“The Apartment You Can Own with Pride”: Federally Insured Black Housing Cooperatives, 1950–1955

In October 1950, civil-rights leader Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune spoke when the cornerstone was laid for Parkway Gardens, perhaps the first apartment development cooperatively owned by African Americans in Chicago (Chicago Defender 1950). Built next to the “L” rapid-transit station at 63rd St and South Park Avenue on the city’s South Side, the 700 apartments were financed with Federal Housing Administration (FHA) mortgage insurance. Bethune wrote of the development, “Scarcely less significant than the unity displayed is the private financing of this mutual development through Federal Housing mortgages totaling more than 6 million dollars—evidence of the building industry’s growing interest in this type of housing” (Bethune 1950). Coverage in the Defender, the most important outlet in Chicago’s Black press, described Parkway Gardens as a triumph: “The mutually owned, mutually developed apartment represents a confidence in America’s basic method of doing business—by private enterprise” (Bethune 1950). In the scholarship on federal policy’s role in mid-century urban development, relatively little has been said about postwar FHA programs that built urban, Black-owned, integrated, cooperatively or mutually owned housing like Parkway Gardens.

This article explores mid-century cooperative housing as a test of the bounds between public and private in real estate. Between 1950 and 1959, the FHA insured approximately 63,000 units of cooperative housing under its Section 213 program. Some additional mutual-housing projects like Parkway Gardens were insured under Section 608 (primarily a rental-housing program). Constructing vignettes from archival material, I argue that development intermediaries experimented with policy, building networks across public and private on the path from the New Deal’s welfare state segregationism to post‑1968 policies of predatory inclusion. Racial capitalism and Cold War anti-communism together informed the conditions for these processes of policy experimentation through real-estate development.

The ignominious end of Section 608 in 1955 added fuel to debates over how much profit was too much profit to be underwritten by the public to produce housing (Shatan and Newman 2020). Cebul and Glass (2025) provide great detail on this scandal and the spatial distribution of the 608 program, as well as contemporaneous FHA programs like Section 220 urban-renewal housing. Though they discuss Parkway Gardens, they neglect to mention Section 213. Perhaps this is because the cooperative form of Section 213 developments challenges the association of FHA with fee-simple private property ownership. There is archival evidence that Section 213 cooperatives were among many of the nation’s earliest open-occupancy (racially non-discriminatory or integrated) developments (Community Relations Program, American Friends Service Committee 1955; Grier and Grier 1960). Indeed, scholar-advocate Charles Abrams looked to dispel the myth of the public–private binary in 1955: “Public housing borrows private funds, employs private contractors, collects private rents. The only socialized aspect of the operation is its ownership… FHA housing, on the other hand, contains many aspects of the socializing process, not the least of which is the socialization of mortgage insurance, investment, and risk.” This attention to institutional arrangements illuminates a key entry point to understanding the FHA through the lens of public–private relations.

The reasons cooperative housing remains understudied are precisely why we should think about them as challenging the binary of public and private. In contrast with sociologists and legal scholars who tend to blame the federal government for mid-century housing segregation (Imbroscio 2021), a growing body of historical scholarship often associated with a racial capitalism framework argues that the FHA and related agencies facilitated practices already underway in private real-estate practice, or otherwise worked in tandem with private entities (Connolly 2014; Taylor 2019; Jenkins 2019). This resonates with Williams’s (2020) assertion that racial planning “transcends the imagined fixities of the public and private domains.” The particular manifestation of racial capitalism most relevant here is dependence of accumulation on differential valuation based on race (Zaimi 2020). Applying this lens illuminates the structures that made it difficult to build Black and interracial cooperatives. What do we see when we attend to the cooperatives that did get built, and the programs that supported them?

Policy negotiation to support housing cooperatives

In transcending the public–private binary, the politics of cooperative housing invited multiple interpretations from a wide variety of actors. Before Section 213 legislation was passed, President Truman and his allies in Congress initially backed a strong program for cooperatives, with a proposal for a Cooperative Housing Administration, issuing direct subsidies instead of mortgage insurance. To lobby for this bill, the National Conference on Middle Income Housing was held in February 1950 by the American Federation of Labor (AFL), the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), the Cooperative League of the USA, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the National Housing Conference, and various women’s, veterans’, and faith groups (US Congress 1951). In line with the anti-communism of the era (Hirsch 2000), the bill’s supporters stated ideologically acceptable motivations for the cooperative model. Senator Ralph Flanders (R‑VT) said, “I have felt that the cooperative movement was the American alternative to the individual private business setup of our industry and distributing organizations, and all the rest, rather than straight socialism or communism or any other form of it” (US Congress 1951). This anti-communist angle on cooperatives also served as background for the Chicago Defender’s characterization of Parkway Gardens as pro‑American.

The real-estate lobby, meanwhile, saw cooperatives as an ideological threat, with the National Association of Home Builders stating in their letter to legislators that “… the current clamor to adopt the semi-socialized methods of other countries can only be interpreted as an effort to change our entire political economy by starting with changing our housing economy.” This lobbying led to the defeat of stronger measures for direct subsidy, and the product in the Housing Act of 1950 was the mortgage insurance program for cooperatives under Section 213 (Sazama 2000; von Hoffman 2012). In the same Congressional debates, an amendment to “[b]an discrimination by reason of race, color, creed or national origin in insured housing units” was defeated by a vote of 111 for, 139 against.

Despite the attempt to reframe cooperatives as American, the few successful attempts to develop open-occupancy and cooperative housing under the FHA show that their racial composition and their supposed leftist politics were conflated, making it difficult to secure financing. “Open-occupancy” meant that a development did not discriminate by race; this included those that were intentionally integrated, though at the time the phrase typically meant an all-Black or nearly all-Black development (Institute for Urban Studies, University of Pennsylvania 1957). Of the 10 million private nonfarm housing units built in the US from 1946 to 1955, only 8,000 were built for interracial occupancy; the rest were built for segregated markets (Grier and Grier 1960). In the late 1940s, most open-occupancy cooperatives that sought federal mortgage insurance faced significant barriers. For example, in Grier and Grier’s (1960) case study, one cooperative leader quoted an FHA official saying that “his agency was ‘ideologically unfit’ to process cooperative housing. The people who organized these and several other postwar housing cooperatives (labor leaders, social workers, and city planners) were people ideologically attached to the attainment of interracial justice. The combination of cooperative and interracial objectives helped to frustrate both attempts.” Despite these hostile conditions, Black and interracial housing cooperatives were indeed built in this period through policy experimentation across public and private bounds.

Experimenting with policy to build Black-owned cooperatives

The following two vignettes highlight Black agency in successfully experimenting with the 213 policy to build housing. Started in 1951, Dorie Miller was the first cooperative housing development developed by and for a predominantly Black community in New York City to receive federal support. Built in the growing Black middle-class enclave of Corona, in Queens, Dorie Miller was advertised in the New York Amsterdam News (1951) as “the apartment you can own with pride,” “a truly democratic, non-profit, cooperative apartment community” where low costs “are made possible by the elimination of the landlord’s profits.” Dorie Miller started as a project by a white builder, David Kent, meant to attract an audience of Black tenants, in a census tract that was around 80% white in 1950. When Rep. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., took over management of the project, he insisted that it be legally open-occupancy, though he intended it as a Black cooperative: “The sponsorship, the advertising media used, the location of the sales office and the location of the development all served to attract Negro rather than white families” (New York Amsterdam News 1951). When it opened, families at Dorie Miller were 93% Black, 5% interracial, and 2% white. Powell, who was also pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church, represented Harlem: the sales office was on 125th Street, and most of the original families populating Dorie Miller came from Harlem (New York Times 1953).

Dorie Miller received mostly negative coverage in the press in the years following its opening. In 1954, at one of same Senate Banking Commission hearings that brought Fred Trump and other white developers under investigation for Section 608 windfalls (though without any consequences for those landlords), Powell was publicly questioned for having accepted a $3,000 loan from Kent (Cleveland Call and Post 1954). Powell claimed it was only a temporary loan and called the investigation “a Republican-sponsored drive to destroy what little non-segregated housing has been begun in New York” and noted its timing just before the November 1954 midterm elections (The Worker 1954). Nonetheless, Dorie Miller became known as the home of many jazz musicians, and as an idyllic environment, according to an oral history of people who grew up there (La Lande and Slaughter 2017). The development continues to be a primarily Black-owned and -occupied cooperative, despite challenges with the physical plant and financing over the years (Shatan and Newman 2020).

The parallel story of Madison S. Jones and Belmar Gardens illuminates both the struggles that Black co‑ops faced and the importance of experimenting with policy to actually build multifamily housing. Jones, administrative assistant at the NAACP’s national office, joined the FHA’s New York office in March 1951 to work on cooperative housing in the Northeast; during this time, he technically remained on NAACP staff (The Crisis 1951). Jones’s career often crossed public and private lines; he later returned full-time to the NAACP’s New York office as Housing Director, and in the mid‑1960s became the executive director of the New York City Commission on Human Rights.

One 1953 Pittsburgh project came to fruition when Jones brought the right people together to change policy. The Pittsburgh Courier was the largest circulation Black newspaper in the US at the time, and its influential publisher Robert L. Vann was interested in building a Black-owned cooperative in the Belmar neighborhood. Jones brought William Brafman, the New York-based white developer of Black Queens cooperative Merrick Park Gardens to a meeting with Courier staff, and they formed a development team for Belmar Gardens. The project secured FHA insurance, but no bank would lend to them. The developer and Vann made calls to politicians in Washington, to enable Fannie Mae “to put up construction loan money for cooperatives from an earlier unused appropriation” (Pittsburgh Courier 1953). At the hearing for these amendments in June 1953, Brafman said: “Since private capital is not building any housing for Negroes, the Negro must build for himself” (US Congress 1953). By August, Fannie Mae opened up to assisting cooperatives like Belmar Gardens, which broke ground that October; an experiment with real-estate development led to policy change. Forty years later, the families in Belmar Gardens came together to celebrate paying off the construction loan with a “symbolic burning of the mortgage” (Hewitt n.d.).

The challenges and successes of Black-led cooperatives like Parkway Gardens, Dorie Miller, and Belmar Gardens and their lasting material consequences are rich enough to warrant further research. In development intermediaries like Jones and Powell, we see how the relationship between public and private actors manifested differently in different places. These cooperatives needed to use networks of development intermediaries and ideological cover to resist the bounds of Cold War anti-communism and racial capitalism. Though the class and gender position of intermediaries like Powell and Vann is due more thorough consideration, these vignettes contribute to the case that it is a simplification of the workings of racial capitalism to bluntly claim that the federal government segregated the US. This is not meant as a vindication of the FHA. It is meant to demonstrate how, under an oppressive regime, there is importance in finding developments that go against the grain.

Nicholas Shatan is a PhD candidate in city and regional planning at the University of California, Berkeley, writing a dissertation on the political economy of affordable housing in New York City. He previously worked at the MIT Community Innovators Lab and served as a founding board member of the Bronx Community Land Trust. He has a master’s degree in city and regional planning from Rutgers University and a Bachelor of Arts in geography from the University of Chicago.

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