Moses distorted displacement statistics by undercounting evictees.

Evidence

Moses’ relocation statistics had always been accepted. No city agency or newspaper had ever computed them even roughly for itself. There were probably over-all statistics in existence, of course, and brought together in one place—but the place was Randall’s Island, and Randall’s ruler kept the long rows of filing cabinets there locked. … What statistics were available—often in obscure files, in other city agencies, of whose existence the unit would never have known were it not for Orton’s encyclopedic knowledge of every corner of city government—were patently too low; Moses kept them low by refusing to count the actual number of people being evicted (instead he multiplied each “dwelling unit” by an “average” family size so small as to bear no discernible relation to reality), and by simply ignoring the existence of “doubled-up” families and boarders (of whom there are always a significant number in low-income areas) as well as of people living in rooming houses or hotels. (There is considerable evidence to suggest that the counts thus arrived at even after these omissions were arbitrarily reduced still further when Moses felt they sounded too high.) — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 3984

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Moses displaced over 170,000 New Yorkers from their homes in seven years. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 3985; Urban-renewal doctrine ignored that slums were homes to their residents. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 4000; Moses used up and discarded the people who served his purposes. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 2545 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Moses lost track of over a third of displaced families entirely. #corroborates (0.92) — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 3992
• Moses used up and discarded the people who served his purposes. #complicates (0.78) — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 2545