Moses’ urban renewal displaced hundreds of thousands of poor nonwhites into worse housing.

Evidence

For highways, Moses dispossessed 250,000 persons. For his other projects—Lincoln Center, the United Nations, the Fordham, Pratt and Long Island University campuses, a dozen mammoth urban renewal projects—he dispossessed tens of thousands more; there are available no accurate figures on the total number of people evicted from their homes for all Robert Moses public works, but the figure is almost certainly close to half a million; the one detailed study by an outside agency shows that in a ten-year period, 1946 to 1956, the number was 320,000. More significant even than the number of the dispossessed were their characteristics: a disproportionate share of them were black, Puerto Rican—and poor. He evicted tens of thousands of poor, nonwhite persons for urban renewal projects, and the housing he built to replace the housing he tore down was, to an overwhelming extent, not housing for the poor, but for the rich. The dispossessed, barred from many areas of the city by their color and their poverty, had no place to go but into the already overcrowded slums—or into “soft” borderline areas that then became slums, so that his “slum clearance programs” created new slums as fast as they were clearing the old. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 102

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to displacement patterns in Base Nation (US bases displacing indigenous peoples) — recurring logic of state projects displacing the poor. — connects to: Moses distorted displacement statistics by undercounting evictees. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 3984; Urban renewal displaced nearly half a million New Yorkers to build rich housing. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 102; Moses’ highways displaced 250,000 people and destroyed whole neighborhoods. (+2 more)
• ADDENDUM: Cross-domain parallel to the sacrificial framing: urban ‘development’ as a sacrifice of the poor for elite benefit.
• SEED: Angle: how ‘slum clearance’ manufactures new slums — a mechanism of self-defeating reform.

Broader Connections

• Moses’ highways displaced 250,000 people and destroyed whole neighborhoods. #exemplifies (0.95)
• Moses distorted displacement statistics by undercounting evictees. #expands (0.88) — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 3984
• Moses lost track of over a third of displaced families entirely. #expands (0.85) — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 3992
• Urban renewal displaced nearly half a million New Yorkers to build rich housing. #expands (0.82) — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 102
• Moses’ housing plan demanded whole-block demolition over rehabilitation #expands (0.75) — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 2601