They wanted to change the American dream. In the mid-1920s, thousands of immigrant Jewish garment workers managed to catapult themselves out of urban slums and ghettos by pooling their resources and building four cooperatively owned and run apartment complexes in the Bronx. They believed that owning one's home went a long way toward controlling one's fate. At Home in Utopia focuses on the United Workers Cooperative Colony, aka the Coops, the most grass-roots and member-driven of the Jewish labor housing cooperatives, where many of the residents were Communists. Almost as soon as they moved in to their new buildings, they were hit by the Great Depression.

The garment industry was hit hard; they were unemployed; and they could no longer pay their mortgage. They believed they were watching the death of capitalism. And in its death throes, they saw opportunity: they would change America. In the 1930s, while they were demonstrating against mortgage foreclosures and for unemployment insurance, they opted to racially integrate their own cooperative house. An epic tale of the struggle for equity and justice over two generations, the film tracks the rise and fall of one community from the 1920s into the 1950s, paying close attention to the passions that bound them together and those that tore them apart. Along the way, At Home in Utopia bears witness to lives lived with courage across the barriers of race, language, and sometimes even common sense. History may not repeat itself, but given the current economic crisis and the recent presidential election, the story of the Coops has powerful echoes today.