Moses lost track of over a third of displaced families entirely.

Evidence

Orton’s staffers found that a substantial number of families had been moved “two or more times” to other buildings “within the site”—had been shuttled from one building about to be demolished to another, and then to another, and perhaps yet another. For seven years, Moses had been giving the impression that the bulk of the low-income families displaced by his public works had been accommodated in public housing projects. In reality, the unit found, the percentage of displaced families that had been admitted to public housing was pathetically small. Moses had been giving the impression that he had taken great pains to insure every evictee “decent, safe, and sanitary” living quarters. When the Planning Commission staffers obtained access to files on tenants for whom relocation responsibility had been “discharged,” they found that more than a third of the files—for some projects, more than half—were marked: “Disappeared—whereabouts unknown.” Disappeared! Moses couldn’t know that the living quarters into which his projects had forced tens of thousands of persons were “decent, safe, and sanitary.” He couldn’t know what the new living quarters were like. He didn’t even know where those living quarters were. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 3992

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; Moses distorted displacement statistics by undercounting evictees. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 3984; Moses’ urban renewal displaced hundreds of thousands of poor nonwhites into worse housing. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 102