Moses displaced over 170,000 New Yorkers from their homes in seven years.

Evidence

Orton’s unit could not repair these deficiencies. With the buildings in which these uncounted tenants had lived demolished and the tenants moved away, there was no longer any way of obtaining a record of their existence. Yet the unit did come up with a rough compilation: during the seven years since the end of World War II, there had been evicted from their homes in New York City for public works—mainly Robert Moses’ public works—some 170,000 persons. … This total was almost certainly far too low. Orton, leaning over backwards as always to be fair and to make sure that the figures would “stand up” no matter what devices Moses employed to discredit them, leaned too far. He permitted his unit to make some adjustment in “official” figures, but not nearly enough to make them accurate. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 3985

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Moses distorted displacement statistics by undercounting evictees. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 3984; Moses lost track of over a third of displaced families entirely. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 3992; Urban renewal displaced nearly half a million New Yorkers to build rich housing. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 102 (+1 more)