A few weeks ago, I was walking in Central Park on the Upper West Side. As I strolled past some benches near the Diana Ross Playground, I saw a young man, likely in his late twenties, with his face buried in a huge, white-covered book. When I got closer, I noticed he was reading a brand-new copy of Robert Caro’s 1974, 1,300-page biography, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York.
It struck me that I was witnessing a quintessentially New York act—to buy the Power Broker and read it in the park. In such an act, we glory in our ability to enjoy ourselves in the vast urban wonderland that is Central Park while reading a book about a man who built more parks in New York than anyone and yet who today is vilified as a power-hungry titan who initiated the fall of Gotham.
The Caro Narrative
It also occurred to me that Robert Caro’s legacy is not just that he provided a chronicle of 20th-century New York’s most important public figure but has also affected the course of public policy.
Caro’s story is about the abuse of power—how Moses transmogrified into a Kurtz-like figure in The Heart of Darkness. Moses began his career as an ambitious idealist Progressive. His genius and endless drive to create parks and parkways pushed him forward and showed New Yorkers how government can improve people’s lives. Yet, with each success, he became increasingly power-hungry and gamed the system to feed his bottomless appetite.
Because of the arrogance that was so basic to his nature…Moses’ susceptibility to the addiction of power was unusually strong….Once Robert Moses had sought power only for the sake of his dreams, only as a means to an end; even then, however, there were signs that he was beginning to seek it for its own sake, as an end in itself. And the avidity with which he sought power—and the lengths to which he went to get it—revealed the depth of his need for it.
After World War II, as Caro’s portrait goes, Moses became deeply entrenched in his “Fortress of Solitude” on Randall’s Island as head of the Triborough Bridge Authority. With a wave of his hand, he clear-cut the “slums” that resulted in massive residential displacements; he ramrodded expressways through vibrant working-class neighborhoods; and his highway construction program drove New Yorkers to become automobile junkies while generating rampant white flight and the collapse of the subways.
Caro provides a gripping tale. We all love a Greek tragedy—the king who becomes so blinded by his power and is convinced of his own perfection that he is unable to see the damage he causes.
Robert Moses in 1939 viewing a model for a Battery Bridge (a tunnel was built instead). Source: Wikipedia.
The Caro Effect
Yet, whereas Moses, the man, was in power until the early 1960s, Caro’s portrait of Moses has been “in power” since 1974. He hovers as a living ghost that haunts New York and holds vast influence, perhaps more so than the flesh-and-blood version ever did.
This is not to say that Moses’s career was not problematic. His policies were not race- or class-neutral and often harmed people of color and the poor to benefit the white middle class. As a master bill writer, he crafted legislation that left him untouched by the democratic process to implement his programs as he saw fit. He swatted away community pushback with the epithet, “You can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs.”
Bogeyman Moses
However, the overly simplistic residual of Caro’s book—the belief that people cling to—is that because Moses was a power-hungry bully after World War II and presumably harmed New York, we shouldn’t build important megaprojects that the city needs today (megaprojects that other cities worldwide are building easily).
Because Moses brooked no community input, the logic seemingly follows, we must allow full-on community input, and, by extension, local veto power that stops the city from addressing its problems head-on. The defining legacy of Caro’s book is that we have become paralyzed by the fear of Moses’s ghost which Caro conjured to life.
The Harm
New York faces 21st-century crises that need to be addressed directly and strongly. Most notably, the city must become resilient against climate change, dramatically expand its housing stock, and upgrade and produce other services, including mass transit, to improve quality of life and prevent the high cost of living from pushing people out.
Today, Gotham is tiptoeing its way to climate change resilience. It builds out the shoreline here, adds some bluebelts there, and buys out some households over there. But the truth is that a patchwork of programs only offers partial protection against increasingly damaging storms, flooding, and sea level rise.
New York is on the path toward building $52 billion worth of seawalls that will be used sporadically to stop storm surges. Politically, erecting seawalls away from any residential neighborhood is the easy path, but practically, its cost-benefit ratio is questionable. Billions more will be spent against sea level rise and coastal disappearance.
The Housing Affordability Crisis
Just as important is housing affordability. Over half the city’s renters are rent-burdened, paying more than 30% of their income for housing, and one in three low-income households is severely rent-burdened, paying more than 50% of their income for an apartment. There is hardly any rental housing to be found with the current vacancy rate at a mere 1.4%, the lowest in half a century.
To his credit, Mayor Adams’s City of Yes Housing Opportunity will attempt to add more housing in each neighborhood, but it’s unlikely to have a meaningful impact on affordability. He has to tread gingerly to avoid total rejection of his plan.
Additionally, climate change resilience and housing affordability are not independent. Housing will become scarcer and more expensive as more land is removed from use because of rising sea levels or to mitigate flooding.
The Interchanges to and from the Cross Bronx Expressway ca. 1973. Source: Wikipedia.
Moses: A 20th-Century Centurion
In the decades following the Power Broker’s publication, there have been more nuanced reevaluations of Moses’s career and impacts. The most forceful and comprehensive is the 2007 book, Robert Moses and the Modern City: The Transformation of New York, edited by Hillary Ballon and Kenneth Jackson (which contains a comprehensive list of Moses’s New York City projects). But the revisionists have been drowned out by the howling of the Caro’s spirit.
Lost in the collective memory is that Moses was a product of his time. He rose out of the Progressive Movement, frustrated with machine politics’ failure to eradicate urban ills like overcrowding and lack of fresh air and sunlight. His genius was in figuring out (for good and for bad) how to overcome nimbyism and status quo politics. He had the support of leaders and the people because he delivered the results that they wanted.
Moses existed within the political spectrum of reformers. On the far left were the socialists who sought to abolish private property. Just to their right were those who wanted to master plan the metropolis, deconcentrate it, and create a network of garden cities. Moses pushed back against those that he saw as being too extreme. He decided that a project-by-project strategy was to be preferred to grand schemes. The populace agreed with him, being suspicious of grand plans that would disrupt the culture of laissez-faire New York.[1]
Slum Clearance
Moses did not invent slum clearance.[2] It had been the dream of reformers since after the Civil War with the rise of hyperdense slums in Five Points. In the 1890s, Jacob Riis’s expose, How the Other Half Lives, provided more fuel to the slum clearance movement.
One of the earliest examples of slum clearance was that of Mulberry Bend, a dense cluster of tenements in the Lower East Side that was notorious for its poverty, crime, and vice. It was cleared in 1904 and the land was converted into a park (today Columbus Park).
When Moses was in his heyday, slum clearance advocates were in positions of power through the New Deal programs. After World War II, Title I and public housing funds were made available on a level never seen before in human history.[3] Moses was able to grab the lion’s share for New York. He was largely supported in his endeavor because he was carrying out the work that previous reformers had been unable to accomplish. Moses was their Trojan Horse.
The Automobile
Moses did not invent America’s love of the automobile, and we can’t blame New Yorker’s car addiction on him (and which is certainly no worse as compared to the rest of the country). It’s good that he didn’t get his way in various projects, such as building elevated highways across Greenwich Village and SoHo, and it’s bad that he did not consider neighborhood impacts when helping to build America’s highway system within Gotham’s borders.
But America’s automobile dependence is based on a much larger institutional and cultural framework—subsidies for cheap oil, various Federal Highway Acts (the National Highway Act of 1956 had the Federal Government covering 90% of localities’ highway construction expenses), and the fact that people highly value the personal freedom that comes with cars.
Moses’s radial highway system for New York City was not his invention. As historian Leonard Wallock states:
Far from being novel, [Moses’s] ideas for a circumferential system of roadways were nearly identical to the ones proposed by the Regional Plan Association in 1929, which in turn were based on Edward H. Bennett’s Brooklyn City Plan (1914) and Daniel Burnham’s Plan of Chicago (1909).
Parts of New York that Will Be Underwater if Sea Levels Rises by Six Feet (a likely projection by 2100). The green areas are those likely to be prone to flooding. Map Source: NOAA.
Moses and “The Fall”
The most influential element of Caro’s book has been its subtitle, “Robert Moses and the Fall of New York,” as if Moses destroyed New York. Yes, Moses did some bad things, and blaming him for Gotham’s post-industrial woes makes for good copy, but it’s just plain wrong.
In fact, after the massive wave of deindustrialization that hit manufacturing cities in the 1960s, New York fared better than most. It lost population from 1970 to 1980 but rebounded after that, and today, the city holds its highest population ever. Detroit and St. Louis, on the other hand, are still losing people. Chicago, Boston, and Newark, for example, have rebounded, but their populations remain far lower than their peak in the 1950s.[4]
More broadly, while Moses is seen as godlike in his impact on New York, the truth is that there was nothing wholly unique about his building spree. As Wallock writes:
In The Power Broker…Moses is not merely the lawgiver but the creator, for he transcends the role of his Biblical progenitor and usurps the place of God. By making Moses the prime mover responsible for the city’s genesis, [Caro’s] interpretations disregard a crucial fact: from the 1920s through the 1960s, New York’s physical and spatial development was markedly similar to that of other large American cities….The Power Broker fail[s] to explain why other cities, not blessed with a Moses figure, assumed the same physical and spatial configuration as New York.
But Caro was writing in the late 1960s and early 1970s when New York was seemingly coming apart at the seams. To many, including Caro, the “fall” was brought about by Moses’s opening the barn doors. In hindsight, this seems to be a confusion of correlation with causation.
Ironically, in his Introduction, Caro hedges on Moses’s net impact, which is quite rich, given how powerful his book has become. He concludes:
Would New York have been a better place to live if Robert Moses had never built anything? Would it have been a better city if the man who shaped it had never lived? ….
Moses himself, who feels his works will make him immortal, believes he will be justified by history, that his works will endure and be blessed by generations not yet born. Perhaps he is right. It is impossible to say that New York would have been a better city if Robert Moses had never lived.
Time to Move On
It’s time to move on. Let’s put Moses in the past where he belongs. We need to learn the true lessons of Moses and use them as a guide to improve New York’s future, rather than clinging to outdated myths that keep the city nearly paralyzed. The true lessons of Moses are that big projects that will benefit New York can and should be built, but they also need to minimize the negative spillovers and unintended consequences and be done in a way that engenders trust and confidence in the government. Getting community input is vital, but community input should not mean complete veto power.
How to Vanquish Moses’s Ghost
However, once lodged in the public consciousness, myths are hard to kill.[5] We long for simple explanations for complex phenomena, and when the “truthiness” of the simple explanations is strong, we cling to them. Blaming Moses for the planning mistakes of the 20th century is easy because he stood in the center of these changes and was seemingly waving his magic wand like Lord Voldemort.
So, how do we remove the Moses Myth from blocking policies needed to keep New York safe, affordable, and viable in the 21st century? I believe the answer is twofold. One approach must come from the top down and the other from the bottom up.
Trust Building
First is that our leaders need to engender trust. Nimbyism is, in large part, motivated by a failure of confidence that the government will do what’s good for individual residents and that large-scale building projects will do more harm than good. The legacy of Moses and Caro was to remove this trust.
Enabling communities to have strong veto power over large projects forces policymakers to employ half-hearted measures instead. When these measures fail to achieve their purpose, residents blame the government for its inability to solve problems, thereby reinforcing their mistrust.
Leaders need to say, “Yes, people like Moses were heavy-handed and their decisions led to projects that today we feel were poorly implemented, but we must move forward. Some large problems require big solutions, and we can’t tiptoe our way to the future. The cost of inaction is much greater than the cost of action and we have learned from the mistakes of the past and will not repeat them. Here are the ways that we have your back….”
Just as importantly, leaders need to create the institutional mechanisms that will bring residents and communities on board. Community input is vital and should be part of the bargaining process. However, all large-scale policies need to lay out the costs, benefits, and the likely negative spillovers, and directly address how these spillovers will be mitigated to reduce the fear of change. (I have spelled out examples here). One mechanism is that a large project also comes with a compensation fund to which people can apply if directly harmed and which is objectively administered by an impartial board.
Rebranding Moses
While leaders work on the issue of trust and compensation, we, the people, need to rebrand Moses and reframe how he is seen in the public eye.[6] Yes, Moses did many things that, in hindsight, were regretful. But he also did many wonderful things. What’s wrong with a story about a complicated man who was a product of his time?
We need to change the narrative. We need to get the word out that Old Man Moses died in the 20th century and we refuse to be afraid of the Spooky Ghost Moses. Let’s put him in the history books along with other 20th-century figures like Al Smith, Franklin Roosevelt, and Fiorello La Guardia. It’s time to create a future with new leaders who help build New York by incorporating the lessons from the best version of Moses while leaving behind those from his worst side.
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Notes
[1] When Jane Jacobs emerged on the scene in the early 1960s, her antidote to planning was to eliminate it altogether. Death and Life directly response to the wide-eyed planners who wanted to remake the city from scratch or to build towers in the park. Her “cure” for neighborhoods was to leave them alone (or allow residents to veto any new construction) and permit mixed uses. In terms of city planning, her recipe for utopia was to build more playgrounds and cut long blocks in half to create more sidewalks and street frontages.
[2] Moses did not invent the tower-in-park style of housing either. It was an invention of reformers and visionaries, such as Le Corbusier, starting in the 1920s. The planning consensus during the Great Depression and beyond was that building towers surrounded by green space would cure urban ills.
[3] Arguably federal mortgage programs that created redlining and with which Moses was not involved had a greater effect on cities like New York than Moses’s housing and slum clearance projects.
[4] Ironically, public housing—something in which Moses had a more behind-scenes role in developing—today is a success story in New York. Given the massive affordability problem, NYCHA housing provides a huge benefit for those with low incomes. See Nicholas Dagen Bloom’s book, Public Housing that Worked: New York in the 20th Century. More broadly, given recent economics research on the impacts of highways (such a Brinkman and Lin, 2024) and slum clearance on cities (such as Collins and Shester, 2013), measuring the net impact of Robert Moses on New York relative to what happened in other cities, would not be too difficult. To my knowledge, no one has specifically measured whether Moses’s projects were a net plus or negative for the city’s economic growth.
Author’s Note: This blog post is the second in a series that brings to light Robert Moses’ forgotten role in New York zoning and planning history. Post I from 1938 to 1941 is here.
Robert Moses, the Master Builder of New York City from the 1930s to the 1960s, is famous—or infamous—for the staggering number of projects he built. He started with parks and parkways and expanded to bridges and tunnels, highways, housing projects, and slum clearance.
Lost in all the discussion, however, was that Moses was also a member of the City Planning Commission (CPC) for twenty years. Though this position was less visible than his leadership of the Triborough Bridge Authority or the Parks Department, Moses’ role at the CPC deserves more attention than it has because it has impacted the city, nonetheless.
A Brief History of the CPC
In 1933, Fiorello La Guardia was elected Mayor of New York. He was determined to clean up city government, which for decades has been run by Tammany Hall Democrats. La Guardia brought in Robert Moses as Parks Commissioner, who immediately initiated a vast program of building swimming pools, parks, and parkways.
In 1936, La Guardia spearheaded charter reform to centralize power in the mayor’s office. The new charter created the City Planning Commission. Many people expected that Moses would take the helm, but he refused. He was unsure exactly what the CPC was supposed to do and was not interested in figuring it out.
Instead, in 1938, La Guardia chose as the CPC’s first leader the economist and FDR advisor Rexford Tugwell. Tugwell, a devotee of master planning, arrived with a vision of what the Commission should do. He had three signature items on his agenda. The first was to undo the problem of non-conforming uses. Tugwell wanted urban order and could not stomach things being where they ought not to be. His first major initiative was to ban signs and billboards at locations where they were originally grandfathered in 1916.
Failures
A business and real estate coalition, however, formed to stop him, afraid that the proposal was just the tip of the iceberg toward greater interference in the property market. Ironically, Tugwell received support from Moses. Given his career building parks and parkways, he, too, thought signs and billboards could be a nuisance.
Next was a Master Plan of Land Use, comprised of maps with stricter boundaries for future allowable land uses and a vast greenbelt. New York would become a Garden City, whether it wanted it or not. Here Moses was his foe and helped lead the charge against the plan, as it struck him as too radical.
The third policy was to revise the zoning resolution—particularly by downzoning the city. But Tugwell never got his chance. Instead, he could only pass changes to a few residential districts. In particular, the CPC created several single-family-home-only zones and introduced Floor Area Ratio (FAR) caps in suburban areas. Moses went along with these as he was fine with downzoning in residential neighborhoods.
Moses on the CPC
After the billboards loss, Tugwell’s failure to pass the Master Plan was the last straw. He quit his position in 1941 and soon became Governor of Puerto Rico. La Guardia chose as the new chairman Edwin. A. Salmon, already a member of the CPC. Robert Moses was picked to fill the vacant seat. Almost immediately after taking office, Moses pushed the CPC to formally scrap Tugwell’s Master Plan.
During the three years of working with—and battling against—Tugwell, Moses learned what the CPC could and should do. Furthermore, being on the inside would be useful, aiding him in his other endeavors. As planning historian Stanislaw Makielski writes, “Moses saw city planning as a matter of meeting the city’s needs on a project-by-project basis, and he never gave his full attention to the activities of the Planning Commission, using it chiefly as an additional source of information and as a public forum for his own brand of planning.”
Long Haired Planners
As discussed in an earlier blog post, Moses occupied a position squarely in the political middle. On his left were those he labeled as “long-haired planners” (although, as best I can tell, they all had short hair). In June of 1944, Moses published a screed against them in the New York Times Magazine. In so many words, he told eminent modernist thinkers like Eliel Saarinen, Walter Gropius, Erich Mendelsohn, Rexford Tugwell, and even Frank Lloyd Wright to shut the f*** up.
Moses was a man who did things like build parks and roads, and their planning theories were poisoning people’s minds, or, as he wrote,
In municipal planning we must decide between the revolution and common sense—between the subsidized lamas in their remote mountain temples and those who must work in the market place. It is a mistake to underestimate the revolutionaries. They do not reach the masses directly, but through familiar subsurface activities. They teach the teachers. They reach people in high places, who in turn influence the press, universities, societies learned and otherwise, radio networks, the stage, the screen, even churches. They make the TNT for those who throw the bombs. They have their own curious lingo and double talk, their cabalistic writings, secret passwords and abracadabras.
Moses also had little patience with the laissez-faire-ists who felt the government had no business telling people what to do with their property. While Moses disdained wholesale reforms, he was a fervent devotee of modernization and “cleaning up” the old metropolis. He believed in slum clearance because the new housing had more open space, was less dense, and was laid out according to proper standards. Like many planners of his day, Moses adhered to the dictate of better living through the tower-in-park.
Before and After. Left: Rendering of a hypothetical office building under the 1916 Zoning Codes. Right: Hypothetical rendering if the same building was constructed under Robert Moses’ 1944 Plan, with stricter setback rules. Source: here.
The Moses Plan of 1944
By the spring of 1944, it was clear that the war would be winding down, and the time was ripe to implement zoning reform ahead of the expected post-War boom. After the Roaring Twenties, there was broad consensus among planners that the 1916 codes were too lenient.
With Tugwell out of the picture, Moses felt it was his turn to take a stab at rezoning. If he could get through a more conservative resolution, he might put the left at bay for a while. Still, Moses firmly believed in the necessity of downzoning. As he wrote to his fellow commissioners in May 1944, when he introduced his new plan:
It is ridiculous to apply high standards to public housing, to redevelopment corporations and to limited-dividend companies, and not apply them to speculative or ordinary private buildings.
All of the buildings, public, semi-public or private, contemplated in the postwar period will accomplish nothing toward improving city life unless the zoning standards are jacked up. At the present time the zoning standards are so low that in a good many cases we are entirely dependent on the Multiple Dwelling Law from relief on over-building….
I should like to go very much beyond these amendments and to make them a good deal more drastic, but it seems the approach should be gradual and conservative. I know of no reason why the rise in standards here proposed should meet with opposition from any reasonable citizen or organization.
Moses’ proposal could be called 1916 2.0. New buildings’ allowable envelopes would be lowered—their street wall would rise to lesser heights, and their setbacks would be more severe. Additionally, the open space requirements around each structure were expanded. The net effect was to reduce a building’s bulk as a function of the then-current rules; each zoning district would thus be dialed down a notch.
Moses Tackles His Opponents
Moses brooked no dissent. He knew he had the other commissioners and La Guardia lined up, and he needed to keep them unified against the opposition. When The Committee on Civic Design and Development, a group formed by the New York chapter of the American Institute of Architects (AIA), for example, wrote a report arguing for more sweeping changes, La Guardia asked for Moses’ opinion. He replied to the mayor, “This report is the work of the same radical group who have always insisted that our planning is not sufficiently revolutionary. You will never get anywhere in trying to argue the matter with them.”
And echoing his run-ins with Tugwell three years early, Moses reminded the Little Flower, “These people want a master plan and zoning system on entirely new constitutional and legal theories.” And relishing the opportunity to trash-talk them down the line, Moses added, “My very earnest advice to you is to ignore this report. I can tell you more about the individual members of the committee if you wish.”
Robert Kohn
Interestingly, Moses received a letter from Robert D. Kohn, who, as I argued in a prior blog post, invented the Floor Area Ratio in 1935. Kohn was a highly respected reformer and architect who served in the Roosevelt administration as the first housing chief of the Public Works Administration (PWA). As Parks Commissioner, Moses managed to commandeer a sizable WPA allotment to build up the city’s park system. It seems reasonable that he would have met Kohn.
Kohn was also a founding member of the influential group the Regional Planning Association of America (RPAA). His architect partner, Clarence Stein was also an important reformer and initial RPAA member, and had led the New York State Commission of Housing and Regional Planning in the early 1920s under Al Smith’s administration while Moses was building out Jones Beach.
The letter from Kohn to Moses offered some slight changes to Moses’ plan as it related to large buildings on entire blocks but was supportive of the downzoning plan overall. Moses’ response to his fellow commissioners was to belittle Kohn and accuse him of hypocrisy, telling them,
Attached is a letter from Robert D. Kohn. Mr. Kohn and his partner Stein are advanced thinkers of planning. Both of them are of the school that advocates drastic reorganization and much higher standards until it gets down to anything which affects their immediate prospects of the commission.
To Moses, the phrase “advanced thinkers” was no doubt an insult, as he clearly associated “advanced” with “radical.”
Moses was likely aware of Kohn’s role at the RPAA. He obliquely refers to (and rejects) their position in his report on his plan to the Board of Estimate. Again, Moses tries to outflank those on the left, by signaling to the Board of Estimate what he sees as their radical position:
The Commission is not proposing further restrictions on the height and bulk of buildings out of sympathy with current theories regarding “decentralization” and the scattering of population and activities over larger areas of the countryside. On the contrary, its purpose is to check trends toward “decentralization” which threatens values based on the manifest advantages of centralization and concentration of people and activity in a community such as New York.
Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire
Moses also attacked those on his right. For example, he accused the leader of the real estate interests opposing the new plan, Robert W. Dowling, of being a liar. Moses complained to the other Commissioners that,
I just want to point to one thing as an evidence of the kind of opposition there has been to these proposals; the unscrupulous character of the opposition. One of the things that Mr. Dowling and his publicity man have relied upon has been the statement that reputable fiduciaries, such as banks, particularly, savings banks, and insurance companies, have filed plans for large buildings—that these plans and the buildings projects will be abandoned if the new standards are adopted; and, that, therefore, the new standards are a very wicked thing. They have even had the effrontery to go to labor unions and tell them that the members of the building trades won’t have any work if we carry out this program.
Well, I have a little familiarity over a period of years with the insurance and banking laws—in fact, wrote quite a little bit of the Banking Law. So, I got in touch with the Superintendent of Insurance first in connection with plans for a building filed in the Building Department where he was indicated as the owner. I asked him what authority he had or anyone in the Insurance Department had for filing the plans. Mr. Dineen, the Superintendent, sent me the man who is in charge of liquidation, who admitted that he didn’t have the slightest thought of ever building such a building, that he was simply trying to create a market—the appearance of a boom—so that he could sell the property at a higher price. Mr. Dineen, this morning ordered the plans withdrawn from the Building Department….
That gives you a rough idea of the activity of Mr. Dowling.[1]
The Huie Maneuver
It was one thing for outside groups to criticize Moses, but fellow commissioner Irving Huie had an alternative proposal that Moses did not like. Huie (1897-1957) was born in Brooklyn. He graduated from New York University in 1911 with an engineering degree. After World War I, he served in city and state positions and private practice, helping to build infrastructure, such as highway construction in New York and Pennsylvania. In 1938, he became chief engineer for the city’s newly formed Department of Public Works. When he was appointed to the CPC in 1941, he was seen as an able official and “doer” like Moses.
Huie—rightly—complained that the CPC went ahead without any analysis of the plan’s impacts. Moses simply notched the dial downward and left it at that. Huie had performed an analysis and concluded that in the dense business districts, the combined lowering of street wall heights, setbacks, and increasing yard sizes would reduce allowable building floor area by 45%, likely making commercial construction uneconomic. At the same time, he felt that the rules in underdeveloped residential zones were not dialed down enough—and would allow, in his opinion, too much residential density. The best way to fix the problem was to establish Floor Area Ratio (FAR) caps citywide.
The Moses Rebuttal
Huie sent his plan to the Board of Estimate. Moses quickly dashed off a rebuttal lest they get persuaded by Huie’s reasoning. Like a good defense attorney, Moses went through Huie’s points and attacked them as either incorrect or too far-fetched. As for the Floor Area Ratio, implementation citywide would be too risky and have uncertain effects. Besides, Moses argued, you’d still need height caps in the center to control excessive height. On the other hand, Moses’ plan was simple, easily understood, and a mere tweak of rules that had existed for nearly three decades.
Rezoning Plan of 1944. As a commissioner on the City Planning Commission, Robert Moses attempted to reform the zoning codes. His plan was a “1916 2.0,” which reduced building envelopes and lot coverage. Source: here.
Moses Never Sees the Promised Land
When first released, the public reaction to the plan was mixed. Good Government groups, like the Citizens Union and the City Club, endorsed it, while the real estate industry was opposed. The CPC held hearings in June of 1944, then again in July. Moses wanted that to be that, but critics demanded more hearings, and caving to their wishes, the CPC had one more hearing in September. The opponents barked for more delay and study. Nonetheless, on November 1st, the CPC voted 5 to 1 to accept the Moses plan with Huie as the lone dissenter.
Next, it went to the Board of Estimate, which was charged with voting it into law. The Board held hearings on November 15th. Thirty speakers were allowed to voice their opinion, and the majority were against it. Over the next two weeks, opponents and proponents tried to sway the Board. When it held its final vote on November 30th, the majority voted against the zoning revision, with ten votes “nay” and six votes “yea.”[2]
And yet, the CPC had won. To give power to the CPC, the 1936 Charter stipulated that zoning changes approved by the CPC became law unless rejected by three-quarters of the Board of Estimate. In this case, the Board of Estimate rejected Moses’ plan by only 62.5%—not enough to negate it.
Thus, with the 1936 Charter on his side—along with La Guardia’s support—Moses accomplished something that Tugwell could not, or for that matter, had not been done since 1916—a revision of the zoning codes. Or so it seemed….
The Board of Estimate and Apportionment may from time to time on its own motion or on petition, after public notice and hearing, amend, supplement or change the regulations and districts herein established….If, however, a protest against such amendment, supplement or change be presented, duly signed and acknowledged by the owners of 20 per cent. or more of any frontage proposed to be altered, or by the owners of 20 per cent. of the frontage immediately in the rear thereof, or by the owners of 20 per cent. of the frontage directly opposite the frontage proposed to be altered, such amendment shall not be passed except by the unanimous vote of the Board. (Emphasis added.)
In other words, if a rezoning was protested by 20% of affected property owners, it could only pass if the Board of Estimate approved it unanimously. The matter was brought to the courts less than a month after Moses’ apparent victory, and the plan officially died in July 1946.
The result was almost anticlimactic….[T]he State Court of Appeals held that “20 per cent rule” applied and that clearly the Board of Estimate had failed to pass the amendment by unanimous vote….The Planning Commission had won before the Board of Estimate…but was defeated by another “formal rule” of the game; a rule that demonstrated the importance of the Borough Presidents’ votes when coupled with an energetic opposition to zoning innovation. Moses characteristically commented on the outcome, “Apparently we were too far ahead of the procession.”
Robert Dowling—the man that Moses accused of lying—led the lawsuit and had the last laugh when he “took a slap at Mr. Moses by referring to protests ‘ruthlessly ignored by certain public officials who resent any disagreement with their opinion….’,” as reported the New York Times.
The Moses Effect
Moses’ defeat, in part, represented the triumph of parochialism. The Borough Presidents of the Bronx, Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Staten Island voted against his plan. This fact, along with the 20% rule, meant that even Moses did not have enough power to overcome local interests. But at the same time, Moses was not interested in building coalitions and forging common interests like Edward Bassett did when formulating the 1916 Resolution. For Moses, it was his way or the highway; in the end, that was his undoing in 1944.
His failure also meant the continuation of the status quo—the 1916 Resolution—for the foreseeable future, which, depending on where you sat, was either good or bad. But more broadly, Moses’ defeat also shows that, in its early years, the City Planning Commission proved ineffective in achieving its own goals. Whether it was the grand dreams of Tugwell’s Master Plan or Moses’ simple rezoning, the City Planning Commission failed to establish power over land uses and to find the right balance between growth and change and protection and preservation. This legacy continues into the 21st century, where the idea today of wholesale rezoning is virtually impossible.
FAR Away
Because of Moses’ antipathy toward using the Floor Area Ratio, a full-scale rezoning of the city would have to wait until he was out of power. But over the years, the ideas of those on the left would become increasingly mainstream. As I will document in the next post, the CPC would take up a full-scale rezoning in 1950, and the battle to tame Gotham would continue once again.
[1] As a side note, Moses appears to utter these statements without a hint of irony, which is rich given that throughout his long career, he was not above using sneaky or underhanded methods to achieve his ends.
[2] The Borough Presidents of the Bronx, Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Staten Island were against it, and the citywide officers and the Borough President of Queens voted in favor. On the Board, citywide leaders each had three votes, the borough presidents of Manhattan and Brooklyn had two votes, and the other borough presidents each had one vote.
Author’s Note: This blog post is the first in a series that brings to light Robert Moses’ forgotten role in New York zoning and planning history.
Gotham is suffering from a housing affordability crisis. One reason stems from its stringent zoning regulations, which limit the number of units on each property. Despite the perception that New York is a high-rise city, this is simply not true. Outside of Manhattan, New York is decidedly low-rise, with two-thirds of its properties mandated by law to be one- or two-family homes.
To her credit, Governor Kathy Hochul intends to introduce legislation requiring New York and other cities to upzone neighborhoods around mass transit lines. Her plan is for New York State to add 800,000 new units in the next decade. Mayor Eric Adams has offered the goal of 500,000 new units for Gotham. The fact that upzonings are a key element of Hochul’s plan shows how important zoning is and how it has limited New York’s housing growth.
Planning through Zoning
Reformers who initiated zoning in 1916 aimed to limit the negative “externalities,” such as shadows and traffic congestion, and reduce urban density for its own sake. They were eager to engage in visionary-oriented master planning but felt they could not legally do so without violating sacred property rights. Planning would have to come later.
A Master Plan of Land Use was finally offered to the public in 1941 by the newly formed City Planning Commission. The plan, however, was quickly shot down. Whether it would have been good for New York today is debatable, but its defeat also meant the defeat of master planning as a tool. Rather, New York would rely on zoning instead.
The result was increasing restrictions, as the “law of motion” of zoning is inherently “downward” in residential neighborhoods, where the Nimbyists tend to outnumber the Yimbyists. The idea in the 20th century that restrictive zoning would someday create a housing affordability crisis in the 21st century was not on anyone’s mind. Instead, the pervasive belief was that density was bad and must be limited. While urbanist Jane Jacobs would spearhead the reversal of this thought in the 1960s, New York remains a victim of its past.
Moses on the Mount
In the history of how we got here, few realize the role that Robert Moses played. This was in large part because his actions regarding zoning were more in the “negative” category—things that were not done because of his protest (or his failures). History unfolds when leaders make decisions at crossroads in time. A left turn instead of a right one or vice versa means that our present could have turned out very differently.
Moses was like a tollbooth, and nothing got through without his blessing. And when he wouldn’t let someone pass, they went in another direction. In the period from 1938 to 1941, Moses saw himself as the guardian of New York’s middle path and he felt his role was to lay down the law: New York will not cave into its far-left impulses. The City should build infrastructure and parks, and even allow for some restrictive residential zoning, but there will be no over-arching Master Plan that imposes Utopia on Gotham.
The Master Builder
When we think about Robert Moses, a handful of popular narratives circulate. First is that of the “Master Builder.” In his four-decade career, Moses built and built and built, and created modern New York. He cleared old neighborhoods for highways, bridges, urban renewal projects, and public housing. He built scores of parks and oversaw the construction of two World’s Fairs.
Then there’s the narrative about his battle with Jane Jacobs—a David versus Goliath tale about the people versus their meddling government. A rag-tag group of residents, led by Jacobs, “took down” the indomitable Moses to block his building of an elevated highway through Greenwich Village.
Finally, there’s the narrative about his anti-democratic methods. As Chairman of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, he was not directly beholden to leaders or voters and could not be checked by the democratic process. Rather, his power stemmed from the almighty nickel. The toll fares pouring in from his bridges and tunnels were the agency’s to keep, and Moses plowed them back into other massive projects.
But less known—and even forgotten—was that Moses was a member of the City Planning Commission from 1942 to 1960, and, before that, Moses was a key voice regarding New York’s planning decisions. Reading Caro’s book one comes away with the notion that Moses’ impact on zoning and urban planning was minimal, if at all.
From a storytelling perspective, this makes sense. Residents were displaced to make way for public housing and “slum clearance.” Traffic congestion emerged immediately upon opening the highways. The Cross Bronx Expressway ripped apart communities in the South Bronx. It’s no wonder that Moses’ role in the mundane world of zoning codes and land use has been forgotten. It doesn’t make for good copy.
Moses v. Tugwell. On the left is the Master Builder, Robert Moses. On the right is the Master Planner, Rexford Tugwell. Politically speaking, however, Moses was on the right and Tugwell on the left.
La Guardia Takes the Helm
Moses’ influence in New York’s zoning history began in the mid-1930s. The Great Depression and the corruption scandal of Roaring Twenties Mayor James “Jimmy” Walker led to the election of Fiorello La Guardia as mayor in November 1933. La Guardia was a reform-minded congressman from East Harlem, and he brought to City Hall his zeal for change. He wanted to eliminate the power of the Tammany Hall Democratic Machine and have the government play a more active role in aiding residents.
In the sphere of city planning, two of his actions were pivotal. The first was that immediately upon taking office, La Guardia brought in Moses as Commissioner of the Parks Department, which then paved the way for the “Power Broker” to dominate city construction for the next quarter century.
Moses gained prominence in Governor Al Smith’s administration in the 1920s. Originally hired to aid the governor in reorganizing the state government, Moses was then given the chance to build parks. In this role, he created the Jones Beach Park system on Long Island, along with parkways to deliver people to them.
La Guardia was eager for Moses to replicate his success within the city, and he was not disappointed. Within weeks of his appointment, funds from the Federal government began pouring in and thousands of employed workers were put to the tasks of creating parks and public swimming pools.
Moses was also a master of public relations. All his projects were accompanied by glossy pamphlets, charts, and maps extolling their virtues. They were distributed to the press and politicians, and they fueled Moses’ desire to engender the goodwill necessary to keep his building operations in constant motion. They also reflected what people wanted to see. Through the slick, “utopian” renderings, New Yorkers could be confident their city was being cleaned up and modernized.
The Birth of the City Planning Commission
The second element of La Guardia’s program was that of charter reform. La Guardia aimed to centralize power in the mayor’s office as New York City had operated more like a federation of boroughs. The borough presidents had relatively strong powers through the Board of Estimate, a “legislative” body made up of the five borough presidents, the mayor, the president of the Board of Aldermen, and the city comptroller. Since the Board voted on important budgetary and governance issues, borough presidents would engage in horse trading to promote their agendas, and, as a result, the Board was often parochial in its outlook.
In 1936, the electorate voted for a new charter. Though it kept the Board of Estimate intact, one of the key provisions was the formation of the City Planning Commission (CPC), whose six members were appointed by the mayor. The CPC had a three-fold mandate. The first was as the “guardian” of the city maps. As such, it was directly involved in the rezoning and remapping of city streets and lots. Second, it was charged with the creation of a Master Plan of the city’s land use, transportation routes, and other municipal services. Third, it was to produce a capital expenditures budget and a five-year capital expenditure program for the investments in the city’s infrastructure.
Ultimately, the CPC, however, had to answer to the Board of Estimate. But to give the CPC power, major policies that it adopted would become law unless vetoed by three-quarters of the Board of Estimate.
Moses Says No
It was widely expected that Robert Moses would be the new CPC Chairman. But he declined. At the time, in 1937, he simply told the New York Times, “I’d rather do what I’m doing.” However, in a speech in 1939, he divulged more details:
[W]hen the Charter went into effect the Mayor asked me to be Chairman of the Planning Commission and I talked to my friends on the Charter Commission about it. The point of the story is that no two of them agreed on the functions of the Planning Commission, although all of them were insistent that it was a vitally important body. The conversation became so confusing that it occurred to me that we might get somewhere by means of a practical analogy, simile, or metaphor, and I asked what function the Planning Commission played in the city government on the theory that the city government was an automobile. One of my distinguished charter friends said that the Planning Commission was the steering wheel; another said it was the brakes. They all agreed that it was not the engine or the carburetor. After thinking it all over I decided that moving from an administrative position into the Planning Commission would be trading the substance for the shadow. (Emphasis added.)
The designated powers of the CPC were not only too vague, but were also hidden from view, and Moses would like to keep the spotlight on him. He was, after all, the hero who delivered parks to the people.
Brain-Truster-on-Hudson
When his man declined, La Guardia searched for someone who had both the gravitas to lead the Commission and could also, in theory, adhere to the mayor’s wishes. That man, La Guardia felt, was Rexford Tugwell.
Born in Sincalirville, New York in 1891, Tugwell earned a Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania. He became an economics professor and taught at Columbia University in the 1920s. In 1933, he joined the Roosevelt administration in two capacities. First was as a member of Roosevelt’s “Brain Trust,” a group of intellectuals who gave advice to the president. Second, he served in various positions in the Department of Agriculture.
In April 1935, Tugwell started up the Resettlement Administration (RA), within the Federal Emergency Relief Administration. The RA sought to relocate struggling rural households to newly-built communities in order to provide urban opportunities. The RA initiated the construction of so-called Greenbelt Cities. They were modeled after Ebenezer Howard’s concepts, as espoused in his 1898 book Garden Citiesof To-morrow, where large greenbelts enclosed low-densities towns.
“Rex the Red”
Tugwell was a controversial figure and was labeled by his enemies as a “Rex the Red,” and he was nudged out of the Roosevelt administration in 1936. As planning historian Mark Gelfand writes,
No political figure of the 1930s was more closely identified with planning than Rexford Tugwell….Tugwell shared little of the American public’s faith in the market place as the impartial maker of decisions, either economic or political. The marketplace had been outmoded by the new machine age; society could no longer be run efficiently or justly on the principles of individualism and competition. Both businessmen and politicians, he insisted, thrived on uncertainty, whereas liberty, equality, and security in the modern world depended on exactitude and control.
Tugwell believed that government should—and will—someday have a “Fourth Power,” a group of planners and social scientists that employ their sharp minds to surgically remove the pathologies of capitalism. As a devotee of the economist Thorsten Veblen, he saw planning as a process where technocrats organize the economy in the way a conductor leads an orchestra.
Urban Planning Philosophy
His philosophy about urban planning, typical of the day, was an offshoot of his broader planning philosophy and was to follow a specific roadmap:
Step I: Conduct a detailed survey of all aspects of the city’s economy, demographics, land uses, and transportation.
Step II: Project what all these elements are likely to be, with and without planning.
Step III: Produce a Master Plan that creates the ideal city in several decades hence.
Step IV: Implement the program.
In short, the urban planning philosophy of the mid-twentieth century can be summarized by: Measure, Project, Arrange.
For Tugwell, the Plan was to be made by those who knew better—the academics, social scientists, and planners—and implemented as a form of noblesse oblige to protect the hoi polloi from the unfettered greediness of capitalists and real estate speculators. Tugwell’s ideal city would be dominated by single-family houses and decentralized employment centers as some version of Garden City Gotham.
La Guardia and Tugwell
To La Guardia, Tugwell had certain advantages. One was his connection to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR). Tugwell had the ear of the president and was connected to members of his administration. La Guardia harbored ambitions to power at the Federal level, thinking he might even run for president during the 1940 election. When World War II broke out, he was angling to be named Secretary of War.
And Tugwell, like La Guardia, was a reformer. They both disliked hyper-density and sought to clean up the slums and create a modern city. However, Tugwell, unlike La Guardia and Moses, lacked the “transactional” personality required for the job. La Guardia and Moses played the game of realpolitik—as opportunities for reform arose, they took them. When the Federal Government was doling out money for housing, the City built housing. When the Federal Government was paying for workers to build infrastructure, the City built airports and highways.
Dressing Down
La Guardia also had little tolerance for academic arrogance. For example, in August 1939, he sent Tugwell a “dressing down” letter for the way he ran hearings:
It is my desire that hereafter all hearings of the Planning Commission be held in your own offices and also that these hearings follow the procedure of conferences rather than inquiries or judicial proceedings. By that I mean that the members should sit around a table on the same level with officials who appear before them to “confer on the Capital Outlay Budget.” I have already detected the psychological effect on your Commission of being elevated and assuming a judicial as well as an inquisitorial attitude. Please cut it out. I don’t know exactly what it is but just a few feet of elevation brings an individual or a group of individuals into what they seem to think is e loftier atmosphere. They get a bench psychosis, a superiority complex, which always affects judgment in the reverse ratio of the degree of such complex. This has been disappointingly noticeable in your Commission of late.
Tugwell’s vision also included regulating aesthetics, and La Guardia wanted Tugwell to know that that was not his job:
An employee of your Commission…informed the Housing Authority that all plans had to be submitted to the Commission and they would pass upon the architectural detail. This is not the functional power of the Commission. I have instructed the Authority to submit no plans to your Commission whatsoever. All the Commission is entitled to know is the location, the general layout and the density of population…..
The very life, existence and continuance of the Planning Commission depend upon whether it takes a common sense attitude or whether it becomes a busybody, interfering with the functions of other agencies of government; whether it sticks to facts or whether it indulges in fantasy; whether it acts as practical men or constitutes itself into the barefooted Isadora Duncans, dancing on the lawn chasing Will-o’-the wisps.”
Nonetheless, while La Guardia and Tugwell did not always see eye to eye, they met regularly and shared a common concern that the city needed better planning. Ultimately, however, as I will discuss below, La Guardia failed to go to bat for Tugwell’s major initiatives. They were simply too controversial, even for the reformed-minded “Little Flower.”
Moses and Tugwell
Arguably, more important for Tugwell and his planning visions was Robert Moses. The result of their clashes meant that Tugwell’s three-year stint at the CPC would be stormy, at best. In fact, his run-ins with Moses would prove pivotal for New York’s long run zoning and planning history.
Tugwell had his agenda, and Moses had his, and the two would increasingly come to blows. When they shared a common interest, they would work together. When their interests diverged, Moses would have the upper hand.
Scolding Moses
Through their letters, we can get a glimpse into their relationship. A typical exchange, for example, took place in July 1939, when Moses scolded Tugwell about his road building plans. Offering opinions that foreshadowed the bigger battles to come, Moses barked,
Dear Rex:…I must say that I was disappointed at the lack of clarity of this [highways] plan. You will recall that I suggested that if your staff had preliminary ideas about these matters they should be kept in the form of memoranda for your files, and should not be scheduled for hearings as part of the master plan. As the matter stands you are putting those of us who have worked for many years on this arterial problem and who are with you in principle, in the position of opposing you.
Poinsettias
Yet at Christmas time, Moses strategically sent Tugwell poinsettias, compliments of the Parks Department, and a note with a pleasing tone:
Dear Rex: The Park [sic] Department is happy to present you with this Christmas plant. I recall gratefully the helpful and pleasant relationship with your office during the past year. Best wishes for the holiday season for the new year.
Tugwell responded graciously:
Dear Bob: The poinsettias are beautiful and I am happy to have them. The Park [sic] Department is to be congratulated on raising such wonderful plants. They brighten up my office and are a grateful reminder of that friendly and pleasant relationship between us which you mention in your note. This relationship, I hope will always continue.
The Master Plan. City Planning Commissioner Chairman Rexford Tugwell tried to order New York according to his notion of the “good city.” He aimed to make one-third of New York into a vast greenbelt by the 1960s.
Moses in the Middle
Tugwell, however, provided a convenient foil for Moses. The Great Depression created an opening for those on the left to test out their theories. Moses, on the other hand, rose to power with a more focused ambition.
As a young man trying to build parks, he ran headlong into the rich and powerful on Long Island who tried to stop him from building parkways on their lands. Through cleverness and grit, he learned how to beat them at their own game and became known as the “best bill drafter in Albany.”
When he came to the Big Apple, he applied this philosophy locally: Get legislation and money and build quickly; then move on to the next project. With the arrival of Tugwell, Moses began giving public lectures and writing about his opinion of the Planning Commissioner and his ilk. In short, he didn’t like their views. Part of this might have been personal. Tugwell was a busybody interfering in Moses’ plans. But it ran deeper than that. To Moses, government should not impose visions of the “good city” on the citizenry—that smacked of communism.
In a 1939 speech, he provided his philosophy:
I like to believe that I am a forward-looking conservative, that is, a person who recognizes the law of change, wants to keep abreast of the times and to anticipate the future to the extent that it can be visualized, but who wants to hold on to what is good and what has proven its worth before jumping to something new just because it is new. Such a person does not believe in revolutions in human nature nor in cure-alls, nor in the possibility of accomplishing anything really worthwhile in human progress without immense and sustained effort over a considerable period of time.
Ironically, forgotten today in all the debates about Moses was that in Depression-era New York, Moses was, politically speaking, dab smack in the middle. To the left of him were the likes of Tugwell. To the right of him were the laissez-faire-ists who believed that the government that governed the least governed the best. This group would also come to include Jane Jacobs both in her battles with Moses about Greenwich Village in the 1950s and in her writings about cities in her classic book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. They wanted planners of all stripes—both the Tugwells and Moseses—to leave their plans to themselves.
The Standpatters
In a 1940 speech, Moses also attacked those on the right of him as naïve:
The ulta conservative group consists of standpatters who believe that the present slums are good enough for those who live in them….These critics assert that plenty of good people have come out of the slums, that only the shiftless stay in them, and that anyway it is no business of the government to substitute palaces for tenement houses and to fix rents according to what people can pay rather than on the basis of carrying charges.
In this respect, Moses’ power was built on a foundation of taking the middle position between the two extremes. He believed that government ought to be a force for good, but that it should not go so far as to allow, as he put it, the “honest fanatic” to “destroy present investments on the theory that no one has a right to own or maintain a building which is unfit for living.”
The Battle to Rezone New York
As Tugwell began to take concrete actions at the CPC in 1939, it was not clear if Moses would be a friend or foe. Ironically, when it came to his rezoning ideas, Moses was a friend. But not even Moses as “Oz—the Great and Powerful” could hold back the tide of anger from Tugwell’s signature proposal.
Initially, Tugwell felt that he should not push through a complete re-writing of the zoning codes until after he released his Master Plan on Land Use, which was to be formally announced in late 1940. In the meantime, he aimed to create intermediate reforms.
Two of the provisions concern us here. First was the idea of so-called non-conforming uses. When the original 1916 Zoning Resolution was enacted, it grandfathered in all properties that did not conform to the new rules. For example, if there was a factory in a district zoned for residential use, it was allowed to remain. The assumption was these nonconforming uses would simply melt away over time. A quarter-century later, however, this was not so. And to this, Tugwell could not abide.
A Bad Sign
To initiate reform, Tugwell picked advertising signs and billboards as his target. He proposed that billboards in certain zones would need to be removed after one year. Additionally, billboards were to be banned from within 200 feet of parkways. This was something dear to Moses’ heart, and he went to bat for Tugwell on the billboards issue.
However, the real estate community, especially those who profited from billboard advertising, along with those who saw the issue as a Trojan Horse for wider enforcement of non-conforming uses attacked it fiercely. Tugwell tried to placate them by extending the elimination period to two years. But alas the Board of Estimate unanimously rejected it. Not even La Guardia supported it. The Board of Estimate, however, left in the parkway provision.
A FAR is Born
The second feature of Tugwell’s zoning plan was the addition of two novel elements to help downzone New York. First was the introduction of zones that only permitted single-family housing. Before 1939, the zoning resolution only limited bulk through setbacks, general uses (residential, commercial, and unrestricted), and lot coverage. But here was the first time in the city’s history that all but single-family homes were banned in some districts. In fact, single-family zoning became a reality in the Feildston neighborhood first in the Bronx on November 17, 1939, and was subsequently embedded in the resolution.
Relatedly was the first introduction in U.S. history of the floor area ratio (FAR) as a zoning tool. In two newly created districts, not only did the original 1916 rules apply, but there were also FAR caps. The FAR limits how much building area can be provided on the lot as a multiple to the lot size. For example, an FAR of one on a 2500 square foot lot, means a building can be one floor with 2500 square feet or two floors with 1250 square feet each. In the “F-1” districts, the FAR was set at 0.75, while in the “E” districts, the FAR was set at 1.9.
The Long-Run Impacts of Tugwell’s Rezonings
While Tugwell lost the battle over non-conforming uses, the CPC established the precedent that some districts could be reserved exclusively for single-family houses and established the FAR as a zoning tool. Moses was silent on these provisions. Likely he saw them as benign, specifically as they related to his program of road building. Downzoned districts of single-family homes or garden apartments were more conducive to automobile usage and encouraged the clearing out of dense tenement districts.
There are some ironies with Moses’ silence on these changes, which we shall discuss in more detail in future posts. But first was that Moses in 1944 would offer his own comprehensive zoning plan, which was a further downzoning. His plan was ultimately defeated, however. And second, after World War II, the CPC would promote the FAR as a planning tool and Moses would become increasingly antagonistic toward it. He was opposed to abandoning the basic 1916 framework. For this reason, even though New York City “invented” the FAR its full-scale implementation would have to wait till Moses was out of power.
Praise be to Robert Moses! This the first two paragraphs of an article printed in the New York Times, on March 20, 1938. It was typical of the kudos New Yorker’s gave to him during the Great Depression.
The Master Plan
While Tugwell’s zoning proposal had mixed success, the defeat of his Master Plan was the last straw. Tugwell certainly had forewarnings from Moses about his position. In May 1940, Tugwell complained in his diary:
Found Moses had written LaG. bitter letter attacking Commission for “long-haired planning.” All this is attempt to prevent work on the Master Plan which would limit, perhaps, his work in some way. … Mayor undoubtedly showed me the letter in a friendly way, though he does not mind a little hard feeling among commissioners. He’d rather they didn’t get together too much.
Dear Bob
After this meeting, Tugwell couldn’t resist the urge to write to Moses.
Dear Bob: I can’t think of anything in our relations during the past two years or more which would lead you to feel that I do not or would not accept your judgment about most planning issues in the city.
There cannot, I think, be any question that I have a mandate to make a master plan. On nothing else is the charter so specific. What kind of master plan is another question. I have hoped that you would give me help on that. Instead you seem to prefer to question the whole activity here developed to master plan work. You have even questioned my judgement as to the division of work in my own department—and done it repeatedly.
I do not want to work up a grievance. I merely want to ask you again if you will not give up your attacks on all master plan work and tell me clearly what it is that you do not like in our proposals. They have been put forward modestly. They were submitted to you even in advance of hearings. None of us here thinks our judgment better than yours. On the contrary we want to embody yours in the plan.….
I hope our relations will not continue to degenerate. If they do, it will not be because I have not tried to make them improve. That, indeed, is the reason for this letter.
Dear Rex
Moses wasn’t going to back down. The next day he fired off his response:
Dear Rex: The last thing I am looking for is a quarrel with you, and it seems to me that there is no reason why we cannot continue to get along amicably and with mutual benefit.
On the other hand, we do have one fundamental difference of opinion. This has to do with the long range planning and the interpretation of Section 197 of the Charter….
There is no compulsion upon your or your associates to prepare a comprehensive far-reaching long range Master Plan. Nobody can make you do it and my hunch is that there are plenty of people who will stop you if you try it, and that in the process you will wreck the Planning Commission and lot of constructive work which might otherwise be done….
If you attempt to go beyond these boundaries and seriously consider distance objectives you will bring your Commission and the administration which it must serve into disrepute, and what’s more you won’t get away with it….
There are so many things on which we can all cooperate, and so much enthusiasm and public support for these things that is seems crazy for you to launch highly controversial, long range plans which many of us, in and out of the city administration, would be compelled to oppose.
Tugwell Undeterred
In early December, the plan for land use was formally released. It was a brief document with five pages of explanatory text and three maps. The first maps showed the land uses and roads at present. And, as the New York Times reported, the second map showed “where the next generation may expect to work and live after slums have been eliminated.” And the third map “foresees the city of the future, probably the third generation from now, when current trends have finally responded to the present foresight of the planners and to the guidance imposed by zoning legislation and public works.” A key element of the Master Plan was that in several decades hence, one-third of New York was to be comprised of a vast greenbelt (an idea that British planner Sir Patrick Abercrombie would put forth for Greater London in his 1944 plan).
Seeing Tugwell step on his turf, Moses ripped him in a letter dated December 10, 1940:
[The Master Plan of Land Use] represents the kind of Ivory Tower, theoretical planning which dresses up revolutionary ideas in obscure and newly invented phrases such as “greenbelts” and “recentralization.” It ignores the city’s government and financial structure, and contemplates an entirely new character along radically different lines…
No one in this city has greater enthusiasm for the expansion of parks and recreation areas than I have.…Actual accomplishments in New York City since 1934…were brought about by people who labored day and night for limited objectives in the face of great difficulties. These accomplishments were not brought about by itinerant carpet bag experts splashing a ten league canvas with brushes of comet’s hair.
I recommend that you file the “Master Plan of Land Use” and forget it. The city won’t stand for it when its implications become apparent. Everything worthwhile in this direction be accomplished by the reasonable use of your zoning powers.
The Hearings
Moses reiterated these statements at the public hearings of the City Planning Commission on December 11. In his personal diary, Tugwell bemoaned not only Moses’ behavior but also the other commissioners, who did not have the nerve cutoff opponents. Tugwell felt his commissioners “like a lot of sheep they shivered in the storm and asked for more by ‘continuing’ the hearings.” Tugwell asked them to take the leap and they hesitated. La Guardia was also silent.
The controversy and the indecision of the commissioners meant that formal approval of the Master Plan was going to have to wait until after city elections in November of 1941. In the meantime, Tugwell’s opponents sharpened their attacks. One business leader, echoing Moses, stated in the New York Times in February 1941 that the Master Plan “was so radical and revolutionary that they will tend to undermine present basic real estate values in the City of New York, without any substantial compensating benefits.”
Moses gets the Last Laugh
By the summer of 1941, Tugwell had had enough. He was offered the chance to become the Chancellor of the University of Puerto Rico and soon after became the island’s governor. He tried his best in the rough and tumble politics of New York City, but, in the end, was unable to win in the arena.
With Tugwell gone, La Guardia once again offered Moses a seat on the City Planning Commission. This time he accepted, though not the chairmanship. Moses now knew what the CPC was capable of and he wanted to be sure that the “Tugwellians” didn’t have any more chances. In early 1942, the CPC formally voted to scrap Tugwell’s Master Plan of Land Use, with Moses declaring, “Green belts are dead.”
Moses on the Inside
While we can’t blame Tugwell’s failure solely on Moses, he did give voice to the collective zeitgeist about city planning in Depression-era New York: It was the city’s job to build infrastructure, clear unsanitary slums, build parks, and get people back to work; it was not to risk the future of New York on pie-in-the-sky ideas that ran counter to Gotham’s laissez-faire spirit.
As a member of the CPC, for the next 20 years, Moses would work from the inside. City planning would now be based on his vision of “short-haired conservatism.” And soon enough, just as World War II was ending, Moses would introduce his own comprehensive zoning reform. This will be the subject of the next blog post.
Gotham is haunted by a gg-ghost!! The ghost of Robert Moses that is.
Whenever a large public project is announced, there’s always a kneejerk reaction against it, with the naysayers shouting, “Remember Robert Moses!”
Moses was the Master Builder of New York who, from the Great Depression to the 1960s, oversaw the construction of most of the city’s highways, bridges and tunnels, and slum clearance and public housing projects.
Toward the end of his career, he lost public favor as his plans became increasingly controversial. Then in 1974, Robert Caro published his 1,300-page biography, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. The book is a page-turner, a mix of awe about how Moses could accomplish all that he did and shock about his abuse of power.
Gotham Noir
Caro’s book and Moses’ run-ins with urbanist Jane Jacobs have produced a residual mythology: That his anti-democratic, heavy-handed methods destroyed New York and its bustling neighborhoods, leaving it a worse place as a result (hence the “Fall of New York”).
The story goes that his slum clearance was really people of color clearance. His highways scattered the middle class and left the subway system sinking under its own weight. His building program led to hyper segregation, the hollowing out of the Big Apple, and the destruction of once-vibrant tenement neighborhoods. All the while, his roads were choked with congestion.
His archenemy, who took him down, was none other than the Patron Saint of Good Urbanism, Jane Jacobs. Jacobs argued that Moses and his ilk should leave neighborhoods alone, and let the “slums” unslum themselves naturally. Rather than building highways, the city should invest in good design strategies and user-friendly parks and let diversity do the rest. Density works for the people, not against them.
When Moses wanted to build a highway through her beloved Greenwich Village, things became personal. She led the protests that stopped Moses in his tracks. Good triumphed over evil.
Myth Damage
The myth of Jacobs-cum-David defeating the villainous Moses-cum-Goliath remains pervasive and influences our thinking about urban policies to this day. Both, however, were in their prime during post-World War II New York, when the issues confronting cities and the beliefs about good urbanism were very different.
Their mythification and deification (one for Olympus and the other for Hades) are preventing us from having real debates about the best way forward regarding the problems facing us in the 21st century. The Moses-Jacobs Myth is now harmful. It’s time to move on.
The Legacies of Jacobs and Moses
One cannot underestimate the legacy of Jane Jacobs. Her book, TheDeath and Life of Great American Cities, is a classic that has inspired countless urbanists. It makes a seductive argument that vibrant urban neighborhoods can magically spring to life if we simply focus on allowing people to find each other and go about their daily lives without much hindrance from the state.
Over time, however, her ideas have transmogrified. In the name of preserving neighborhoods from the wrecking ball or banning the construction of luxury high-rises, residents have used her words to prevent urban re-development. The Gospel of Saint Jane has become the rallying cry of the Nimbyist. Greenwich Village, for example, has become preserved in amber. In 1969, thanks in large part to Jacobs, it was designated as a historic district, and none of its buildings can be torn down.
The result: the bohemians, artists, factory workers, and immigrants who once made it so special can no longer afford to live there. Jacobs’ leave-it-alone philosophy has turned Greenwich Village into an urban country club for those who can afford to pay the membership fee.
Resurrecting Moses
Simultaneously, there have been attempts in the last twenty years or so to revive Moses’ legacy by putting his actions into a larger context. While not condoning his anti-democratic and elitist behavior, “apologists” acknowledge his vast portfolio of accomplishments and note that he was not omnipotent, having been defeated many times throughout his long career, even before Jacobs was on the scene. When compared to “building czars” in other industrial cities, like Chicago, Boston, Detroit, and Newark, his projects were not all that different.
Nonetheless, it’s clear that in the public consciousness, Moses is still the villain, and Jacobs is the hero. He is an example par excellence of big government gone awry. On the other hand, Jacobs is the urbanist of the people, who taught that government can’t and shouldn’t be trusted.
Moses v. Jacobs. Robert Moses (left), the “Master Builder” of New York, built most of the city’s highways, pools, and public housing and slum clearance projects. Jane Jacobs (right) argued that governments should encourage local policies for neighborhoods to thrive on their own.
Welcome to the 21st Century
But it’s time we take a step back and put Moses and Jacob in a historical context. They were both fighting over their version of the 20th-century city. Moses was trying to eradicate the old city in the name of progress. Jacobs was trying to preserve the old city in the name of progress. In some sense, both visions were correct.
The automobile was a technological tour de force that had to be dealt with. To ignore the car in post-World War II planning was impossible. But the density so hated by early and mid-20th century reformers is now celebrated. Our thinking about density is the opposite of what it was in 1960.
In this sense, Jacobs won the debate. A whole body of literature in economics has measured the value of “agglomeration.” It shows that density can generate higher incomes, a more diverse economy, and easier access to goods and services.
But we can’t simply say, “get government out of the way so that we can get on with our lives.” The world we live in is very different than theirs, and we are facing a host of issues that they could never have imagined.
End of the Extensive Margin
In 1950, when Moses started building out the highway system in New York, about 74% of the population in New York and immediate counties lived inside the city boundaries.[1]The suburbs were ripe for development. By 1980, only 56% of this population resided in the city. Moses’ program allowed the city’s territory and economy to expand.
But Moses was out of power by 1970, and road construction stopped. Today, the highway system is virtually identical to the one that existed when he retired. Additionally, as the suburbs filled in, towns and villages used their power over zoning to restrict what could be built. These towns have erected virtual moats or walls around the big city. Thus, by circa 1980, the New York City region became de facto “closed.”
When Jacobs was writing, people were fleeing the city, as it was in rough shape from years of decay and deindustrialization. Jacobs tried to stop planners from encouraging (or requiring) urban flight. But even if neighborhoods like Greenwich Village and East Harlem remained vibrant for the working classes, the middle classes wanted to live in the suburbs. Rising incomes and highways allowed them a castle of their own.
But the debate about in-fill versus expansion became moot forty years ago. Expansion stopped because people wanted it stopped. They wanted to circle the wagons and preserve what they had. The suburban homeowners wanted to protect the value of their houses and keep out “the other.” The urbanists wanted to preserve their neighborhoods from the wrecking ball or change more broadly. And the city and state had no will to improve mass transit or make driving more expensive.
Today, the city can’t expand outward because zoning and transportation limits won’t allow it. The necessary densification within the city is difficult because residents won’t allow it.
The New York Renaissance
While New York City has always been home to immigrants and a part of the global network of trade, commerce, and finance, today, globalization has radically changed the nature of cities. In 1960, the world population was three billion, and today it is nearly 7.8 billion. Over the same period, per capita income grew by 67%. Thus, world income has grown faster than the world population. That’s a lot of disposable income.
Thanks to technological improvements and growth in productivity, the global population is more mobile, richer, and interconnected than ever before. Correspondingly, there has been a massive change in the nature of work, and we are increasingly dependent on computers and computer networks. In 1960, when Moses and Jacobs were duking it out, there was no such thing as personal computers; music was still enjoyed exclusively on vinyl records, and people read the daily news on printed paper.
Our economic, technological, and sociological changes have profoundly impacted New York City in the 21st century. First is that its importance in the global economy has increased. New forms of work and production are taking place in big cities, be it software and computer tech, finance (and fin-tech), biotech and healthcare, and the supporting system of universities, banks and venture capitalists, business services, and so on. In 1960, one out of every four employed New Yorkers worked in manufacturing, but today that number is 2% (and much of that is probably artisanal foods and craft beers).
Funtown
Second, New York is a haven for fun and consumerism for locals and tourists alike. With greater mobility comes greater engagement with the city. In 1991, New York had about 23 million visitors. In 2019, it was up to 66 million.
Besides the day and week trippers are those who pour in for a year or two or three. It’s reasonable to say that New York is experiencing gentrification on a scale unimagined by Jane Jacobs. Her aim was the deslumming of the tenements, not turning central city neighborhoods into hot spots for the global elite and their offspring. As international money has poured in and the workforce has expanded, the city has been unable to build housing fast enough to accommodate this demand.
While housing costs were always high in New York City, the current housing affordability problem is a historical anomaly. Housing was relatively affordable in the decades after the War because the central city was emptying out while new housing was being built along the suburban fringes (in addition to strict rent controls, but which likely did lots of harm in the big scheme of things). There was plenty of supply to go around.
But the larger point is that the city’s economic resurgence is taking place in a “closed” city, generating higher housing prices, greater income inequality, and massive traffic congestion. These were not issues facing urban America in 1960.
Climate Change
There’s little need to dwell here on climate change beyond saying that rising sea levels and damage from more frequent and devastating storms and surges were a non-issue in 1960. While environmentalism was gaining traction, there was virtually no notion of climate change being a major force. So, the Moses-Jacob debate is silent on this point.
Highway Planning. Left: A 1929 plan for a highway system proposed by the Regional Plan of New York and Its Environs. Right: The highways, bridges, and tunnels built by Robert Moses, which implemented much of the Regional Plan. His two highway proposals through Manhattan south of Central Park were defeated.
Policies
If residents of the past had the same attitude about infrastructure and public works as today, we’d never have gotten Central Park, the subway system, or any number of the great projects that made New York what it is. Big problems require major government investments and wholescale changes in housing and transportation policies. There is no way around this.
We cannot build a seawall in the harbor and claim that the city is protected from climate change. We cannot upzone a handful of neighborhoods (while also downzoning other ones), give developers tax breaks, and claim we are doing something about housing affordability. We cannot build a Brooklyn-Queens express rail and say we’ve solved the city’s transportation woes.
Making neighborhoods function better means more housing everywhere, greater geographic mobility for all, and sufficient protections against climate changes regionwide. Since a city is inherently an interconnected system of systems, we must recognize that changes in one area inherently affect the others.
The government needs to take steps to move New York into the 21st century. Ideally, these steps should be regional, as the New York metro area is a megacity of 20 million people. But given the municipal fragmentation and the bitterness of the debate, Gotham must take the lead. So here, I propose a broad agenda to get things started.
Restore Trust in Government
We need to restore trust in our government. The first thing is for politicians to recognize that the Depression and Post-War era policies had mixed results. Some produced a better Gotham, and others made it worse. But these policies have generated a vast database of knowledge about what works and what doesn’t. These lessons can be applied to the present. Additionally, we have a mountain of science and social science research that has emerged in the last 50 years that can be applied to the looming crises.
Politicians need to admit that past mistakes engendered mistrust. And they need to restore trust by being open and listening to residents’ input while being honest and direct about the necessary large-scale changes. All this begins with leadership.
Government policies need to create open, transparent, and fair mechanisms that ensure that people harmed by changes are compensated and made whole. To get buy in, all policies must come with a carrot and stick, and they must help reduce the anxiety of change. Policies must be seen as not targeting only one community or neighborhood.
A Master Plan
Along with building trust is the need for a new master plan, not one that tries to tame or control the city, but one that lays out the mechanisms by which neighborhoods will get needed housing, services, and infrastructure upgrades.
What does the plan include?
Transportation
First, it must make driving more expensive. Too many cars choke up the highways and streets and take up too much space for parking. An automobile-oriented lifestyle encourages sprawl and discourages the use of more efficient (and environmentally friendly) mass transit. The way to do this is to set congestion pricing on all the highways, bridges and tunnels, and parking meters. Let the cost of driving reflect the harm it imposes. When the streets and highways are flooded with cars, jack up the prices. Encourage people to use alternate forms of transportation or wait till the roads are under-utilized.
Second, once we can cut down on the number of cars, you can devote significant street usage to mass transit, be it dedicated bus lanes or streetcars. With fewer cars on the streets, more people will take up biking or electric scootering.
Housing
Improvements in transportation without encouraging more housing will only wind up making housing prices more expensive in places that become more accessible. We need a wholesale rethinking of our current zoning rules and affordable housing policies. The key to housing is to let the market decide how much housing is demanded in a neighborhood.
Land values are the best indicator of demand, and when land values rise, it means more people want to live in that neighborhood than are being accommodated. When housing construction is truly able to follow increases in land prices, all neighborhoods, not just central city gentrifying ones, will get their fair share of construction. This new construction will help keep prices in check. But housing markets must be much more fluid for this to happen.
Climate Change
Currently, the city is trying to sneak its way to resiliency—an expansion of the shoreline here, a resuscitation of wetlands there, fixing drainage pipes over there, and so on. But the truth is the problems caused by sea-level rise and more damaging storms and surges cannot be fixed with a few tweaks. The city needs to create a citywide mitigation plan that prepares Gotham for the 21st century and that also considers that climate change damages will make housing more unaffordable, either from lost units along the shorelines or from the costs of mitigation born by property owners.
The city is not using systematic planning now. For example, plans are afoot to build a seawall in New York Bay to protect against surges. During torrential storms, the sewage and rainwater pipes hit capacity forcing waste into the city’s waters. We can imagine a scenario during a hurricane where the seawall is raised and sewage pours into the harbor simultaneously, turning it into a giant toilet bowl. So, surges and storms impact the city in both vertical and horizontal directions at the same time.
The Future
New York has always managed to survive in the face of adversity. It is an economic engine, a home for immigrants, and a cultural dynamo. There’s every reason to believe that it will power its way to the future.
But ultimately, the question we must ask ourselves is: Don’t we prefer a city that works better for everyone rather than one that descends into tribalism and dysfunction? The policy answers to a better city are there. But the social and political will remain a stumbling block.
The myths we tell ourselves are powerful tools that can propel or block us. Thus, the first step forward is to abandon the tiresome tales of old that keep us locked in the past. Let’s develop a new set of stories about the resurrection of Gotham–one about how its residents came together to collectively slay the beasts that were harming its people, and how the city triumphed in the 21st century.
Thanks to Julia Sinitsky for her editorial assistance.
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[1] In New York, these countries are Nassau and Westchester, and in New Jersey are Hudson, Essex, Middlesex, and Bergen.
