Matthew Yglesias on X: "Moses’ views about urban freeways were conventional at the time, where his opinions were truly odd were on housing. 🧵" / X

Moses’ views about urban freeways were conventional at the time, where his opinions were truly odd were on housing.

Quote

Nicole

@nicolegelinas

17h

Yep. This 1950 editorial (snipped) represents the conventional uniform elite wisdom of the time. Moses was the efficient executive officer of this uniform elite wisdom. Until the early 1960s, the only people who argued against urban highways were basically considered urban cranks x.com/BigApplePhoeni…

12:50 PM · Mar 1, 2026

37.1K

Views

Post your reply

Matthew Yglesias

@mattyglesias

1h

Moses had the view that eliminating low-quality housing was good even if the housing was not replaced with new better units — he wanted to shrink the supply of urban housing. slowboring.com/p/robert-moses

His preference was to deliberately depopulate cities in order to make them more spacious and less vulnerable to nuclear attack. slowboring.com/p/robert-moses

But he was also hostile to the actually existing suburban developments of the 1950s, which he thought were ugly and bad — genuinely unclear to me how he envisioned his preferred mix of “restrict new supply and destroy old supply” working out. slowboring.com/p/robert-moses

At any rate, these ideas were only very partially implemented — I think in part because they don’t make any sense — but they don’t track well onto any contemporary viewpoint. Nobody today really has this “cheap housing is oversupplied” take, but it deeply informed Moses.

7.4K

To view keyboard shortcuts, press question mark
View keyboard shortcuts

Post

Conversation

To view keyboard shortcuts, press question markView keyboard shortcuts

Post

Conversation

To view keyboard shortcuts, press question mark
View keyboard shortcuts