Revisiting "The Power Broker"

I recently listened to my friend Geoff Kabaservice's podcast with Marc Dunkelman, author of the recent book Why Nothing Works. The book echoes much of the "abundance" line of thinking flowing out of Ezra Klein's well-oiled machine, arguing from a "liberal" perspective that America has bound itself up to tightly in red tape, which makes it impossible to get anything done. Trump et al would not disagree.

One legacy that is being rethought is that of Robert Moses and indeed of Robert Caro's bio of him The Power Broker and the extent to which it has reshaped thought about Moses himself and his work. Dunkelman points out that Caro works hard to take Moses down, but that it was Moses who got things built, and that after Moses and Caro it got ever harder to get things built. I am oversimplifying here due to the cadence of this blog and my days, you must understand.

A few thoughts. First, I don't think Caro's goal in his book is entirely to tear Moses down. Reading Caro, one cannot but be in a certain awe of Moses' intense productivity, the amount of stuff he got done, the number of jobs he held, even as one appreciates the ironies of such facts as that Moses never had a driver's license but would sit in the back of his limo reading and dictating furiously to his admin who traveled with him. Also, although the Dunkelman (and Klein and others going back at least a decade) point out that the NIMBYism which has grown out of the Jane Jacobs/Lewis Mumford line of thought that constrained Moses has gotten out of control, I think nobody really would have wanted Moses to get his way and build cross-town expressways at 14th, 42nd, and 72nd, or wherever he was proposing. Moses needed constraining. Nor would many fault Caro's critique of Moses's failure to provide for right of way for a train when building the the Van Wyck Expressway (from Manhattan to Idewild/JFK), or the fact that when he built expressways on Long Island headed out towards the beach and suburbs he intentionally built overpasses too low to permit buses so as to admit only cars and keep out the riffraff.

In short, Caro's point is that Moses was a complex figure who did incredible things. Some of the sacrifices required of communities were sad but necessary. But on some specific points he was pretty evil. And we are glad people rose up to slow him down some, even if by now we can see that some of the constraining forces his opponents gave rise to have ossified into counterproductive forces we should reconsider.