MATTHEW GORDON LASNER. High Life: Condo Living in the Suburban Century.

William Levitt may have been joking when he stated his famous dictum that “No man who owns his own house and lot can be a Communist. He has too much do,” but his observation has endured because it sums up the postwar belief in single-family suburbia as a bulwark of American democracy. Housing that did not adhere to the model, including public housing, rented apartments, townhouses, and co-ownership of cooperatives and condominiums, appeared for decades as a non-standard, and often inferior, form of American domesticity. The sharing of governance, finances, and other amenities in co-ownership, the subject of Matthew Gordon Lasner's High Life, not only left a suspicious amount of time for undefined leisure activities but shifted many Americans into a communal mode of living and governance that contrasted with the “do it yourself” culture and pride and privacy of single-family homeownership. Adding to co-ownership's foreign flavor was the suspicious fact that co-ownership seemed to prosper (and still does today) in expensive, liberal, urbanized areas such as New York, Florida, and California.