Ко-оп Сити: История и современность крупнейшего жилого комплекса США.

Co op City was formerly marshland before being occupied by an amusement park called Freedomland U. S. A. from 1960 to 1964. Construction began in 1966 and the first residents moved in two years later, though the project was not completed until 1973. The construction of the community was sponsored by the United Housing Foundation and financed with a mortgage loan from New York State Housing Finance Agency. The community is part of Bronx Community District 10 and its ZIP Code is 10475. Nearby attractions include Pelham Bay Park, Orchard Beach and City Island.

Co op City's 15,372 residential units are composed of 35 high rise buildings and seven clusters of townhouses, making it the largest residential development in the United States. It sits on , though only 20% of the land was developed, leaving many green spaces. The apartment buildings range from 24 to 33 floors. There are four types of buildings: 10 Triple Core (26 stories high with 500 apartment units per building), 10 chevron (24 stories, 414 units), 15 tower (33 stories, 384 units), and 236 town houses. The townhouses are three stories high and have a separate garden apartment and upper duplex apartment. This "city within a city" also has eight parking garages, three shopping centers, a educational park, including a high school, two middle schools, and three grade schools. More than 40 offices are rented by doctors, lawyers, and other professionals, and there are 15 houses of worship. Spread throughout the community are six nursery schools and day care centers, four basketball courts, and five baseball diamonds. The adjacent Bay Plaza Shopping Center has a 13 screen multiplex movie theater, department stores, and a supermarket. The development was built on landfill, and the original marshland still surrounds it. The building foundations extend down to bedrock through 50,000 pilings, but the land surrounding Co op's structures settles and sinks a fraction of an inch each year, creating cracks in sidewalks and entrances to buildings.

The land north of the Hutchinson River Parkway was a large swampy area known by residents as "the dump", and most of the land on the north side of the Hutchinson River was flat land used for recreation. The land to the south of the Hutchinson River (now Section 5 of Co op City) was swampland. A tidal estuary reached from the Hutchinson River at the New Haven Railroad along a route just north of Hunter and Boller Avenue to pass under the Hutchinson River Parkway. The estuary was the site of boat yards and canoe rental sites during the 1950s. The northern portion of the site became the home of a 205 acre theme park named Freedomland U. S. A. Freedomland operated from June 19, 1960 until September 1964, when it closed after going bankrupt. A small portion of the former park site at the northeast corner of Bartow and Baychester Avenues in Co op City remains zoned as a C7 district, reserved "for large open amusement parks". The zoning district is a holdover from Freedomland's operation.

In February 1965, plans were announced for the residential Co op City development, the world's largest housing cooperative, on the site. The plans for Co op City were announced in May 1965, with no provisions for an amusement park. Construction on Co op City began in May 1966. While much of the Freedomland site and some of the surrounding land was infilled, several existing houses were retained along Givans Creek (near Section 5 of Co op City) because of opposition from residents there. These houses received sewage and other utilities, though these projects were delayed. There was a controversy when Co op City builders filled the land to grade, because the existing houses were located as much as 12 feet (4 m) below grade, and filling for the main development caused storm runoff to flood the existing houses. Residents began moving in during December 1968, and construction was completed in 1973. The project was sponsored and built by the United Housing Foundation, an organization established in 1951 by Abraham Kazan and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, and was designed by cooperative architect Herman J. Jessor. The name of the complex's corporation itself was later changed to RiverBay at Co op City.

The construction of the community was financed with a mortgage loan from New York State Housing Finance Agency (HFA). The complex defaulted on the loan in 1975 and has had ongoing agreements to pay back HFA. Mismanagement, shoddy construction, and corruption led to the community's defaulting on its loan in 1975. The original Kazan board resigned, and the state took over control. Cooperators, faced with a 25 percent increase in their monthly maintenance fees, organized residents to refuse to pay their monthly maintenance fees. New York State threatened to foreclose on the property and evict the residents, which would mean the loss of their equity. However, cooperators stayed united and held out for 13 months (the longest and largest strike of its kind in United States history) before a compromise was finally reached, with mediation from then Bronx Borough President Robert Abrams and then New York Secretary of State Mario Cuomo. Cooperators would remit $20 million in back payments of maintenance fees, but they would get to take over management of the complex and set their own fees. The shares of stock that prospective purchasers bought to enable them to occupy Co op City apartments became the subject of protracted litigation, culminating in a United States Supreme Court decision United Housing Foundation, Inc. v. Forman, 421 U. S. 837 (1975). 57 residents sued because they had been charged for costs that were not described in a 1965 Information Bulletin seeking to attract residents for apartments in Co op City. The Supreme Court held that federal courts have no jurisdiction of shares of stock that allow the purchaser to live in an apartment in Co op City because they are not federally regulated shares of commercial stock. In 2004, Co op City was financially unable to continue payments to HFA due to the huge costs of emergency repairs. New York Community Bank helped RiverBay satisfy its $57 million mortgage obligation, except for $95 million in arrears, by refinancing the loan later that same year. This led to the agreement that Co op City would remain in the Mitchell Lama Housing Program for at least seven more years as a concession on the arrears and that any rehabilitation that Co op City took on to improve the original poor construction (which happened under New York State's watch) would earn credit toward eliminating the debt. By 2008, RiverBay had submitted enough proof of construction repairs to pay off the balance of arrears to New York State.

Within the first decade of the 2000s, the aging development began undergoing a complex wide $240 million renovation, replacing piping and garbage compactors, rehabilitating garages and roofs, upgrading the power plant, making facade and terrace repairs, switching to energy efficient lighting and water conserving technologies, replacing all 130,000 windows and 4,000 terrace doors (costing $57.9 million in material and labor) and all 179 elevators. The word "renaissance" is being used to describe this period in Co op City history. Many of these efforts are also helping in the "greening" of the complex: the power plant will be less polluting, the buildings will be more efficient and recycling efforts will become more extensive. The New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) awarded its largest ever grant—$5.2 million—to the community under its NY Energy $mart Assisted Multifamily Program. In 2003, after a partial collapse in one garage, inspectors found 5 of the 8 garages to be unsafe and ordered them closed for extensive repairs. The other 3 garages were able to remain partially open during repairs. To deal with the parking crisis, New York City allowed angled parking in the community, the large greenways in the complex were paved over to make outdoor parking lots and agreements were made with nearby shopping centers to use their extra parking spaces. All garages were re opened by January 2008, and work began to restore the greenways that had been paved. Financial responsibility for these upgrades was the subject of a protracted dispute between RiverBay and the State of New York. Co op City was developed under New York's Mitchell Lama Program, which subsidizes affordable housing. RiverBay charged that the state should help with the costs because of severe infrastructure failures stemming from the development's original shoddy construction, which occurred under the supervision of the state. The state countered that RiverBay was responsible for the costs because of its lack of maintenance over the years. In the end, a compromise had the state supplying money and RiverBay refinancing the mortgage, borrowing $480 million from New York Community Bank in 2004, to cover the rest of the capital costs. In 2007, the power plant was in the process of upgrading from solely managing the electricity brought in from Con Edison to a 40 megawatt tri generation facility with the ability to use oil, gas or steam (depending on market conditions) to power turbines to produce its own energy. The final cost of this energy independence could be as much as $90 million, but it is hoped to pay for itself with the savings earned—with conservative estimates at $18 million annually—within several years. Also, whatever excess power generated after satisfying the community's needs will be sold back to the electrical grid, adding another source of income for RiverBay. In September 2007, a report by the New York Inspector General, Kristine Hamann, charged that the Division of Housing and Community Renewal (DHCR), which is responsible for overseeing Mitchell Lama developments, was negligent in its duties to supervise the contracting, financial reporting, budgeting and the enforcement of regulations in Co op City (and other M L participants) during the period of January 2003 to October 2006. The report also chided Marion Scott management for trying to influence the RiverBay Board by financing election candidates and providing jobs and sports tickets to Board members and their family/friends—all violations of DHCR and/or RiverBay regulations. The DHCR was instructed to overhaul its system of oversight to better protect the residents and taxpayer money. In October 2007, a former board president, Iris Herskowitz Baez, and a former painting contractor, Nickhoulas Vitale, pleaded guilty to involvement in a kickback scheme. While on the RiverBay Board, Baez steered $3.5 million in subsidized painting contracts for needed work in Co op City apartments, to Vitale's company, Stadium Interior Painting, in exchange for $100,000 in taxpayer money. Herskowitz Baez was sentenced to 6 months in jail and 12 months' probation and given a $10,000 fine in March 2008.

During January 2015, an outbreak of Legionnaires' disease sickened 8 people near Co op City's cooling towers. Twelve people were diagnosed with Legionnaires' disease between December 2014 and the end of the outbreak in January 2015. Another outbreak of Legionnaires' disease in 2018 sickened three people, one of whom died. As a result of the continued presence of the amusement park zoning lot at Bartow and Baychester Avenues, there were no restrictions on the heights of signs on that lot. In late 2017, the site's owner began erecting tall LED billboards on the lot, a move opposed by Co op City residents since one of the billboards faced Co op City, keeping residents awake at night. The following year, residents proposed changing the lot's zoning to a standard commercial use. The turbine toppled later that month, knocking down the billboard, but causing no injuries.

RiverBay Corporation is the corporation that operates the community and is led by a 15 member board of directors. As a cooperative development, the tenants run the complex through this elected board. There is no pay for serving on the board. The corporation employs over 1000 people and has 32 administrative and operational departments to serve the development. The complex has its own Public Safety Department with more than 100 sworn officers. In December 2007, the cable television company Cablevision gave RiverBay permission to use its fiber optic cables in order to install additional surveillance cameras throughout the complex to be viewed at the Public Safety Command Center. In 2008, trained supervisors were granted the power to write summonses for parking and noise violations and Segways were acquired – along with bikes – to help the officers patrol during the warmer months. Co op City was managed by Marion Scott Real Estate, Inc. from October 1999 to November 2014. Before then the property was run by in house general managers. The development is currently managed by Douglas Elliman Property Management. There are two weekly newspapers serving the community: Co op City Times (the official RiverBay paper) and City News.

Community District 10 is patrolled by the 45th Precinct of the NYPD, located at 2877 Barkley Avenue in Throggs Neck. The 45th Precinct ranked 28th safest out of 69 patrol areas for per capita crime in 2010. as of 2018, with a non fatal assault rate of 53 per 100,000 people, Community District 10's rate of violent crimes per capita is less than that of the city as a whole. The incarceration rate of 243 per 100,000 people is lower than that of the city as a whole.

The Co op City Department of Public Safety is a privately owned and operated security force that protects the residents, visitors and property of Co op City. The Co op City Department of Public Safety currently employs more than 100 Public Safety officers and 10 civilian employees.

Co op City is served by the New York City Fire Department (FDNY)'s Engine Co. 66/Ladder Co. 61 fire station at 21 Asch Loop.

as of 2018, preterm births are more common in Community District 10 than in other places citywide, though births to teenage mothers are less common. In Community District 10, there were 110 preterm births per 1,000 live births (compared to 87 per 1,000 citywide), and 10.3 births to teenage mothers per 1,000 live births (compared to 19.3 per 1,000 citywide).

The largest open space in Co op City itself is the Greenway, which is located in the superblock connecting all of the buildings. The majority of Co op City was built atop Rattlesnake Creek, a small stream that emptied into the Hutchinson River to the east. A small nature preserve called the Givans Creek Woods is located at the northern portion of Co op City, near the intersection of Baychester Avenue and Co op City Boulevard. Despite its name, which is derived from Scottish immigrant Robert Givan, it is located above Rattlesnake Creek. Co op City Field, located on the waterfront of Hutchinson River at Co op City Boulevard north of Bellamy Loop North, contains two baseball fields. Directly to the south is a proposed waterfront park, which was announced in 2017 and is still in the planning stages.

The New York Public Library (NYPL)'s Baychester branch is located at 2049 Asch Loop North. The one story branch building opened in 1973 and was renovated in 2003.