You’d be forgiven if you passed by St. James Towers in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, or Southbridge Towers in Lower Manhattan without noting their exceptional qualities or sensing the tumult within. The former is a domino-like tower with generous, inset balconies; the latter is a warren of interconnected buildings curled inward around a series of interior courtyards. Both are—or were—limited-equity cooperatives constructed under the aegis of New York’s Mitchell-Lama program, one of the United States’ greatest success stories in social housing, supporting one side of the debate around privatizing housing co-ops.

As cooperatives, St. James and Southbridge are peopled by their owners, families with shares in the company that holds title to the buildings and the land they sit on, those shares entitling owners to apartments and a say in governance. As limited-equity co-ops, the price of those shares—the cost of buying a home—is kept affordable to middle- and lower-income families by restricting their resale value.

These share prices don’t follow the jagged rise and fall of a stock market; they largely track with inflation, ensuring that families can leave with the value they put in, plus all the years of a solid, stable, safe affordable home. That limit on resale maintains the same opportunity for the next family in their wake. This is social housing: kept outside the market, decommodified, permanently affordable, and controlled by its residents.

At least, that’s how it’s supposed to be. A programmatic change meant to spur more rental development under the Mitchell-Lama program early in its existence had unintended consequences for these co-ops, spurring the debate around privatizing housing co-ops. The controversial loophole allows for cooperators to collectively vote whether to leave the program—or “privatize”—once the building’s mortgage is paid to its public lenders.

Leave the program, and cooperators can sell their share for whatever they can fetch in the market—no small amount in the rabid real estate market of New York. But leaving also means the loss of affordability for the next generation of owners, and the threat of rising costs at home for those who don’t wish to sell out. This is the choice put before the residents of St. James and Southbridge in my book Homes for Living: The Fight for Social Housing and a New American Commons.

Read the full article about the debate around privatizing housing co-ops at Raw Story.