planners! and Master Builder [Moses]

| the Eminent Domain revisited.

Great Cities Need Great Builders
Architecture

By EDWARD GLAESER
Special to the Sun
January 19, 2007

Robert Moses still bestrides New York like a colossus. More than three 
decades have passed since Jane Jacobs and Robert Caro tore down Moses's 
once pristine public image, but his physical legacy remains standing. 
Our New York is Moses's New York. He built 13 bridges, 416 miles of 
parkways, 658 playgrounds, and 150,000 housing units, spending $150 
billion in today's dollars. If you are riding the waves at Jones Beach 
or watching the Mets at Shea Stadium or listening to "La Traviata" at 
Lincoln Center or using the Triborough Bridge to get to the airport, 
then you are in the New York that Moses built.

....

Moses's greatest failures were his housing projects. More than 40 years 
ago, Jacobs attacked Moses for replacing well-functioning neighborhoods 
with Le Corbusier-inspired towers. She was prescient. Moses spent 
millions and evicted tens of thousands to create buildings that became 
centers of crime, poverty, and despair.

A simple but stark lesson emerged from Moses's travails as housing tsar: 
The government is not good at the housing business. New York is filled 
with apartment buildings that provide decent housing and a comfortable 
social environment for their residents. Almost none of them were built 
by the government. New York has an affordable-housing problem, but it is 
the result of government intervention in the housing market that has 
limited housing supply. Rent control and an increasingly anti-growth 
regulatory environment have ensured that new supply has not kept up with 
the demand to live in reinvigorated New York. We need people with the 
vision of Robert Moses building homes in New York, but they should come 
from a private sector that is less fettered by government constraints. 
Moses was at his best when he had to make sure his projects would fund 
themselves or would really appeal to the people of New York. When Moses 
acquired vast federal funding, he also acquired the freedom to pursue 
his own vision, and that vision wasn't always in the interests of the 
city. Mr. Bloomberg's plan for New York in 2030 needs its own Moses-like 
master builders, but the city will be best served if those builders are 
funded by and accountable to the city. Those builders must not be 
beholden to every neighborhood group or cadre of unelected elites. While 
Moses's successes would have been impossible under such conditions, his 
failures could have been checked if he had faced a greater degree of 
citywide oversight.


cont'd....
http://www.nysun.com/article/47012?page_no=1