Urban renewal displaced nearly half a million New Yorkers to build rich housing.

Evidence

For highways, Moses dispossessed 250,000 persons. For his other projects—Lincoln Center, the United Nations, the Fordham, Pratt and Long Island University campuses, a dozen mammoth urban renewal projects—he dispossessed tens of thousands more; there are available no accurate figures on the total number of people evicted from their homes for all Robert Moses public works, but the figure is almost certainly close to half a million; the one detailed study by an outside agency shows that in a ten-year period, 1946 to 1956, the number was 320,000. More significant even than the number of the dispossessed were their characteristics: a disproportionate share of them were black, Puerto Rican—and poor. He evicted tens of thousands of poor, nonwhite persons for urban renewal projects, and the housing he built to replace the housing he tore down was, to an overwhelming extent, not housing for the poor, but for the rich. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 102

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes how grand projects transfer cost onto the disenfranchised and onto nonwhite and poor — connects to settler-colonial and infrastructure discussions in the reader’s corpus. — connects to: Urban renewal leveled huge Manhattan neighborhoods as new housing after World War II — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now: The 1960s New York…, 108; 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’ urban renewal displaced hundreds of thousands of poor nonwhites into worse housing. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 102
• recurring: this claim recurs 2 times within its source

Broader Connections

• Moses displaced over 170,000 New Yorkers from their homes in seven years. #exemplifies (0.85) — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 3985
• Urban renewal leveled huge Manhattan neighborhoods as new housing after World War II #expands (0.80) — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 108