Zoning toward oblivion.

• Author: Weiser, Jay
• Position: Letter to the editor

I enjoyed Damon W. Root's review of Michael Wolf's The Zoning of America, and I'll have to order a copy of the book, but quoting Robert Caro on Robert Moses is like quoting Naomi Klein on Milton Friedman. Caro has spent his career on demonographies of Moses and Lyndon Johnson, decrying liberal deal cutters who fail to meet his saint-like standards of purity.

Moses didn't use zoning to wreck New York City neighborhoods. He worked through public authorities (the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority for highway and airport projects, the New York City Housing Authority for housing), which were exempt from local zoning requirements. Moses acquired land through eminent domain rather than choking neighborhoods off through restrictive zoning. The neighborhoods he condemned consisted mostly of poor-quality 19th-century tenements, some of which had emptied out as people migrated to new housing in the outer boroughs during the 1920S and '30s. He replaced them with new, high-quality, high-rise public housing projects that, at least until they started running into financial trouble during the last decade, were the highest-quality housing in their low-income neighborhoods. In New York, unlike other cities, the high-rise projects worked and were not crime-ridden, so we haven't had to demolish ours.

Moses' unornamented towers in a park were grim-looking (though often nicely landscaped) and lacked retail and a street wall, but that was the era's aesthetic, even for private middle-class projects like Met Life's Stuyvesant Town in New York. While Caro demonstrates that Moses was a believer in racial segregation, other cities (Chicago was worse than New York) and the federal government (the Fair Housing Administration would not guarantee loans in integrated neighborhoods) had the same policy.

His legacy is a mixed bag. He destroyed neighborhoods (which were redlined and deteriorating for lack of capital), some of which, like the well-located Upper West Side, might have gentrified...