Extra History

Interstate Displacement - The Legacy of Robert Moses (106x1)

: 18, 2021

Last week we talked about redlining and now we need to tackle another systemic issue. With minority groups denied money and loans to be able to grow the value of a property or their neighborhoods, cities began looking at minority communities as blights upon their urban landscape. Enter Robert Moses, the architect of the modern city. Moses had a plan to revitalize the urban landscape by redesigning it for the automobile. He designed lush parks and oases with the idea to make them accessible to anyone with a car, especially to the affluent folks of the suburbs. That meant highways and building projects... built right on top of already existing communities. And with the Federal Aid Highway Act, that problem spiraled out of New York and across all of America.