A Bronx cheer for Trump and MAGA.
Photographer: Leonardo Munoz/AFP/Getty Images
New York Is the Front Line of the War on Cities
Without a baseline of the liberal tolerance that Trump and his base seem to hate, the Big Apple would quickly become unlivable.
“This was all wilderness when it started,” said Ed Yaker, surveying the Van Cortlandt Village neighborhood of brick, concrete and stone that forms the Amalgamated Housing Cooperative. Yaker has lived in this attractive, 11-building development in the Bronx for all but seven years since 1944, when he was born. His parents owned an apartment in Amalgamated’s ninth building, which was built in 1931, before the developers got around to building the complex’s eighth building. (Tracking the sequence of construction at Amalgamated is akin to a “Who’s on first?” skit.) “It was a great place to grow up,” said Yaker, the son of a milliner and a garment presser. “There were a million kids here.”
Amalgamated was the first limited equity cooperative in the US. The first families — almost entirely Jewish union members like Yaker’s parents — moved into their homes in 1927, leaving tenements on the lower east side or in the Bronx to become urban pioneers. State legislation, public subsidies and union muscle, political and otherwise, made the development possible. The state continues to regulate both the amount of capital investment, borrowed or saved, that cooperators use to purchase an apartment, and their monthly carrying costs.