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Affordable Housing and Cooperative Housing Pre-NYCHA

The New York City Housing Authority was founded in 1934. Today it owns approximately 178,895 apartments. Before NYCHA, low and middle-income housing was constructed and operated by private entities, including philanthropists and worker's unions. This collection highlights some of the unique affordable housing projects built prior to NYCHA.

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Riverside Houses
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Riverside Houses

Built in 1890, the Riverside Houses received praise from Jacob Riis, who wrote in his 1890 book, How the Other Half Lives: “Its chief merit is that it gathers three hundred real homes, not simply three hundred families, under one roof.”
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1331 First Avenue
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1331 First Avenue

Constructed in 1882 these buildings situated between First and Second Avenues and 71st and 72nd Streets was the city's first model tenement.
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Jefferson Court
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Jefferson Court

Sunnyside Gardens was constructed between 1924 and 1928 by the City Housing Corporation, a limited-dividend company. Following the Garden City movement led by Ebenezer Howard, the model homes, situated around central green courtyards, were one of the first planned communities in the United States.
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First Phipps Houses/Kips Bay Plaza Apartments
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First Phipps Houses/Kips Bay Plaza Apartments

Completed in 1906 and designed by Grosvenor Atterbury, this building was commissioned by steel magnate Henry Phipps. Phipps had sold his holdings in the Carnegie Company to J. P. Morgan for more than $50 million in 1901. Using these funds, this was Phipps' first attempt to curb the rising tuberculosis epidemic in the city by improving living conditions for paying tenement tenants.
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Phipps Houses
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Phipps Houses

These tenements (four six-story buildings) on 63rd Street were the second project to utilize the fund. Completed in 1906 or 1907 the apartments were rented to African Americans, who suffered increasingly from housing discrimination.
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Phipps Garden Apartments
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Phipps Garden Apartments

Phipps Garden is a notable early example of "superblock" architecture, occupying two square blocks between present-day 50th and 52nd Streets, north of 39th Avenue. It was envisioned as a development for “white collar clerical workers.” It was one of many low and middle-income housing projects developed by Henry Phipps, a steel magnate.
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Amalgamated Housing Cooperative
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Amalgamated Housing Cooperative

The Amalgamated Housing Cooperative, then known as the Amalgamated Cooperative Apartment House, was built between 1927 and 1930 in the Bronx, just below Van Cortlandt Park. The co-op is the first in the United States to be founded on limited equity rules.
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Amalgamated Dwellings
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Amalgamated Dwellings

The Amalgamated Dwellings, completed in 1929, was a Lower East Side development built by the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACW). Abraham Kazan, president of the ACW, financed the two Amalgamated projects.
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Dunbar Apartments
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Dunbar Apartments

John D. Rockefeller built this six-building housing development between 1926-1928 in response to a housing shortage in Harlem. According to the New York Times, the Dunbar Apartments were “the first large cooperative project in the country built for occupancy by blacks.”
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Academy Housing Project
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Academy Housing Project

This 1930 Bronx housing complex was the largest single project (up until that point) built using the 1926 law that encouraged the construction of limited-profit co-ops. Like many other housing developments that aimed to create housing that only utilized a minority section of the plot, these buildings covered only 44 percent of the land.
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