unions and cooperative housing in New York. The labor leader proclaimed: “Half a century later, we return to the place where our union was born. We have wiped out the sweatshop. We return to wipe out the slum.”38 In Dubinsky’s statement, we see a grand vision of what the cooperatives might do for low-income neighborhoods. Unfortunately, the vision was detached from reality.
There was a contradiction at the very genesis of large-scale Mitchell-Lama cooperative housing. Aside from his excessive optimism on both the labor and housing fronts, Dubinsky’s language denies the approximately half million Black, Latinx, and low-income families who were disproportionately displaced throughout New York’s slum-clearance programs, including building that same East River Co-op.39 Approximately 14 percent of the co-ops came at the expense of displacing very low-income communities of color through “slum clearance,” ostensibly to make space for other working-class constituencies that had more means.40 In assessing the bulwarking functions of Mitchell-Lama cooperatives, it is important to acknowledge that, at their inception, the co-ops bulwarked for some and displaced others.
The rest of the Mitchell-Lama co-ops (86 percent), however, were built on vacant and reclaimed land—including its three largest projects: Co-op City in the Bronx, Rochdale Village in Queens, and Starrett City in Brooklyn—that could have been diverted to private capitalist development.41 Labor unions successfully led the way to create a new model for housing in which the state, the city, and powerful organized labor converged to ensure quality affordable housing for a lower-middle- to middle-class organized worker constituency. Unions advocated on behalf of a so-called working-poor constituency experiencing serious problems of crowded, subpar tenement housing that was devoid of both air and light. Rectifying this was central to the architectural additions of Mitchell-Lama “tower in the park” housing.42 Defending against predatory landlords meant constructing a new kind of housing that privileged self-management, community control, and permanent affordability rules in a classic “resist and build” process central to bulwarking.
Mitchell-Lama cooperatives were created through a new kind of investment vehicle backed by New York State as fiscal guarantor. The idea was to create not just affordable housing but a village model in which there would be schools, credit unions, cooperative supermarkets, an electricity cooperative, and more. One might call it an effort to create a solidarity city within the city—a protected space where a different economy and sociality can flourish for working-class families who otherwise had no choice but to be subjected to poor living conditions by predatory landlords. Incredibly for those of us accustomed to looking critically and skeptically at state practices in the service of capital, in this case, the state was actually a partner in creating this protected solidarity space.
The majority of Mitchell-Lama housing units were built in the Bronx. The close-up in Map 23 reveals scale. Map 23 is also an important caveat to our density maps discussed in chapter 2 because it shows that the density of residents participating in solidarity economies does not always match the density of organizational locations. Co-op City is the prime example of this counterpattern. The Northeast Bronx does not even appear on our geospatial density maps (Maps 2 and 3), but it is important precisely because a single location, Co-op City, counts 55,000 residents (of whom 60 percent are Black and 28 percent are Latinx). Co-op City has abundant green space, community meeting spaces, a high school, two middle schools, three grade schools, its own newspaper, a fire station, and its own zip code. It also strives for cooperative living in a broader respect: its older adults are more likely than average to be able to live in their own homes because of thick social networks and older adult care. Co-op City is often referred to as a “city within a city.”43 The public sector’s investment and the creation of special regulations and tax benefits helped produce a solidarity city at such a large scale. The dense clustering of solidarity economy practices in one site also helps build the idea that bulwarks can be important not just in allowing one type of solidarity economy to maintain itself but also in creating a space for solidarity economy hot spots, as we explored in chapter 2.
In the 1970s, effective resistance limited the expansion of the co-op housing model. Tensions brewed between workers’ stagnant incomes and the rising cost of housing. The kind of community created by cooperative housing proved effective against the nexus of city, state, and nonprofit decision-making. In 1975, two years after the last building of Co-op City opened, 80 percent of residents successfully waged the longest and largest successful rent strike in U.S. history to protest monthly maintenance charges, which had doubled in the span of five years. In the wake of this strike, the United Housing Foundation was dismantled, and some of the leaders of the United Housing Foundation fell to casting tenants as short-sighted.44 The rent strike at Co-op City revealed the yawning chasm between stagnant wages and the rising prices of construction that supposedly necessitated rent and maintenance charge increases beyond the reach of blue-collar workers in the 1970s.45 The strike also showed the possibilities of community power in resistance, a scary thing for those seeking control over urban space. Consequently, no new projects were initiated after the 1970s, despite the many progressive benefits of this model. In a way, the bulwark pattern was so effective in tying together a community that it was considered too risky to build more such projects where residents would exert voice over key matters like rent, even against the nonprofit organizations that helped them come into existence.
Mitchell-Lama co-op development was pushed to the periphery of the city (see Map 23), creating a spatial urban dynamic of underdeveloped areas hosting numerous solidarity economy initiatives. Regardless, investment in explicitly affordable housing was part of a sweep of policies, alongside guaranteed free public university access for city residents at the City University of New York and the right of people experiencing homelessness to housing, all of which centered on social equity. As the city ran into deep fiscal problems in the 1970s, these remarkable programs became the target of a neoliberal doctrine that demanded forced austerity for supposedly socialist initiatives. A conservative administration and business coalition demanded long-term sacrifices and cut back social services to entice capital with tax breaks. The subsequent phase of planned investment and disinvestment brought a wave of economic collapse to the city, which started another thread of housing cooperative development. This new route involved creating a separate legal category of limited-equity housing co-ops, officially Housing Development Fund Corporations. This second major legal category of housing cooperatives can also be considered a bulwark, but one constructed entirely by residents and devoid of most of the state support granted to Mitchell-Lama co-ops.
HDFCs as Bulwarks: First against Disinvestment, Now against Gentrification
The history of housing co-ops reflects the paradox of “double movement.”46 In the 1950s and 1960s, the state intervened to establish protection from the market through the centralized support of housing; in the 1970s and 1980s, by contrast, the state withdrew support. In the latter decade, waves of white flight from the city, combined with housing disinvestment, led landlords to abandon properties because tax costs outweighed rental income. Especially in neighborhoods of color in the 1970s, housing properties and vacant lots fell into tax arrears. In this context, the city in the throes of its own budget crisis took possession of housing properties and approximately eleven thousand vacant lots.47 Rather than absorb hundreds of properties and associated costs, the city turned over ownership rights to low-income renters (sometimes for a dollar) primarily through three city programs: Tenant Interim Lease, Community Management Program, and Third Party Transfer. All three programs extended ownership to collectives of tenants who could demonstrate capable self-management. The Urban Homesteading Assistance Board (UHAB), the major nonprofit organization in cooperative homeownership, has played a crucial role in providing these co-ops with support to navigate complex legal and financial questions.48
The pattern of distribution of HDFCs (see Map 23) reflects the neighborhoods that experienced the most abandonment in the 1970s and 1980s—areas in northern and lower Manhattan, the Bronx, and Brooklyn. Residents in these neighborhoods fought back against disinvestment and constructed a new way of living, enacting the core of bulwark practices. Once again we zoom in on the Bronx to show the contrast between HDFC and Mitchell-Lama locations. Map 23 shows how the spatial distribution of HDFCs in Southwest Bronx differs from the earlier phase involving the construction of Mitchell-Lama buildings in the North and Northeast.
Initially, HDFCs used to be bulwarks against deteriorated housing stock, absentee landlords, and poor living conditions. In the last thirty years, these same cooperatives have turned into bulwarks against gentrification. This is because residents of limited-equity housing tend to stay: an estimated 85 percent of the HDFC housing stock has not changed ownership since being founded. These co-ops have an annual turnover rate of only 1 to 1.5 percent, much lower than market-rate housing in New York City.49 These data suggest that the mostly nonwhite population living in these HDFCs is close to what it was in the 1980s, even though the surrounding neighborhoods may have drastically changed due to gentrification. In the case of Brooklyn in particular, gentrification has pushed Black residents with lower incomes farther out from the west to the southeast. This brings up a whole other aspect to why HDFCs can be characterized by the bulwark pattern: their birth lies in a resistance by people of color to the ways that their landlords abandoned all responsibilities when taxes were greater than profits. Residents maintained homes in place even though their neighborhoods were drastically affected by deep poverty. Today, the same institution allows people to stay in place despite the pressures of gentrification. We identify resistance to gentrification as a core feature of the bulwark pattern but as born of a different origin than Mitchell-Lama co-ops.
In her examination of limited-equity housing co-ops in Washington, D.C., Amanda Huron similarly highlights how co-ops allow for possibilities for a different life.50 She points out how these alternative forms of tenancy have positive tangible and intangible benefits. Lowering housing costs allows working residents a higher quality of life, while the neighborliness of the co-op structure gives children a more communal sense of everyday life. Structured oral interviews with local housing cooperative residents in New York undertaken in 2015 with the help of graduate students in the Design and Urban Ecologies Program at Parsons School of Design confirm these benefits. Students recorded and transcribed interviews with residents that led to wide-ranging conversations on themes of diversity and what it means to live with housing security despite lower-than-average incomes, which we highlight below in anonymized excerpts. We also partnered with UHAB to create written questionnaires for co-op residents across the city. Although too small in number to constitute a representative sample, the survey responses we received were rich in insight. Respondents echoed what people reported to Saegert’s research team over twenty years ago and to Huron a decade ago.
One co-op owner, for example, said, “If I didn’t have the apartment, I couldn’t retire. . . . If it wasn’t for the co-op, my pension wouldn’t even pay my rent.” Another shared that being a member of an affordable housing co-op had changed household career decisions: “My wife is an environmental designer. She does a lot of advocacy for climate change, and that does not pay much. . . . So I think my personal benefit for living here is that I can . . . vicariously enjoy the left-wing activities that she does.” When others were asked about the benefits of living in a co-op, some simply reported that they were able to travel or go to a movie. The benefits range from the dramatic to the mundane: from adopting different job trajectories to expanding discretionary spending possibilities. Overall, the interviews with housing co-op residents reveal that they are able to exert more control over their own economic lives and decision-making because of their access to a secure and affordable place to live. Being saved from rent-burdened housing takes the form of constructing housing in an altogether different way to engage in collective self-management that can then promote individual choice.
Housing co-ops are examples of what Huron calls “urban commons,” which are spaces of negotiation and antagonism.51 Usefully, Huron distinguishes the type of urban commons constructed by housing co-ops from other kinds of natural commons (like pastures, fishing waters, irrigation networks, etc.) investigated by Elinor Ostrom and the associated school of commons research in economics, which are usually characterized by homogeneity of race or language. Instead, urban commons involve the coming together of people who have no kinship relation, are not racially homogeneous, and have occupational differences. We can see appreciation of this space of encounter and racial integration in housing co-ops. In the words of one of our interviewees: “Diversity is one of [the] things that I like about this building.”
Housing over the Long Haul
While housing cooperatives offer many important economic and social benefits, we are careful not to construct a monolithic rosy understanding of living in these co-ops. Interviews show us that these initiatives live and change with the residents that constitute them. One woman, who told us she experienced homelessness prior to her tenancy in a Brooklyn housing co-op, reminisced, “We all used to work together, we used to have all the doors open, we used to have parties. It was really, really nice, back then.” She lamented a change on the board that has dramatically altered the culture and finances of the co-op. Co-ops obviously change with time and resident composition, and as cities like New York are also facing intense gentrification pressures, so too do the neighborhoods around the cooperatives themselves.
When a neighborhood starts to see increasing average incomes, changing racial composition, and more expensive housing (for rent and ownership), these are the classic pillars of gentrification that can push a housing co-op in one of two directions. On one path, the co-op maintains itself, which thousands of units in the city do proudly. There are large numbers of housing co-ops in areas that now are more white, but the co-ops have older residents who have managed to stay in place from the 1980s when neighborhoods were predominantly Black (like Harlem and Washington Heights, see also Map 5). From speaking with housing co-op members and activists in the sector, we were able to confirm that in areas where displacement occurred, people of color with low incomes have been able to stay in those housing co-ops despite creeping gentrification around them, a sign that both Mitchell-Lama buildings and HDFCs have functioned as protective bulwarks against racialized displacement of Black and Latinx people in the city.
On the other path, when the neighborhood actually changes, the housing co-op succumbs to market pressures, which is when the group of homeowners decides to no longer be a limited-equity housing co-op. If any subsidized loans remain, they pay those off and become conventional market-rate housing, allowing people to buy and sell at market prices. Some Mitchell-Lama buildings have indeed demutualized (approximately fifty-two thousand units by 2019), and market pressures remain today.52 HDFC co-ops face the same pressures of demutualization, and some have demutualized, but this form of co-op cannot as easily dissolve the entire agreement that brought them into existence. Worryingly, we do hear from organizers that HDFCs are increasingly entering into domains of exclusion as boards allow the prices of units to rise close to market levels. While households may still only need to make below area median income to qualify for residency at the HDFC, prices have risen well beyond what lower-middle to middle-income families expect and can afford.
One of the reasons that housing cooperatives barely appear in Queens today (those remaining are represented by pink dots on Map 22) is the legacy of approximately four hundred Section 213 housing cooperatives that overwhelmingly demutualized and ceased being limited-equity cooperatives by “selling out.”53 As with Mitchell-Lama co-ops, organized labor played a major role in Section 213 co-op development, helping to ensure housing for working-class, union families. But unlike Mitchell-Lama co-ops, Section 213 co-ops were neither subsidized nor legally restricted from profiting when co-op members sold. As prices rose, their units have, for the most part, become unaffordable for newer generations of lower- to lower-middle-income households. Rising prices present an ever-looming possibility for co-ops in the remaining boroughs, especially when some co-ops see the lucrative payout if residents could sell apartments at market rates in gentrified and gentrifying neighborhoods.
The complete absence of housing co-ops in Staten Island is also a sign that strong racial fault lines can prevent co-ops from coming into existence in the first place. The construction of the Verrazzano Bridge in 1964 connected Staten Island via road to the rest of the city for the first time. Previously, Staten Island was relatively undeveloped. The new bridge made the borough into a destination for Italian Americans and Irish Americans leaving Brooklyn. Staten Island was rapidly transformed into the whitest (56 percent) and most conservative of the city’s boroughs.54 White flight politics further led nearly every majority-white civic organization in Staten Island to successfully fight in the 1960s to prohibit attached structures, apartment buildings, or low-cost housing on the vast vacant tracts of city-owned land.55 Since apartment blocks were associated with Black communities, prohibiting low-cost multiple-occupancy housing further raised income requirements of residents and fed into racial segregation in the borough. Amid this backdrop, housing cooperatives did not find fertile soil to establish themselves. Not coincidentally, the prevalence of single-family housing also contributes to the near absence of community gardens in the borough.
While municipalities can impose obstacles, they can also support cooperatives. We briefly reviewed a variety of possible origins for housing cooperatives to come into existence. One origin includes a period of massive capital flight and disinvestment. Earlier, though, an apparatus (composed of labor unions, credit unions, housing activists, and the city) came together with multiple constituencies to ensure real—not token—affordability. We note the laws helping to finance Co-op City are still on the books, waiting to be dusted off and reused, perhaps by a reinvigorated labor and housing movement today. But no matter what, we do not have to go far back to find ideas on how to do things differently.
The idea that solidarity economy initiatives stretch back in time is abundantly clear, as we have seen both here and at the end of chapter 2. Yet in the same period of the 1930s through the 1950s in which housing co-ops saw investment, the city also intentionally deprived other areas of credit and finance. We turn to the topic of bulwarking and financial cooperatives for the last section.
Credit Unions as Bulwarks against Both Conventional and Predatory Finance
In New York, as elsewhere, credit unions extend the powers and protections of cooperation into finance. In the final case we examine here, people are being squeezed by either predatory lenders or conventional banks to the point of getting financially exploited or excluded from banking and credit.56 In response, they set up something else altogether: credit unions, which are some of the oldest formal solidarity economy institutions in the United States. Credit unions originate in a set of practices that include informal lending circles, which have long supported social groups that pool and share financial resources around the world.57 While capitalist banks use customers’ money to generate profit for owners and investors, credit unions operate on a not-for-profit basis and charge for financial services basically at cost. They are member-owned and governed by boards elected from general membership (according to the principle “one member, one vote,” not size of assets). For all these reasons, particularly among communities where conventional capitalist finance is either absent or predatory, credit unions can be thought of as spaces where people collectively defend against financialized extraction and construct bulwarks of cooperative finance where solidarity organizes the economic relations in core ways.
Since credit unions conceive of their members as a community, a conception that follows a legal requirement of officially stating the common bond that unites this community, we examine the categories of common bond that prevail in New York City. Credit unions bring together people from a single organization or association (e.g., those belonging to the same church), workplace (e.g., workers in the same government agency), occupation (e.g., teachers), or those from a community (residential area). In the United States, employment-related credit unions that are organized around a workplace or occupation constitute a majority and certainly dwarf their fellow financial co-ops in terms of assets. Slightly more than half of all federal and state credit unions have a low-income designation, meaning they draw together that constituency.
Because credit unions originate from the notion of a small community, they are always tied to place through the common bond that unites the community members. In addition, today’s credit unions, especially the larger ones, have ties to particular locations. Even if not chartered for a residential area per se, geographic belonging is created through “fields of membership” that specify the source for their common-bond communities. That is, by drawing social and geographic boundaries, the common bond creates financial communities that have a strong connection to place. This connection to place does not exist for capitalist banks. Banks extract profit from their customers and allocate it to shareholders who are typically outside investors. Banks can prosper even if some of their customers’ homes get destroyed by gentrification or poverty. In contrast to footloose financial capital, credit unions are part and parcel of place; they do well when the place and its member community prosper. The history of credit unions shows that organizing finance collectively and democratically makes it possible to resist wealth extraction and make place in the spirit of solidarity. In fact, for over a century, U.S. credit unions have protected marginalized communities against the devastation of redlining, conventional extractive lending or “greenlining” (e.g., toxic loans triggering the foreclosure crisis after 2008), and predatory lending (e.g., payday lenders and check-cashing services). For all of these reasons, credit unions can be considered bulwarks of solidarity economies.
It is also important to note that precisely because they have strong connections to place and community, credit unions are characterized by race and wealth disparities in profound ways. Like other solidarity economy institutions, fault lines of race and class that divide urban space also define the communities that create financial cooperatives. Yet, credit unions continue to remain spaces for collective care and solidarity to defend life, core to the bulwark pattern we have described all along.
Snapshot of the Credit Union Landscape in New York City
With over eight hundred thousand members and cooperative assets that have doubled since 2008, New York City has the highest concentration of credit unions nationally. Our analysis is based on a 2014 National Credit Union Administration dataset of 85 credit unions with a total of 156 main and branch office locations within the city borders.58 Compared to national statistics, New York City’s credit unions are distinct. Nationally, employment-related credit unions account for the majority of institutions (80 percent), while associational credit unions (including faith-based ones) make up a small share (14 percent). However, in New York City the proportions are different: employment credit unions accounted for only 39 percent in 2014, while associational credit unions reached 45 percent, mostly because of faith-based credit unions.59 The overwhelming majority of faith-based credit unions belong to historical Black churches, which we highlight in Map 24. In this section, we focus our discussion on their geographic patterns that illustrate the power of community-based solidarity as a bulwark against racist banking.
Credit Unions of Black Churches as Bulwarks against Redlining
Being relatively small communities themselves, church congregations usually form credit unions that have particularly small membership and are operated by volunteers to provide financial services. Under what circumstances would Black churches put such an effort into organizing solidarity finance? The answer lies in the historical and contemporary geographies of racial capitalism that we sketched in chapter 2, against which the cooperative traditions of Black communities have tried to create what we call “solidarity economy bulwarks of finance.”
During the Great Migration in the early part of the twentieth century, when so many moved from southern states to New York City, Black migrants faced rampant racism and racial segregation that concentrated Black people in neighborhoods in which churches played crucial community-building roles. In addition to contributing to spiritual and cultural belonging, Black churches across the United States advocated for social justice causes that they linked to everyday survival and thriving in spite of the prevailing racism. W. E. B. Du Bois writes that any study of cooperation among Black people “must begin with the Church,” and he provides forensic accounting for church-based, collectively organized responses to community needs resulting from racist exclusion in education, credit, health care, death benefits for widows and orphans, print publishing, and more.60 Here, we concentrate on credit and on how churches responded particularly to the processes of redlining, which we explored in chapter 2. Redlining policies, together with racist exclusionary policies of conventional banks, led to the formation of “banking deserts,” areas without a single banking branch in communities of color and inundated by numerous predatory lenders. Against absent and predatory lending, church congregations pooled their scarce monetary resources together for saving, borrowing, and lending that enabled their members to pay rent, start businesses, bury loved ones, or even put food on the table.61 Even though assets were, and are, limited by congregation size and the low average incomes of members, credit unions have provided safe financial spaces that sustain all kinds of social reproduction in urban Black neighborhoods throughout the city.
The overwhelming majority of faith-based credit unions in New York City sprung up during the height of the redlining decades, in the 1930s through the 1950s, in Black churches including Saint Martin’s (1937), Abyssinian Baptist Church (1940), Saint Mark’s (1943), and Saint Philip’s (1951) in Harlem; Saint Augustine Presbyterian (1946) in the Bronx; and Concord Baptist Church (1951) and Cornerstone Baptist Church (1957) in Brooklyn. These and many other Black churches across the nation have built cooperative finance to specifically contest racist exclusion. Saint Philip’s Church, for instance, tells of how its credit union started with one hundred dollars precisely because its Black parish members “could not access banks.”62
New York showcases this pattern in Map 24, where the location of most faith-based credit unions can be seen to still overlap with previously redlined areas, demonstrating clearly how credit unions have acted as financial bulwarks, protecting against racist discrimination but doing so via a cooperative form they built themselves.
Today’s geography of faith-based credit unions in New York City presents eloquent testimony to past and ongoing collective resistance to the long-term effects of redlining and other urban racial capitalist practices. Their small membership communities are rooted in the surrounding neighborhoods. They have low wealth and account for just a fraction of the city’s cooperative membership, assets, and loans. Yet we think their importance, manifested in their geographic patterns, far outweighs those indicators. While famously diverse, New York is also one of the most racially segregated cities in the nation. Faith-based credit unions directly contest racialized wealth disparities by working where need is greatest, resulting in locations where lower-income people of color concentrate in Upper Manhattan, North Brooklyn, and the Bronx in areas that have suffered decades of racialized disinvestment.
It is worthwhile to note that the urban credit union landscape in New York contrasts with the rest of the country. For the United States as a whole, credit union membership is predominantly white, and just 10 percent of credit unions are minority-designated.63 Half of all credit unions have a low-income designation.64 In New York City, though, credit unions show greater inclusion by both poverty and race: 52 percent of credit unions are minority-designated and 59 percent are low-income. The faith-based common bond clearly stands out among all types of credit unions because practically all faith-based credit unions (91 percent) have low-income designation and most (77 percent) also have a minority designation. Faith-based credit unions continue to provide inclusion along lines of both class and race to a much larger degree than other types of credit unions. For this reason, faith-based credit unions are not only bulwarks of solidarity economy but also specifically bulwarks for low-income people of color. They may not have many assets, given that their constituencies are facing racialized poverty in the first place, but they remain important lifelines for the people they serve.
The story we tell of credit unions in Black churches arising in opposition to racial capitalist processes in finance in New York City describes the strategy undertaken by communities of color elsewhere. Similar histories unfolded in Philadelphia and countless other cities where there were concentrations of people of color who faced redlining and racist financial discrimination. But the story is not all one of successful resistance against racial capitalist forces.
Fault Lines Are Never Easy to Get Rid Of
By definition, credit unions work by defining a constituency through a common bond and excluding others. In one way, common bond protects the community it defines and provides the means of collective resistance to financial exclusion. Credit unions founded by Black churches are a prime example. However, fault lines of racial capitalism can reappear powerfully within credit union movement space. In New York City, there are large differences, for example, between faith-based credit unions and employment-related credit unions, with the latter having more branches, more assets, and larger membership totals.65 Likewise, credit unions founded by white European ethnic associations (e.g., Italian), specific neighborhoods, and those with mixed common bond (often a combination of private employers) hold more wealth from their relatively well-to-do populations. They can consequently form more significant collective assets than credit unions of Black churches that have little resources at their disposal, while serving communities most in need. Credit unions reflect the wealth or poverty of their membership, and in this way they reflect the fault lines produced and reproduced by racial capitalist processes.
The question of how credit unions can expand the boundaries of membership directly relates to how much they can respond to the actual forces of need surrounding the location of the institution. Upon initial examination of Map 24, it might appear that the presence of credit unions, aside from faith-based ones, in neighborhoods of color would provide those areas access to solidarity finance. In reality, however, the employment-related types of common bond limit membership to particular industries or employers and do not include residents of those areas per se. Thus, there is a fault line that separates urban neighborhoods that can benefit from solidarity finance and those that cannot even if credit unions are present. And even in Black neighborhoods with church-based credit unions, only those residents who are members of the church would typically be able to access this form of solidarity finance.
One way to address this limitation is for more credit unions to consider combining multiple common bonds (serving more than one group) and open charter (serving all residents and workers of an area), rather than a single common bond. Certainly, the growth of membership in this area is the fastest at the national level. For faith-based credit unions, one important exemplar of the principle “survive by expansion and further inclusion” is Saint Mary’s Credit Union in Marlborough, Massachusetts, one of the oldest in the country. Over the years, their credit union common bond went from French Canadian workers of Saint Mary’s Parish, to residents of Marlborough, to all of Worcester and nearby counties. There were obviously people in the nearby communities who were not of shared faith but also in need of credit union services. This multiple bond became the source of a credit union acting more powerfully to promote financial inclusion by expanding services to all people in neighborhoods nearby.
In order to increase the capacity of small credit unions in neighborhoods where needs for safe and fair finance are unmet, there is a pressing need to create a mechanism for cooperation among credit unions that can redistribute resources at the urban and national scale of the movement. While there is a perception among many in the solidarity economy movement that credit unions have come to resemble mainstream financial institutions, this is also a domain for political demands about cooperation among cooperatives. The first place the movement can start is within its own backyard.
We would like to suggest that the story of faith-based credit unions in New York has implications for the role that credit unions might play in realizing the Solidarity City. Internal to the sector, the larger employment credit unions can do more to shore up smaller credit unions like those coming out of Black churches. But branching out beyond this one sector, we can imagine a concerted effort by credit unions to work more with worker and housing cooperatives? Currently credit unions are hampered by legislation designed by for-profit banking to limit their competition with private banks, but what if we imagined credit unions playing the role of the financial artery, expanding and promoting solidarity economies by design?
We have drawn attention to a bulwark aspect to each of the different sectors we looked at. And while each of these co-op sectors is shaped by many different factors, we have highlighted the build and defend functions, showing how worker cooperatives form to defend workers against super-high rates of racialized exploitation. Housing cooperatives help defend lower-than-average income residents against displacement and low-quality housing. Credit unions, especially those started in Black churches, formed to contest redlining. In each case, there is a defense against racial capitalist processes, but inside and via a cooperative structure.
Solidarity economies have existed in the past and had some important historical phases of development and expansion; we saw this timeline to be true especially in housing cooperatives and credit unions. As this and previous chapters demonstrate, there is both a past and a present to solidarity economies. In the conclusion, we look at the future possibilities.
In drawing this chapter to a close, we would like to reflect in a more speculative vein about the contribution it makes to our overall argument. We began this book with the proposition that if we study the solidarity economy as a whole, rather than just its parts, we would be in a much better position to discern what is required to realize its full potential. A key part of this work is defending the community from the consequences of racial capitalist dynamics. The work of defending by building solidarity-based institutions is, in our view, crucially tied to creating links and connections between fundamental practices and institutions of solidarity—at work, at home, and the various means by which we invest in a common future. Thus, cooperative economic institutions make it possible for social transformation to occur in all these sites through forming worker cooperatives as places of work, housing cooperatives as places to live, and credit unions as places to do everyday finance.
New York City, perhaps more than any other place, serves as testimony to the presence capitalism can have in a city—its immense concentrations of wealth, as well as areas and peoples experiencing poverty. In this chapter, we focused our attention on the ways New York could be seen as an exemplar for the Solidarity City due to the presence of those different types of cooperatives. If we can make solidarity there, in the largest U.S. metropolis, a command-and-control center of global capitalism, we can make it anywhere in the country. In the conclusion, we draw together some larger political implications of the bulwark, ecotone, and fault-line patterns that we analyzed in this book.
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