New York City dominated American urban renewal spending under Robert Moses

Evidence

Most cities approached urban renewal with caution. But in New York City, urban renewal was directed by Robert Moses. By 1957, 133,000,000 of public monies had been expended on urban renewal in all the cities of the United States with the exception of New York; 267,000,000 had been spent in New York. So far ahead was New York that when scores of huge buildings constructed under its urban renewal program were already erected and occupied, administrators from other cities were still borrowing New York’s contract forms to learn how to draw up the initial legal agreements with interested developers. When Moses resigned from his urban renewal directorship in 1960, urban renewal had produced more physical results in New York than in all other American cities combined. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 63

Categorization

• XREF: Bears on the general literature about urban renewal and ‘federal bulldozer’ critique; connects to the ADDENDUM-adjacent theme of infrastructure-as-power seen in the reader’s existing article on trees as infrastructure being underused worldbuilding, though more directly to Moses’s highway empire to come in later chapters. — connects to: Robert Moses justified mass displacement of residents as necessary for urban renewal — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now: The 1960s New York…, 113; Urban renewal leveled huge Manhattan neighborhoods as new housing after World War II — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now: The 1960s New York…, 108

Broader Connections

• Urban renewal leveled huge Manhattan neighborhoods as new housing after World War II #corroborates (0.85) — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 108
• Robert Moses justified mass displacement of residents as necessary for urban renewal #expands (0.82) — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 113