12. As Integration Ebbed

What is happening to our beautiful Rochdale Village???

William Dunlap, president of Rochdale Village House Congress, 1974

In 1973, WNET, the public television station in New York City, had a relatively short-lived news program, The 51st State (a catchphrase popularized in Norman Mailer’s 1969 mayoral bid).1 The show prided itself on its daring and willingness to flutter the dovecotes of conventional wisdom. On March 22, 1973, they had a program on Rochdale Village, and whether it still deserved its reputation as a showcase for successful integration. If the program was intended to be provocative, it succeeded. The program rather gave away the ending in its title, “A Dream That Failed,” concluding that integration in Rochdale was in disarray, with rising rates of crime, growing dissatisfaction in the schools, heightening racial tensions, and an ongoing white exodus. Lewis Lachman, president of Rochdale’s Board of Directors, interviewed on the program, certainly avoided the pitfalls of boosterism when he said that he was shortly going to be moving out of Rochdale, and those who moved out were generally “very happy” with their decision. Lachman predicted that within a few years, very few whites would be left in Rochdale. The program came to the conclusion, in the words of its producer, Hal Levenson, that “the possibility of successful integrated housing in New York City is a most difficult goal at best, if one examines the Rochdale experience.”2

Figure 12. A line of sitters on a Rochdale bench, August 3, 1966. United Housing Foundation Papers, Kheel Center, Cornell University.

The general response in Rochdale to the program was one of outrage. In a letter to the Rochdale Village Bulletin one person claimed that the program seemed to be set up “to scare white people into moving and discourage white people from moving in,” and wondered why the program didn’t interview people like him who had “no intention of moving” and that Rochdale “can still be a beautiful place to live” with “many social functions” not available elsewhere. He advised Rochdale’s management to sue the producer of the program for defamation. Another resident maintained that “the truth of the matter is people of different backgrounds, of different ages, and different persuasions live here side by side amicably without getting in anybody’s way,” and that the purpose of the program was to “incite fear” and provoke “racial tension between Blacks and Whites.”3

In his response, which was printed in Inside Rochdale, Hal Levenson said that, actually, he had pulled his punches in the program, and that he had honored his promise to Harold Ostroff to “attempt to temper the report in the interest of the Rochdale community,” but now “all gloves were off,” and he proceeded to pop Rochdale right in the kisser. Providing damaging information he claimed to have omitted from the program, he cited statistics from the local precinct showing that between 1969 and 1973 in many key categories Rochdale’s crime rates had doubled or tripled. Vandalism costs alone were running a fairly staggering $14,000 a month. He stated that he had omitted some of the more negative and inflammatory comments about Rochdale’s management and racial tension in the cooperative. In short, the real situation in Rochdale was far worse than The 51st State had indicated.4

Looking back in retrospect, who had the better of the argument? In many ways, Levenson was certainly correct. Crime in Rochdale was definitely on the upsurge, and the schools were deteriorating. Integration was certainly faltering, and would, in a matter of years, fail utterly. Almost all the whites who complained about the negative impact of The 51st State likely moved out of Rochdale within a few years. And most of those who did write defending integration in Rochdale were, not coincidentally, Jewish retirees, the group in Rochdale who were probably most afraid, as one woman at the time expressed it, of Rochdale “becoming a ghetto,” and who because of age and financial resources, were the least interested in moving and starting all over somewhere else, in addition to the obvious reality that retirees were the group least affected by problems in the schools. As one of those who wrote to Inside Rochdale to defend life in the cooperative acknowledged, “True, young people (married couples) with children moved out because of the school situation, we all know it is bad.”5

But at the same time there is something about Levenson’s response that is disconcerting in its cocksureness and condescension, his conviction that he somehow understood Rochdale better than people who had lived there for a decade, and in his sweeping relegation of Rochdale to the rubbish heap of failed ideas, an indication perhaps that the smart money in 1973 was already placing its bets on the death of the social democratic city, and on the dawning of neoliberal triumphalism, which had no place for limited-equity cooperatives. Levenson seemed to think that the defenders of integration were oblivious to ongoing social trends, and that Rochdale residents hadn’t somehow noticed “that black /white relations following the 1968 school strike” had deteriorated “in Rochdale and elsewhere.”6 As one man complained of the program, the producers “very casually crumpled the idea of Rochdale Village like a piece of scrap paper, and tossed away all our years of cooperative effort.”7

And what stung all those committed to staying in Rochdale was that the program portrayed cooperative residents as sort of passively awaiting their fate, grumbling to the camera about their problems as their community fell apart, just waiting for grand sociological forces to wash over them and claim new victims. The African American president of the House Congress said the program displayed a “negative defeatism-type attitude as indicative of Rochdale Village.” In fact there was no lack of proposals for how to stanch the flow from Rochdale, and how to organize those who remained. One of the cardinal principles of the ethos that created and nourished Rochdale was that no problem was beyond the grasp of people working cooperatively to solve it. However, on one point The 51st State was clearly correct. One issue overrode all others in Rochdale in the early 1970s: the steady and inexorable departure of white families from the cooperative.

Lewis Lachman wrote to Charles J. Urstadt, commissioner of the State Division of Housing and Urban Renewal in 1972, asking for additional financial assistance: “There has been a heavy turnover at Rochdale Village which is not healthy for this community and inimical to its stability. The problem of schools, security, increase in the cost of living and other factors have contributed to this turnover. While we realize that the state may legally ignore social considerations in the pursuit of legal obligations, we nevertheless believe that the survival of Rochdale Village as an integrated community should be preserved.”8 Throughout the 1970s the masthead of the Rochdale Village Bulletin proclaimed itself, at first proudly, then defiantly, the newsletter of an “integrated cooperative of 25,000.”

The dimensions and timing of the white departure from Rochdale are not easily quantified, and have to be pieced together from a number of disparate sources. Most would date its start to 1969, in the aftermath of the 1968 teachers’ strike.9 The most official figures extant do not contain any racial data, but it is reasonable to assume that most of those who moved out were white. In 1970, 447 families (8 percent of the total) moved out; in May 1973 the Rochdale Village Bulletin stated that 1,800 families (31 percent) had left over the past three years. Later that year the Bulletin reported that the departure continued unabated, with fifty to sixty move-outs a month. This data is corroborated by the shifting impressions at the time of Rochdale’s racial composition. Estimates of the percentages of blacks in Rochdale range from 50 or 60 percent in 1974, 70 percent in 1977, 85 percent in 1979, and by the early 1990s, 98 percent.10 A small survey I conducted among twenty-two former Rochdale residents, with primarily white and Jewish respondents, found that one family left before 1970, though by 1975, only four families were still in Rochdale, with half the families leaving from 1971 to 1974. (We moved in 1973.)11

It is worth noting that by no means all the families that left Rochdale were white; as Cal Jones states, “There wasn’t a mass exodus of black families, [but] many left to buy homes.” And by the 1980s the changing character of black middle-class redoubts in southeastern Queens such as St. Albans led some to speak of “black flight.”12 But if the departure from Rochdale was to some extent biracial, it was certainly true that white families were no longer moving in, and almost all those who left were replaced by blacks. In Rochdale and other communities undergoing racial change at the time, the focus on the drama of “white flight” can obscure a concomitant dynamic, the lack of “white replenishment.”

The factors contributing to the mass departure of white families were largely beyond the control of Rochdale’s other residents; increasing rates of crime, turbulence in the city schools, and increasing rates of inflation (which was reflected in an increase in housing costs).

In December 1970, in a memo to the Rochdale Board of Directors, Leonard Bridges, an assistant manager in Rochdale, offered five reasons, on the basis of his conversations with departing families, for the decision to move: an interest in purchasing a house, relocating for work, problems with the schools, “social conditions or problems” (a euphemism for crime), and the “community political atmosphere” (the rancorous internal politics in Rochdale). He noted that most of the families moving out “were families with young children or teenagers.”13

Some of the reasons offered by Bridges are overlooked in discussions of the departure: personal considerations having little to do with the broader sociological trends. A number of families moved to Rochdale with the full intention of moving out in fairly short order; they would save money by living relatively inexpensively for a few years, and then light out for the suburbs.14 And this trend was hastened by the women’s movement and broader economic trends that led many households to gain a second income, which placed many families over the upper-income limit for Mitchell-Lama housing, beyond which a surcharge had to be paid and Rochdale became less and less of a bargain. Many two-income Rochdale families started thinking of going elsewhere.15 And of course some people simply moved to follow their jobs. One woman remembers her father got a new job in New Jersey. After a few months of a horrendous commute, they moved across the Hudson.16

There probably are as many variants of the “why we moved from Rochdale” story as there are families who left. Certainly those relating to the schools, or to crime, are the most common. One former student at IS 72, who, after issuing a litany of problems with the school, concluded that “in spite of all the nonsense, we weren’t moving either, until my sister got attacked in the lunch room. That was the straw that broke the camel’s back, and we were out of there in a matter of months.”17 Another woman remembers her family left because of “dangerous neighborhoods and schools (my mom worked at IS 72 and saw it all), and we had enough for a house in the suburbs, where there would be better schools for my sisters.”18

For many there came a particular turning point, an episode or incident that offered an instance of clarity, when the question of staying or going came into focus. As Cal Jones said, whether or not a family moved from Rochdale often “depended on whether or not you got mugged when you came home.”19 A typical story was one told by a man from an interracial household. His parents were committed to Rochdale, but after his mother was mugged they moved elsewhere.20 Another former resident “left because my parents did not like the element they saw moving in—they already were looking when my mother was mugged at gunpoint in the parking lot. This pushed them over the edge.”21

Sometimes reporting the crime was as upsetting as the crime itself. One woman remembers, after a mugging, the attitude of the police was “What are you doing here? As a white family you don’t belong in this neighborhood. This is no place for you.”22 If Rochdale had brought extended families together, moving from Rochdale could pull them apart. “The dangerous conditions finally forced my mother, sister, and grandmother to break up their homes and move to different communities. By then [everyone in my family] had been mugged at least once, and threatened on several occasions.”23 At times, the incident that prompted someone to leave was so painful and frightening that it was never shared. One woman remembered: “We moved for my mother’s well-being. For many years I thought it was simply so she could go out and meet people, but she told me recently that a fellow passenger on the LIRR had threatened to take a gun and ‘blow her head off.’”24

Epiphanies could arrive in other ways as well. One family realized it was time to move when “we were eating dinner one night and a rather large rock came sailing through the window and left a dent in the wall.”25 There was a rash of such incidents after 1971, when a new park—built on the site of Rochdale’s abortive swimming pool project—opened adjacent to IS 72, contoured with berms rising twenty and thirty feet high, an architect’s idea of complementing the unrelieved flatness of Rochdale’s terrain.26 And though the design won awards, even before it was completed there were worries that the city was building a haven for criminal activity, and it immediately became the perfect mountain hideout for thieves who would descend from their lairs to waylay passersby and use the hills as launching pads for throwing stones into the windows of the school and adjacent Rochdale apartments, breaking hundreds of panes of glass.27 “From my apartment I could see the entire park,” remembered one man. “Predators would lie in the ill-lit park, on the top of the hills waiting for someone to walk by. In a matter of seconds they would clamber over the crest, strike their victim, and disappear back over the hill.”28 Rochdale’s manager complained, “You can’t blame the police. This is a guerrilla training ground. There’s no spot from which you can see everything. They’d need a helicopter to patrol here.”29 Eventually the park was flattened to make space for a more easily policed park, and was later turned into a public garden.

For many, there was an internal “tipping point” that was joined to a general sense of an irreversible neighborhood deterioration. Certainly the sight of friends leaving confirmed doubts and made them concrete and visible. One man remembered, “We were growing up (I was already in college) and the neighborhood was getting bad. It had also become apparent that a mass exodus was under way.”30 Rochdale residents were not homeowners, and did not to worry about selling at a loss; they could pick up stakes and move fairly easily. And as a community less than a decade old, no one had the lifelong ties to place, kin, and church that often prompted defenses of the old sod and homestead. Most Rochdale residents had moved from there changing neighborhoods, and moving from Rochdale came fairly easily. On the other hand Rochdale did have unique institutions, and ten years in one location can seem like a lifetime.31 Perhaps especially for senior citizens, moving away was painful, as Pearl Grossman tried to explain in 1974:32

We have lived in Rochdale Village for 10 years, but we applied for an apartment in a new co-op built for middle income families; when we looked at the apartment we were disappointed. After much discussion and many sleepless nights, we have decided to remain in Rochdale where we have all the conveniences retired people need. We don’t have to cross streets when we go shopping; we don’t have to travel to see a doctor, the HIP [a local HMO] is right on the premises. If we moved, we would be leaving many good friends and the social and organizational activity that is such an important part of our life here. Our honest advice to our neighbors is “don’t move simply because you see other people moving.” We hope everyone will take into consideration all the privileges and conveniences we have here, and not make the mistake we almost did.

As whites were steadily moving out of Rochdale, blacks were staying and moving in. Large numbers of black families worked in civil-service positions, such as mass transit and the post office, and many others were working in private industry. By the early 1970s Rochdale had become that rarest of housing phenomena, a stable, relatively inexpensive home for the upwardly mobile black middle class. If Jews had many such options for stable middle class communities, blacks did not. By the early 1970s, most Jews simply needed places like Rochdale less than they did a decade before. This was not true for blacks. In 1973 the New York Times had a feature article about the black middle class, focusing on John Henry Howell, a thirty-one-year-old accountant who lived in Rochdale, and had grown up, rather poor, in South Jamaica. “While John was making his hardworking, cautious ascent up the middle-class ladder, the Howells lived in a cheerful, tastefully furnished 10th floor apartment in Rochdale Village, a sprawling low-cost cooperative project. [He] said at the time he didn’t want the expense or responsibility of owning his own house yet.” The Howells were not committed to Rochdale as a permanent home. “Maybe in five years,” the article suggested, “Sandra Howell, who is no fan of city living—‘the people are too cold, the city too hectic, dirty and full of crime’”—would move to suburban New Jersey. But for now, Rochdale would do fine.33

But many of those who left Rochdale appreciated that they were leaving someplace special, with a unique combination of qualities that were not likely to be reproduced elsewhere. Indeed, one emotion that contributed to the departure was disappointed idealism, the tarnishing of the high hopes that so many had for Rochdale. For one person it wasn’t anger so much as frustration, “people moved out because it no longer lived up to their expectations.”34 Cal Jones remembers the sadness that many felt on leaving. “I was sad when families moved. One person moving told me it was too painful to discuss with me. It was painful…[but the sort of cooperative] you were dreaming of and towards which you were moving was not going to be forthcoming, that was something that residents quietly faced.”35 For some, the imperatives of integration had been turned upside down. One woman remembered her family left Rochdale because “[our parents] didn’t want us to grow up to be racist, which is what they were afraid would happen if we stayed in Rochdale.”36 By the 1970s, many, black and white, had concluded the safest path to better (or at least less explosive) race relations was to keep blacks and whites as separate as possible.

People left Rochdale with a variety of emotions. Some moved in anger, some in sorrow, and many with a combination of both. Many told their neighbors of the decision in tears, and apologized for letting them down.37 Some felt acutely embarrassed at moving. Young people and teenagers sometimes left without telling their friends, and those left behind wondered where they had gone.38 Of course many were glad to move, angry at Rochdale, and eager to start over somewhere else. I can’t remember having strong emotions either way when we moved. And in truth, once I moved, I hardly gave it another thought for three decades. It was, as nonhistorians like to say, history. Out of sight, out of mind. I suspect I was fairly typical in this callowness, certainly among my teenage peers. Others, who had drank more deeply of Rochdale’s uniqueness, were often profoundly conflicted. Anita Starr, a teacher at IS 72, and deeply committed to the cooperative and integrated vision of Rochdale remembers:39

My youngest daughter complained bitterly that she felt ignored when she complained that she didn’t feel safe going to IS 72, that I so wanted Rochdale to work out as an integrated community that I had failed to understand my duties as a parent. My other daughter would complain about school, and say “This happened today Mom, but forget about it,” so I forgot about it. I disregarded complaints about IS 72 until they became really intense. One day my husband came home late and he was mugged, his wallet was stolen and something he had been working on for months had been stolen, and he said we have to move. This was in the spring of 1975. I was horrified; he wasn’t a person who [usually] complained but we had to move. I felt terribly guilty about moving [out of] Rochdale. When I moved, I said, “Wherever I look all I see are white people, I don’t know if I can make the adjustment.”

Those who stayed in Rochdale had a variety of emotions about those who left. Some were angry and resentful. The bulletin of the Rochdale Black Society in 1971 criticized the winning slate in the local elections as wanting “to keep control of Rochdale Village until such time as they could move out.” Cal Jones remembers that a common feeling among Rochdale’s blacks was that “It was as if everyone just picked up and ran and didn’t have any commitment to Rochdale.”40 He wrote in 1973 that no matter who was living in Rochdale, the challenge remained much the same: “Whether the cooperative is black, white, integrated, or whatever, that is not the most important thing. The most important thing is that the cooperative serve all of the people in the community.”41

But if there was anger at those departing, most of those remaining recognized that the underlying causes for the white departure were real and needed to be addressed by those still living in Rochdale, and this became grist for Rochdale’s ever-churning political mill. In 1972, one political faction, then out of power, promised Rochdale residents that they had “formulated a plan which would make Rochdale Village a place that people will fight to move into, rather than run to move out.”42 In response Lewis Lachman, chair of the Board of Directors, countered: “I agree that a most serious problem, if not the most serious problem in the community, is the number of families moving out, but to imply that there are magic steps to prevent this is ridiculous. The current board has spent more hours with this problem than any other.”43

One briefly considered proposal for keeping up the percentage of white families in Rochdale was a quota system that would give some preference to white applicants by keeping racially separate waiting lists, rather than offering apartments on a first come, first served basis.44 Morris Milgram, a pioneer in integrated housing, suggested that Rochdale try something along these lines in 1977. Such a program would have been immensely controversial and of questionable legality—although it was employed to considerable effect in a Brooklyn Mitchell-Lama rental development, Starrett City, for a number of years.45 In any event, as Milgram notes, the best way to preserve integrated housing is by prophylaxis, dealing with potential problems, such as deteriorating schools, before they become a serious cause of out-migration. By the early 1970s, early prevention was no longer an option.46

Certainly the Rochdale Board of Directors did what they could to address the problems that beset the cooperative, though many things were outside their control. In 1973, Rochdale finally installed a buzzer and intercom system in the building entrances to limit access to residents, workmen, and guests.47 Jules Weinstein, Rochdale’s manager, was still struggling to place the crime issue in perspective: “Crime has increased in Rochdale Village and we have felt the impact of this as well as every other community throughout the city. We are using every resource at our command to contain and control crime, vandalism, and malicious mischief. Our security force, contrary to the opinion of some residents, has been vigilant and responsive…. There is no quick and easy way to solving crime and eliminating vandalism. You know this as well as I do.”48

The schools, particularly IS 72, were a continuing concern. As the percentage of whites in attendance dropped, the remaining white parents grew more afraid of sending their children to the local school. In the fall of 1971, in response to a decline in absolute enrollment numbers at IS 72, there was a change in feeder patterns, which involved busing for the first time, and the percentage of white students declined below 30 percent for the first time. By all accounts the new racial patterns and balances in the school made a bad situation worse.49 Lewis Lachman said at a board meeting in June 1971 that “quality education depends on integration. Time to stand up and say loud and clear that we want our schools to be for the children of the community, based on the existing housing.”50

Often, those who stayed were just as upset at what was happening to the cooperative as those who left. In 1974 William Dunlap, the black president of the House Congress, offered a cri de coeur on the ongoing problems with Rochdale, in an “An Open Letter to All Cooperators,” noting that he viewed “the conditions in the cooperative in very similar terms to those who had decided to move:51

What is happening to our beautiful Rochdale Village??? As tenant-cooperators, let us look around and see what is happening to our beautiful Rochdale Village.

Our stairwells, walls are painted up with graffiti. Is your building any different? Take a walk through the stairwell and see for yourself. See the locks broken every day. See the glass broken everywhere. Kids urinate in the elevators, dogs going in the lobbies.

See the kids who harass and threaten residents when we walk in and out of the building. Don’t you care what your children are doing? If this co-op will become a slum, will you be willing to live in filth and dirt?

It is time that we interest ourselves, get involved, join your building committee, Hall Patrol and House Congress. Together we can get results.

Help one another to make our building safe and worthy to live in.

Talk to your children. Let them know that destroying our homes will benefit no one. Don’t you give a damn what happens to our homes?

Implicit in Dunlap’s critique was a sense that Rochdale’s newcomers were cut from a different cloth, less committed to the cooperative ideal, less interested in dedicating their time to working for the betterment of Rochdale. Of a new venture in community involvement, the Rochdale Black Society in 1971 wrote, “One very promising aspect is that the meetings have been attended by young parents, which makes the myth that ‘young parents don’t care about their community’ a lie.”52 Jules Weinstein said in November 1971 that “Rochdale Village has not changed. Our beautiful grounds and buildings are still here…. There has been entirely too much scuttlebutt about the ‘best families’ moving and the reasons generally ascribed to lack of security and poor schooling…. Loose talk about Rochdale Village can only hurt our image. I think the time has come for residents to stop worrying about those people who have moved. The decision was theirs and we wish them well. Let us instead take pride in Rochdale, welcome the new families coming in and make them part of our community life.”53

Doubts about the newcomers extended beyond questions about their civic-mindedness. There were persistent rumors that some of the newcomers were on welfare, or at least were of a lower caliber than the original residents. Leo Mossman, president of the Rochdale Board of Directors in 1978, said in that year, “When I came here fifteen years ago, the United Housing Foundation knew the color of my underwear. Then management stopped screening people—looking for people concerned about the concept of cooperative living—because they were planning to leave and didn’t care.”54 This was a common sentiment. Juanita Watkins thought Rochdale declined because there had been “a loosening on the tight reins on screening,” allowing drug dealers and other unsavory people into the cooperative, and thought that management had made a mistake when they “allowed people to move in who would not have been able to live there a few years before.”55 There were persistent rumors—I remember hearing them before we moved in the fall of 1973—that families on welfare had been admitted. This was vociferously denied at the time by Rochdale management, and was subsequently denied by several knowledgeable people in interviews with me.56 Nonetheless, many believed that Rochdale was admitting poorer families than ever before, and was becoming just another housing project. Indeed, at some time in the late 1970s or 1980s, those in the vicinity began to refer to Rochdale as “the projects,” a sobriquet that never was used in the 1960s.57

Programs were developed to help acculturate new residents. By 1971 building 14 had started a program with the purpose “of educating and informing the tenant-cooperators of their building on cooperative living” with the goal of restoring “a feeling of pride and to initiate a program in our building whereby people…see each other as neighbors and not as strangers,” and it promised to “zero-in on areas like vandalism, maintenance and security.” A “welcome wagon” was established to greet and instruct new families on their arrival in Rochdale.58 In 1972 Lewis Lachman called for the establishment of “building parties,” so “that the new cooperators could get to meet the established ones, to promote a better rapport and understanding of cooperative living.”59 A similar program was discussed by Jules Weinstein in 1973. “Unfortunately we are experiencing an apathy by new residents to the principles and control of children in their family. To overcome this, an Operation Handshake program has been started by House Congress whose members are personally visiting each new family to acquaint them with the positive side of Rochdale Village and to invite community involvement as well as respect for mutually owned property.”60

But it was one of the paradoxes of Rochdale in the late 1960s and 1970s (and one that escaped the notice of committed declensionists such as Hal Levenson of The 51st State), that despite (or because of) the problems it faced, the cooperative’s internal politics was showing a new vitality, though one person’s vibrant democracy had others muttering about a descent into mob rule. If nothing else Rochdale’s politics were proof positive against those, such as Jane Jacobs, who have argued that cooperatives fostered a politics of coercive blandness in the name of community harmony.

All this became fully manifest only in the fall of 1969, when, finally, Rochdale residents were able to vote directly for a majority of the fifteen person Board of Directors.61 This did not lead to a complete repudiation of the UHF—Harold Ostroff would remain perhaps the most influential member of the board for many years thereafter—but a majority was captured by the Tenants Council, an anti-UHF faction with its roots in the politics of the Old Left. They viewed the UHF as out of touch, as a bureaucracy that had long ago abandoned its idealism and needed to be challenged. The Tenants Council captured eight seats (six whites, two African Americans), which made for a bare majority of the fifteen-person board,62 and they used their narrow majority to effect a minor revolution in Rochdale. They dropped Rochdale’s legal counsel (who were also lawyers for the UHF), filed a $3 million lawsuit against an arm of the UHF, and fired the UHF-appointed manager, Abe Brown, who was, it was claimed, “a tool of management,” “incompetent,” and under whose leadership “maintenance, security and service have deteriorated continuously.”63 They made changes in the cooperative itself: increased the income-level minimum for surcharges, and changed the lease, making renewals easier. The Tenants Council allowed residents to bring baby carriages up to their apartments (rather than requiring them to be stored in “carriage rooms” notorious for a lack of security for the vehicles stored there),64 and they took down many of the chain fences and monitory signs from the lawns, allowing Rochdalers to walk on the grass, and walk directly from point A to B without labyrinthine detours.65

But above all, the Tenants Council made enemies. With the power to make changes comes responsibility for what follows. Those upset by the Tenants Council complained of financial incompetence and hinted at financial malfeasance. A new set of washing machines purchased by the board broke down frequently, and turned into a fiasco. By March 1970 there were complaints that the Tenants Council–dominated board “has not done anything that it promised to do. Nothing has been done about improving security, nothing’s been done about cleaning up Rochdale.” Others accused them of “totalitarian” tactics in board meetings (using their one-vote majority to ram through numerous proposals by an 8–7 vote) and of being (because of their hostility to the UHF), “interlopers bent on destroying Rochdale Village.”66 After the Tenants Council lost their majority in 1971, a man wrote that had they not been ousted, “our village would have been completely destroyed. Presently we call it a partial destruction, because our lawns are destroyed beyond repair [referring to their “stay on the grass” policy].”67

If the aggressive anti-UHF stance of the Tenants Council vitalized a determined opposition, their own tactical rigidity and penchant for confrontation didn’t do them any favors. Hugh Williams, one of those elected to the board with the Tenants Council in 1969, felt the deck was stacked against them from the beginning, and that they were unfairly demonized and red-baited. (One former resident remembered the Tenants Council as “that bunch of Commies.”) However, Williams allowed that some of the problems of the Tenants Council were self-created. It was difficult to make the transition from gadflies to administrators. “The strange thing is you run for the board because you see so many things that are wrong, and so many things that need to be improved, and need to be changed, but when you’re sitting in the seat it’s a different thing; you can see how difficult it is, and you see how much you don’t know about how to run a development.” And, unfortunately, the Tenants Council faction wasn’t into coalition building. “We felt we were the progressive people in the community, and we had to be leadership, and the other people just had to fall in line, but things just don’t work that way.” In the end, Williams says, “we won the election, but we lost the war.”68

It did not take long for an organized opposition to develop. In March 1970 a new organization formed and called itself the Concerned Cooperators. At first the group consisted of moderate to conservative Democrats, though it later would ally with more left-leaning social democrats. They were broadly (though they would argue not uncritically) sympathetic to the UHF, and the extent to which the UHF was behind the formation of the new organization is a matter of some debate.69 By the time the next election was held many of those who had voted for the Tenants Council had become disenchanted, and in October 1970, the Concerned Cooperators, in a bitterly fought election in which over 80 percent of eligible voters cast ballots, enough members of the Tenants Council were defeated to provide the Concerned Cooperators with a narrow victory.70 The backers of the Concerned Cooperators savored their victory, reversed some of the decisions of the Tenants Council, and maintained better relations with the UHF.

However, the fruits of their victory were relatively short-lived, because in 1972, the remnants of the Tenants Council, shorn of some of their rougher edges and renamed the United Shareholders, emerged victorious in board elections.71 And for much of the next two decades, these two factions would rancorously rotate in and out of office, trading accusations and trading positions. What is perhaps most remarkable about Rochdale’s politics in the 1970s and 1980s is that the two main factions reflected long-standing divisions in Jewish politics that continued to dominate the cooperative’s leadership long after the Jews had moved on. And though internal politics in Rochdale was frequently nasty and bitter, race was never a factor, and over time, the leadership of the different factions changed from being predominantly white, to mixed, to predominantly and then entirely black, with relatively little change in their essential positions. Jack Raskin said, “The changing racial composition did not have an impact on the governance—all of the factions remained integrated; differences between the groups were not based on race.”72

Over time the issues would change, and in particular, the question of the relation of Rochdale to the UHF would fade, as the residents of Rochdale took an ever greater role in the running of the cooperative, and by the mid-1970s the UHF itself entered a steep and irreversible institutional decline. One issue that would remain central to internal debates was finances and carrying-charge increases. For all Mitchell-Lama developments, the 1970s were a time of troubles, when in New York City and State declining tax revenues and increasing expenses placed the government-assisted housing developments into parlous circumstances, raising anew old questions of why the middle class required the subventions that the Mitchell-Lama program provided.73

Rochdale Village was typical among Mitchell-Lama projects in that it had rarely broken even. A 1975 report on Rochdale Village prepared by the Office of the State Comptroller came to the conclusion that Rochdale Village had been in financial difficulty beginning with the first year of full occupancy. Indeed, as the comptroller’s report noted in 1975, in only two of the previous nine years had Rochdale not ended up in the red.74 Fuel costs doubled (due to the 1973 oil embargo) between November 1973 and April 1974 (rising to all of $0.31 a gallon).75 In November 1973, at the height of the energy crisis, Rochdale was in danger of losing its gas supply, and dropped the temperature of hot water from its usual 140 degrees to a tepid 124.76 Carrying charges rose sharply to cover fuel costs. Per-room rentals from the opening of Rochdale through the end of 1968 averaged $23.18. Through November 1971 they increased to $26.66, then $31.46 through April 1973, $37.41 at the beginning of 1974, and by the beginning of 1975, $41.48. In less than four years, there was an almost two-thirds increase in carrying charges.77

The increases led to a rent strike in early 1974, called by the United Shareholders. Rochdale was very divided by the prospects of a rent strike, and only about five hundred families participated. (The 10 percent participation during the rent strike at Rochdale stands in sharp contrast to the 75 percent rate in the rent strike then going on simultaneously at Co-op City.)78 Nonetheless, given the tight margins under which Mitchell-Lama projects operated, that 10 percent produced a $500,000 deficit, enough to put Rochdale on the brink of bankruptcy, and state housing officials began to initiate foreclosure proceedings. (In the event of foreclosure the state would have taken over Rochdale, it would have ceased to be a cooperative, and residents would have lost their equity down payments of $450 per room.)79 After complex court proceedings, which first favored one side and then the other, the increased carrying charges were ruled to be valid, and the United Shareholders accepted the decision.80 The next year Rochdale required a special grant from the legislature of $625,000 to avoid foreclosure proceedings.81 In early 1976 State Comptroller Arthur Levitt charged that Rochdale, Co-op City, and Starrett City were in weak financial condition, and the three huge projects, accounting for nearly half the $1.6 billion mortgage-loan commitments held by the state, were imperiling the health of the Housing Finance Agency, already battered by the consequences of the 1975 fiscal crisis. Levitt’s dire forecast was challenged by state housing officials and by Rochdale management.82

Rochdale’s factional fighting continued, with each side pointing fingers at the other for the cooperative’s shortcomings. The continuing internal division, which had become standard in Rochdale, led Inside Rochdale in October 1975 to describe the cooperative as perpetually “wracked by internal battles,” though to many the whirring of political factions was a background noise that had little impact on their daily lives.83 By the late 1970s Rochdale was 75 to 85 percent black. The white departure was beginning to ebb, if only because most of the whites who were planning to leave had already done so, leaving, with only a few exceptions, elderly whites. But another challenge, the most serious Rochdale would face, was around the corner.