Growing up as an eyewitness to appalling tenement conditions, Kazan believed that housing was a vital obstacle for the average person.

As the president of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers (ACW) Credit Union, Kazan understood that most people, rich and poor, usually considered a home as “purely a product of his own efforts.” Yet, unlike all other routine necessities, owning a home required a sizable initial investment that was usually beyond that of those with moderate means or salaries.

[3] Open spaces were important for healthy children, and he believed that lack of quality conditions would result in child delinquency, crime, disease and a host of other social and health crises that would fester.

[4] He took his cooperative idea even further and succeeded in federating the "Co-op Supermarkets" into a larger collective in order to give the markets competitive abilities to contend with the established chains.

Later developments, under Kazan's United Housing Foundation (UHF),[11] include the Penn South community in the Chelsea area of Manhattan, Warbasse Houses (Brooklyn), Rochdale Village (Queens), and Co-op City in the Bronx, the largest co-operative development of its kind.