People displaced from homes, not physical obstacles, made urban expressways hardest to build.

Evidence

Moses was not building under a totalitarian regime. Moses was building under a system in which permission to build could be granted only by officials who derived their power from the people. And, in that light, what was most significant about the Cross-Bronx Expressway was not that seven miles of brick and mortar and steel and iron had to be removed from its path but that seven miles of people had to be removed, removed from homes which in a time of terrible housing crisis in New York were simply irreplaceable. “People said that [the route] was so built up that you’d never get the politicians to say okay,” Ernie Clark would later recall, and engineers who had built bigger roads even than Ernie Clark agreed. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 3549

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Great public works throughout history have required autocratic power to build. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 3547; The manner of demolition, not just the demolition, destroyed a community’s will to resist — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 3728