My parents came of age in 1950s New York City believing in the dream of equality through architecture. My mother, a secular Jew raised in Brooklyn, and my father, a moderately observant Jew from the Bronx, both found God in modernism. They adhered to the belief that the homes we build could change the world for the better. At their core, they embraced what one scholar has described as the Bauhaus ideology of “architecture as the collective, satisfying all vital needs with the exclusion of personal demands,” which could “create a human brotherhood, with organic community ties.” On their tall functional bookcase, my parents prominently displayed a black-and-white hardcover tome titled Bauhaus the way others exhibited a bible.

In 1967, their fervor was fulfilled when we moved into RNA House, on Ninety-Sixth Street between Amsterdam and Columbus, developed by Riverside Neighborhood Assembly, a West Side community organization, whose stated purpose was to “facilitate democratic integration of all people on the Upper West Side.” RNA House was conceived with financing by the Mitchell-Lama Housing program, sponsored by New York state senator MacNeil Mitchell and assemblyman Alfred Lama and made into law in 1955 as the Limited-Profit Housing Companies Act. Its mission was to provide affordable rentals and cooperative apartments for thousands of middle-income New Yorkers like my family. The state gave developers low-interest loans, mortgages, and tax exemptions to build apartments contingent upon controlled rents and sales prices below market value for a twenty-year period. Once the period of time passed, the buildings could either opt out of the program and privatize or refinance under the same conditions and remain public.

RNA House was the first of a slew of brutalist no-frills, twenty-to-thirty-story super-slabs conceived by urban planners committed to the common good. The angular and monotonous Mitchell-Lama buildings lined Manhattan’s Upper West Side in concrete. Socialist housing experiments already existed in other parts of the world on a much larger scale and with greater success, notably in Red Vienna, when, between 1923 and 1934, the Social Democrats built 220,000 apartment units, making up about 24 percent of all of the available housing in Vienna.