Sidney Hillman backed the first limited-equity co-op

Person: Sidney Hillman
Lived: 1887–1946
Field: Labour movement
From: Lithuanian-American

The story

In the 1920s many of New York's garment workers lived in crowded, run-down tenements. Sidney Hillman believed a union should look after the whole lives of working people, not only their pay. Under his leadership the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America pioneered a version of "social unionism" that offered members low-cost cooperative housing and unemployment insurance and founded the Amalgamated Bank. Labour historian David Brody describes how, under Hillman, the union built two banks, fostered low-cost unemployment insurance and set up educational and social support programmes for its members.

Housing was the most visible part of that vision. The Amalgamated Housing Corporation was organised in 1927 under New York's 1926 State Housing Law, and its first building rose that year at the southern edge of Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx. Funded and inspired by Hillman and the cooperative housing pioneer Abraham Kazan, it became the first limited-equity housing cooperative in the United States. Residents owned shares in the cooperative, but the resale price was limited so that homes stayed affordable for the next working family. The original buildings were designed by a team that included the architect Herman Jessor.

The Amalgamated grew from 303 apartments in its first phase to 1,468 in 11 buildings, and it survived the Great Depression, earning praise from Franklin Roosevelt. When much of the West Bronx declined in the 1970s and 1980s, it remained an anchor of stability. A street in the neighbourhood, Hillman Avenue, is named after him.

The idea spread far beyond the Bronx. The union also sponsored the Hillman Housing Corporation, part of Cooperative Village on Manhattan's Lower East Side. Jessor and Kazan went on to build much of New York's post-war cooperative housing, and the Amalgamated became the model for larger, state-sponsored limited-equity cooperatives such as Penn South in Manhattan, Rochdale Village in Queens and Co-op City in the Bronx. The legal model it pioneered was ultimately used to develop more than 40,000 affordable units in Greater New York.

Nearly a century later, the Amalgamated still houses working- and middle-class New Yorkers, proof that a union's idea of decent, shared and affordable homes could last for generations.