The West Village: Let There Be Blight

The Housing and Redevelopment Board has replaced Robert Moses’s Slum Clearance Committee, and a new order has been proclaimed for the on-going work of tucking in New York’s residential shirt tails. Robert Moses, who now deals only with sovereign nations, has been declared the villain of Title I, and his successors, previously his assistants, have announced themselves the heroes of Urban Renewal.

A solution to the housing emergency in New York has two complicated parts that must first be separated in order to describe the problem itself: first, how to go about it, and second, what to end up with. This article is meant to describe how neither part has been fundamentally changed from the original destructive program, whatever the good intentions that have been declared.

With slogans that everyone can understand, James A. Felt, the City Planning Commissioner, promises an end to bulldozing first and questions later. But bulldozing is not a method, it is an inevitable result of bad planning. Nor did Moses’s crimes begin and end with bulldozing. His way of getting things done involved manipulations of the City Charter, the Municipal Code, and federal and state regulations; his objective was arrogantly monumental architecture, and his method was expressed in contempt for obstacles—he had help. The chief obstacles were the people and their laws; but in a curious way the opaque waters of the law offered Moses protection: no one, apparently, underd...