Urban-renewal doctrine ignored that slums were homes to their residents.

Evidence

In the textbooks, “slums” were synonymous with “dirt” and “blight.” But, recalls Mrs. Black, “the thing that hit me was that most of the apartments you went into were well kept, clean.” Time after time, City Club volunteers would walk off the filthy street, up the filthy stairs, down a filthy hall, and knock on the door of an apartment—and when the door to that apartment was opened, behind the frightened face peering out (“Oh, they were always frightened,” one of the volunteers said. “They always thought you were from the developer or the city”) was a room neat and clean. “What hurt the most,” Mrs. Black says, “was just the feeling of people trying to make a decent place for their family to live in these conditions.” It is possible to read through scores of textbooks and tracts on housing conditions written in the 1940’s and early 1950’s without finding even a hint of the fact that many of these women volunteers, who had read the textbooks, now learned for the first time: to the people who lived in them, slums were home. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 4000

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Complements the East Tremont chapters in this book and would support an argument about the human texture of displacement that planning categories erase.
• XREF: Echoes Jane Jacobs’ emergent critique of slum-clearance orthodoxy in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, published just a few years later. — connects to: Moses distorted displacement statistics by undercounting evictees. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 3984; Moses’ housing plan demanded whole-block demolition over rehabilitation — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 2601
• recurring: this claim recurs 2 times within its source