Why the Bronx Really Burned | Hacker News Reader

Why the Bronx Really Burned

fivethirtyeight.com

35 pointsmdlincoln8 comments

A curious omission in this is Robert Moses [0], who is almost single-handedly responsible for the creation of the South Bronx with his Cross Bronx Expressway [1]. Although waning in power by the mid-1960s, Moses began (and ensured the completion) of a number of public construction projects with disproportionate impacts on poor (and usually non-white) communities.

The Power Broker by Robert A. Caro is one of the best political histories of New York, which I recommend if you're interested in exactly why the city's infrastructure (and lack thereof) is the way it is.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Moses

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_Bronx_Expressway

Bizarrely, The Power Broker appeared in the Financial Times list of best books of 2015. It seems it was never published in the UK until now. It's one of the finest biographies ever written.

That is bizarre. It's a terrific book.

Wikipedia claims that Moses destroyed the South Bronx, not created it, and routed his projects away from wealthy neighborhoods to destroy poor neighborhoods. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Moses#Criticism

> Moses destroyed the South Bronx, not created it It depends on what you think of as the South Bronx. In many senses, Moses did both: he created the common demarcation for the region thought of as the South Bronx (the CBE), and thereby destroyed it.

> routed his projects away from wealthy neighborhoods to destroy poor neighborhoods.

Yes, almost all of his projects had the common theme of benefiting a very precisely selected portion of the population. The Power Broker does a great job detailing Moses' biases, particularly during his parks development phase.

“Yeah, when we get the recommendations of which firehouses to cut, sometimes you get one that would be down the block from where a judge lived or it would be in a powerful city councilman’s district. We would skip that one and move down the list.” Where they knew they were going to get pushback, they actively did not cut in those places.

In other words people directly caused the problem not algorithms.

"The methodology was flawed, the analysis was rife with biases, and the results were interpreted in a way that stacked the deck against poorer neighborhoods."

A little bit of A, a little bit of B.

When you put people in your process, there's little difference.

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