Speaker 1: Oh, Holy leading Jesus on a cross, his legs broken.
Speaker 1: That's the podcast. Stabbed in the side by a spear.
Speaker 1: That's a different that's a different show. Holy that Jesus.
Speaker 1: I'm Robert Evans. Are you? I am Robert Evans, the
Speaker 1: Jesus of podcasting, crucified, crucified by the need to make content,
Speaker 1: which I do for your souls in the same way
Speaker 1: that Jesus died. I'm sorry you're fired. I feel like
Speaker 1: I feel like this is a good direction to go
Speaker 1: is do not. I think it's really going to work
Speaker 1: out for so if people love blasphemy, everybody's a big
Speaker 1: fan of blasphemy. That's what made the Beatles so huge.
Speaker 1: It was blasphemy. They were, in fact, bigger than Jesus speaking,
Speaker 1: a bigger than Jesus. Bridget Todd my guest today. I'm
Speaker 1: good with that, bro. Yeah, you know what, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: take it. I'll take that intro. I appreciate it. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean you know the fuck him. Um, Bridget how
Speaker 1: are how are you doing? How how are you feeling
Speaker 1: as we go into part two? I'm feeling good. I
Speaker 1: have to, I was telling Sophie before we hit record
Speaker 1: I'm a little bit hungover, but I'm otherwise doing well.
Speaker 1: That's great. Um, I am hungover from uh taking a
Speaker 1: bunch of pain killers last night after laser eye surgery. Um.
Speaker 1: Just like bridget all, it was an open bar. Oh
Speaker 1: ship ye man, open bar. Had a minute since I
Speaker 1: had me an open bar. I love great Goose Martini's
Speaker 1: I can't be trust bar. Um. So let's uh, what
Speaker 1: do we what do we? What do we bridget? When
Speaker 1: we last left off, we're talking about that Jones State Park,
Speaker 1: the overpasses that he built real low. Um, We're and
Speaker 1: like kind of the debate to it about it to
Speaker 1: this day and kind of the shitty arguments people make
Speaker 1: to be like, no, he had to make the bridges
Speaker 1: too low for busses. It was prettier that way. Um.
Speaker 1: So yeah, and it's it's it's kind of like as
Speaker 1: we kind of talk about the degree to which it's
Speaker 1: fair to blame Moses for making bridges too low, and
Speaker 1: you'll find again, you can find a ton of there's
Speaker 1: like this whole wave in the last couple of years
Speaker 1: and people being like, actually, Robert Moses did nothing wrong
Speaker 1: and like it's unfair to critique him for that, they
Speaker 1: all tend to ignore the fact that not only did
Speaker 1: he like build his bridges super low, but he drafted
Speaker 1: because again he's the legislation guy. Right, He's really good
Speaker 1: at writing laws. One of the things he did was
Speaker 1: he drafted and passed legislation to forbid the use of
Speaker 1: busses on parkways. UM because again he wants to cut
Speaker 1: off where poor people can travel to um. And and
Speaker 1: this is like, uh, he considered, you know, this was
Speaker 1: part of his This was part of his kind of
Speaker 1: plan to silo off poor people of color from white
Speaker 1: people in the places white people went affluent white people
Speaker 1: in particular, because he was not just racist, he was classist. UM.
Speaker 1: And laws like that kind of like trying to restrict
Speaker 1: busses on parkways where something he would do as like
Speaker 1: an emergency stop gap because he couldn't funk around with
Speaker 1: like construction everywhere. Um. But he considered those laws a
Speaker 1: lot less useful in stopping poor people and particularly poor
Speaker 1: people of color um, from living around white people than
Speaker 1: he did physical construction. Um. Again, you can change a law.
Speaker 1: A law can be changed overnight, as we're all currently
Speaker 1: dealing with, right. Um. It takes as a court of
Speaker 1: returning something or a legislature voting infrastructure has a long lifespan, right, Um,
Speaker 1: This is why you know he constructed something like a
Speaker 1: hundred and seventy two hundred and eighty bridges that were
Speaker 1: too low for buses. Um, and he saw that kind
Speaker 1: of thing is much more important. He was quoted often
Speaker 1: is saying, quote, legislation can also be changed. It's very
Speaker 1: hard to tear down a bridge once it's up, um,
Speaker 1: and Moses found it considerably easier, in fact, to tear
Speaker 1: down the homes of poor black people, which he did
Speaker 1: regularly as part of his construction schemes. His justification for
Speaker 1: this was always the need to create a massive network
Speaker 1: of urban highways within New York City. The number one
Speaker 1: thing that he did, the thing that people remember him
Speaker 1: fondly for, is he made all these bridges and parks.
Speaker 1: The thing he spent most of his time doing was
Speaker 1: building urban highways, because again, he hates public transportation. He
Speaker 1: fucking loves cars. And not only do urban highways lead
Speaker 1: to congestion, UM, lead to a city in which a
Speaker 1: lot of people have to have cars that would probably
Speaker 1: be happier living off a public transportation. What you can
Speaker 1: do with a highway is you can use it as
Speaker 1: a wall, because the highway is a very effective physical barrier. Right,
Speaker 1: you can't like run across the highway, He'll get fucking killed. Um.
Speaker 1: And so he was. He not only built these highways
Speaker 1: and kind of tried to wrench away progress in New
Speaker 1: York from towards public transportation, but and and in favor
Speaker 1: of like everyone having their own fucking car. But he
Speaker 1: used the highway to wall off poor, majority black parts
Speaker 1: of the city from affluent white ones. And he also
Speaker 1: made sure that whenever he was constructing a highway, because
Speaker 1: again you're adding a highway to a city that's already
Speaker 1: quite dense, you have to destroy a lot of houses,
Speaker 1: you have to bulldoze neighborhoods. And it just so happened
Speaker 1: that all of the neighborhoods he destroyed, uh in order
Speaker 1: to make his urban highways were majority black. Um. Now,
Speaker 1: Robert Carro argues that Moses purposefully placed roots in such
Speaker 1: a way as to demand that it would demand the
Speaker 1: eviction of large numbers of non white people living in
Speaker 1: places he didn't want them to live, particularly neighborhoods that
Speaker 1: bordered upper class white neighborhoods um and he would do
Speaker 1: this even when the route he picked, even when like
Speaker 1: going through these neighborhoods, was hideously inefficient. A great example
Speaker 1: of this is the Cross Bronx Expressway, which I'm sure
Speaker 1: we're all familiar if you've been to New York, like,
Speaker 1: you know of the Cross Bronx Expressway. In order to
Speaker 1: build the Cross Bronze Expressway, they had to eliminate the
Speaker 1: neighborhood of East tremant Um. This one mile chunk of
Speaker 1: highway couldn't be constructed without evicting tens of thousands of people,
Speaker 1: most of whom were black. Under Moses's reign, these people
Speaker 1: were forced out of their homes five years before construction
Speaker 1: was completed, and the eviction was brutal. People did not
Speaker 1: want to give up their neighborhood for this road, as
Speaker 1: pa Rights quote now, and this is after people were
Speaker 1: forced out, sometimes by police with weapons. Now, East Trement
Speaker 1: looked as London might have looked after the if after
Speaker 1: the bombs troops had fought their way through it from
Speaker 1: house to house. It had the look of a jungle. Now.
Speaker 1: Later in The Power Broker, Carol alleges that quote during
Speaker 1: the seven years since the end of World War Two,
Speaker 1: there had been evicted from their homes in New York
Speaker 1: for public works, mainly Robert moseses public works some hundred
Speaker 1: and seventy thousand persons. He suspects this number is actually
Speaker 1: quite low. A report published more recently by the New
Speaker 1: York City Planning Commission describes this process overseen by Moses,
Speaker 1: as an enforced population displacement, unlike any previous population movement
Speaker 1: in the city's history. Um, you could see this as
Speaker 1: an act of ethnic cleansing, and it is in a
Speaker 1: lot of way, and it's but it's done under the
Speaker 1: auspices of what we're improving the city. This is going
Speaker 1: to make it better for everybody. We have to add
Speaker 1: in these roads. We're paying people for their houses even
Speaker 1: if they don't want to sell them, and we have
Speaker 1: to like force them out using police. I'm going to
Speaker 1: quote now from a write up by Poverty Justice Solutions
Speaker 1: that makes it clear just how fucked up the demographics
Speaker 1: on this were. The evicted population was forty black or
Speaker 1: Hispanic at a time when those demographics made up only
Speaker 1: a little over ten percent of the city's overall population,
Speaker 1: meaning that a large proportion of the evicted tenants faced
Speaker 1: extreme discrimination and finding new housing, and little arrangement was
Speaker 1: made by the city to help evicted tenants find new housing.
Speaker 1: Carol tells us for seven years, Moses had been giving
Speaker 1: the impression that the bulk of the low income families
Speaker 1: displaced by his public works had been accommodated in public
Speaker 1: housing projects. In reality, it was found that the percentage
Speaker 1: of displaced families placed in public housing was pathetically small.
Speaker 1: Many tenants were forced to crammond already crowded tenement buildings nearby,
Speaker 1: exacerbating conditions caused by poverty and allowing exploitative landlords to
Speaker 1: reap huge profits. In the worst cases, tenants were forced
Speaker 1: to shelter in their old neighborhoods as they were being
Speaker 1: torn down, surrounded by the deafening noise of demolitions, and
Speaker 1: often without basic utilities. A member of the Women's City
Speaker 1: Club investigating the Manhattan Town development on the Upper West
Speaker 1: Side described people living in a scene that looked like
Speaker 1: a cross section of bombed out Berlin. Right after World
Speaker 1: War Two. Some of the tenements were still standing, broken
Speaker 1: windows gaped cyclessly at the sky basement doors, yawning and
Speaker 1: covered on the sidewalks, and surrounding them were acres strewn
Speaker 1: with brick and mortar and rubble where wreckers and bulldozers
Speaker 1: had been at work. So that's heart I mean, like
Speaker 1: that's heartbreaking. And also even if those people have gone
Speaker 1: into like public housing and like housing projects, that's not ideal.
Speaker 1: And the fact that they that that wasn't even really
Speaker 1: what was happening. They were being crowded into tenements and
Speaker 1: things like that, Like I can only imagine the lasting
Speaker 1: legacy that that is that had on those families for generations.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's that's so heartbreaking. They're being made refugees
Speaker 1: in the city they were born in um and it's
Speaker 1: you can find pictures of this period of time and
Speaker 1: they're they're pretty harrowing. They look like war zone photos.
Speaker 1: It will be like, you know, you'll see pictures of
Speaker 1: like three or four little black kids sitting on like
Speaker 1: a pile of like rocks next to like a burnt
Speaker 1: out shell of a building, and it's usually framed. Especially
Speaker 1: when like it's brought up, it's like this is how
Speaker 1: bad New York was before, like the city got poverty
Speaker 1: under and got crime under control, and like all this stuff.
Speaker 1: It's like no, no no, no, this is how ugly the
Speaker 1: city was after they went to war with like several
Speaker 1: neighborhoods in order to build a highway so that people
Speaker 1: didn't have to get on a train because Bob Moses
Speaker 1: didn't like trains. And then that's why this happens. Yeah, yes,
Speaker 1: And then that sentiment that like false sentiment of like oh,
Speaker 1: this is how the city was before they got it
Speaker 1: under control, that's used to like usher in all manner
Speaker 1: of really fucked up policies, Like it's such a fucked
Speaker 1: up cycle of that really has criminalizing and targeting poor
Speaker 1: people and black people and people of color at the
Speaker 1: heart of it. And it's yeah, it really breaks my heart. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's really fucked up. Um. And when Bob Moses wasn't
Speaker 1: busy displacing Black New Yorkers, he was deliberately routing roads
Speaker 1: in such a way as to clog their neighborhoods, like
Speaker 1: heavily black neighborhoods, with pollution and traffic. He specifically built
Speaker 1: the road in a highway system of New York as
Speaker 1: to offload the majority of the traffic and thus the
Speaker 1: pollution on black neighborhoods. The Yale Law Journal notes that
Speaker 1: he placed the Robert F. Kennedy Bridges exit ramp and
Speaker 1: Harlem when a better location would have been the Upper
Speaker 1: east Side. The only reason to locate it in Harlem
Speaker 1: was to stop traffic from exiting and wealthy neighborhoods and
Speaker 1: instead crowd Harlem with traffic headed for the bridge, right.
Speaker 1: And I'm sure that when asked he was like, Oh,
Speaker 1: the aesthetics are just better this way. It just looks
Speaker 1: better this way. It looks better this way. This is
Speaker 1: going to be like you know, he would They always
Speaker 1: have some wonky reason why it's not racism, right, m hmm,
Speaker 1: but it just keeps happening this way. Um, when he
Speaker 1: constructed the Long Island Expressway, it would have cost Moses
Speaker 1: four more to add mass transit in the middle of
Speaker 1: the highway, right, to like add a mass transit line
Speaker 1: in the middle of the highway. Four percent increase. And
Speaker 1: we already know Bob Moses is great at getting his
Speaker 1: budgets increased, right, right, So when he builds the Long
Speaker 1: Island Expressway for four percent more, they could add mass
Speaker 1: transit to the highway. This would have doubled the carrying
Speaker 1: capacity of the Long Island Railroad, massive improvement and the
Speaker 1: ability of New York's public transportation. Moses is presented with
Speaker 1: this option um and says no. When he was designing
Speaker 1: the Van Wick Expressway to the JFK Airport, he was
Speaker 1: asked to reserve space for future mass transit. Basically like,
Speaker 1: for an extra two million dollars, we can add space
Speaker 1: into this development so that in the future we can
Speaker 1: add mass transit and it will be cheap, right, um,
Speaker 1: And the two million bucks would have cost is again
Speaker 1: a peddling some given the budgets involved in the potential benefit. Uh,
Speaker 1: he says no, And again he could have done it
Speaker 1: back in like the fifties for two million dollars. Instead,
Speaker 1: years later, when the city priced adding a rail link,
Speaker 1: they were quoted three million. This is one of the concept.
Speaker 1: This is part of what because of the way he
Speaker 1: builds the highways and build the roads and builds the
Speaker 1: parks in the city, one of the things that it
Speaker 1: does because he hates public transit. It's part of why
Speaker 1: it's so fucking expensive today to make any change to
Speaker 1: New York City. And there's other reasons, right, there's permitting
Speaker 1: and why. There's a bunch of reasons why. One of
Speaker 1: them is that Moses specifically puts a bunch of ship
Speaker 1: in the city that he builds without even though he
Speaker 1: has the option without any like without space for a
Speaker 1: public transit, because he hates it, right, And that's part
Speaker 1: of why it's so expensive to expand anything in the city. Again,
Speaker 1: not trying to say that's the whole thing. This is
Speaker 1: a complicated story, but he's this is a significant factor
Speaker 1: in it, and it's it's still very hard today. Like
Speaker 1: it's like a lasting legacy, and it is really wild
Speaker 1: to me. I know that you've said this a few times,
Speaker 1: but like hating public transit while being in charge of
Speaker 1: public transit and like never taking public he's in charge
Speaker 1: of the parks. Well yes, but that that also means
Speaker 1: that he gets to be in charge as they're building
Speaker 1: these roads and these things that like connect you know,
Speaker 1: all of this stuff. Like as he's doing these developments,
Speaker 1: he gets to make decisions about public transit. Again, he's
Speaker 1: not in charge of technically anything but the parks. This
Speaker 1: is all the way he's like wielding power because of
Speaker 1: he's he's he's not None of this is formal right.
Speaker 1: None of this is like him issuing executive orders. This
Speaker 1: is all him sitting down and talking to people are
Speaker 1: like using the flex at the park depart Parks Department
Speaker 1: has pushing his budgets like threatening people who are elected
Speaker 1: with like well, if this doesn't get done, it's gonna
Speaker 1: look bad. Like that's how he does all of this.
Speaker 1: Um So, the New York City bridges that are built
Speaker 1: under Robert Moses, which are the Tribe Borough, the Verrizono,
Speaker 1: the Henry Hudson, throgs Neck, and Bronx white Stone, all
Speaker 1: became iconic symbols of the city, and all of them
Speaker 1: are built without a mass transit component. Moses repeatedly shut
Speaker 1: down proposals to add this capacity whenever it came up,
Speaker 1: and he also acted to hamper the subway system whenever possible.
Speaker 1: On two occasions, the city attempted to build a second
Speaker 1: Avenue subway line. Both times Moses stopped them from using
Speaker 1: funds which he controlled, to pay for the project. He
Speaker 1: instead diverted the money to bridges and high ways. In
Speaker 1: nineteen fifty five, the transportation budget Moses Shepherd it was
Speaker 1: large enough to modernize the Long Island Railroad and build
Speaker 1: two new tunnels under the Hudson, and I'm gonna quote
Speaker 1: again from the power broker here, it would have been
Speaker 1: more than enough to build a long, proposed and desperately
Speaker 1: needed Second Avenue subway, and to build a tunnel along
Speaker 1: across the East River through which a branch of the
Speaker 1: Second Avenue line would extend out to Queens to provide
Speaker 1: adequate subway service there, and to build extensions of the
Speaker 1: existing subway lines to Queens to provide service for the
Speaker 1: hundreds of thousands of residents of Eastern Queens who were
Speaker 1: miles away from the nearest subway, And to extend the
Speaker 1: Nostrand Avenue subway in Brooklyn three miles along Flatbush Avenue
Speaker 1: to a new modern terminal that would serve the growing
Speaker 1: Mill basin area that possessed no rapid transit at all.
Speaker 1: And to construct a new plaza and great elimination project
Speaker 1: at the Calb Avenue that would eliminate switching delays which
Speaker 1: caused the most severe bottleneck and train service between Brooklyn
Speaker 1: and Manhattan. So he he has the budget, he has
Speaker 1: can do all this right. This could have all been
Speaker 1: in place decades ago in New York City, but instea
Speaker 1: of using it for that, Moses ensures the money is
Speaker 1: diverted to build more highways. He takes the money that
Speaker 1: could have gone and he builds more fucking roads for
Speaker 1: people's personal cars. Um. And again his justification for this
Speaker 1: is always this is going to solve traffic. This is
Speaker 1: going to help people's commute time, right right, like that, Yeah,
Speaker 1: what a joke. It never does, right, raise your hand
Speaker 1: listening at home, if you've been in a city that
Speaker 1: expanded a highway and if it actually helped with your commute,
Speaker 1: it never does, like if they always say that, it
Speaker 1: never does. And the traffic in New York, as you
Speaker 1: said Earl as you opened the show with it, is
Speaker 1: a nightmare to this day. Yeah, it never quite seems
Speaker 1: to work. Um the because again, cars are actually a
Speaker 1: hideously inefficient way of getting large numbers of people around
Speaker 1: a dense urban area. Um so yeah, And this becomes
Speaker 1: clear eventually city officials are like, wait a minute, none
Speaker 1: of these roads are helping with the traffic problem. The
Speaker 1: in fact, the more roads that he builds, the worst
Speaker 1: traffic gets because and also the more cars are just
Speaker 1: in the city that need parking, that are like and
Speaker 1: so parking is now more expensive and the streets are
Speaker 1: even more crowded, and yeah, um people do start as
Speaker 1: like this becomes clear and the fifties and stuff pushing
Speaker 1: for him to add more public transit, but Moses, for
Speaker 1: forty years, fights it every chance he gets. Right, He
Speaker 1: doesn't always get his way, but he always fights whenever
Speaker 1: he whenever it like crosses his purview. He fights to
Speaker 1: limit the expansion of public transit because like, fuck people,
Speaker 1: you know, I have a driver, right, I don't want
Speaker 1: to get all I'm not gonna get on a subway. No,
Speaker 1: I mean, the whole justification really is fun. People. He
Speaker 1: probably has no sense of what like the ways that
Speaker 1: expanding public transit would actually improve cities and improve livability.
Speaker 1: He can't because again, he doesn't drive. So that's the
Speaker 1: other part of this. He takes a car everywhere, but
Speaker 1: a dude is driving him when he needs to get somewhere.
Speaker 1: He has a fucking driver because he never learns how
Speaker 1: to drive, So that also means he never has to park.
Speaker 1: Like's not he is. He is. He is because of
Speaker 1: his wealth and privilege, completely immune to the consequences of
Speaker 1: all the decisions he's making. So he just gets to like, well,
Speaker 1: when I'm on the highway, I just get to like
Speaker 1: read my book or you know, work on paperwork or something,
Speaker 1: and then off I go. And this seems like a
Speaker 1: good development. No more nasty subways. You know, he sucks
Speaker 1: pretty bad. He sucks pretty bad, Bridget. But you know
Speaker 1: who doesn't suck pretty bad? You know who sucks good?
Speaker 1: They suck incredibly these they could they could take the
Speaker 1: lug nuts off of an eighteen wheelers tires, Bridget. Who's
Speaker 1: that the products and services that support this podcast? Wow?
Speaker 1: So if you just let me get away with that one,
Speaker 1: she didn't stop it at all. Didn't stop it at all.
Speaker 1: Suck him right off, pop him out. Have the energy
Speaker 1: for this today? Well, our sponsors have the energy to
Speaker 1: do that, Sophie. Here they are. Oh, we're back, and
Speaker 1: we're talking about the mouth game of our sponsors, which
Speaker 1: is solid um anyway. So if he's still fine with us, Wow,
Speaker 1: she just muted herself. Incredible, just great, everybody's wow, what
Speaker 1: a professional podcast. Unbelievable. I can't believe you're allowing us.
Speaker 1: She gave me the thumbs up that means we're good
Speaker 1: to go. Okay, So obviously Bridget Moses is new Defenders
Speaker 1: cannot deny his staggering racism or the degree to which
Speaker 1: his policies contributed to a small, choked city based around
Speaker 1: the least efficient form of transit conceivable. But they will argue,
Speaker 1: while he was not perfect, he did a lot of
Speaker 1: good things to and people don't note all of the
Speaker 1: good things he did for black people, right, he did
Speaker 1: a lot of nice stuff for black people. So really, like,
Speaker 1: how could he be that racist if he did nice
Speaker 1: things for black people helping us out? What do you do?
Speaker 1: Here's Bloomberg to tell you what he did? Okay, but
Speaker 1: Moses was complex. He gave Harlem a glorious pool and
Speaker 1: play center. Now Jackie Robinson Park one of the best
Speaker 1: public works of the New Deal era anywhere in the
Speaker 1: United States. A crowd of twenty five thousand attended the
Speaker 1: opening ceremony in August nineteen thirty six, sixty nine, regiment
Speaker 1: playing when the music goes Round and Round before park's commissioner,
Speaker 1: Moses was introduced to great applause by Bill bow Jangles Robinson.
Speaker 1: So this is undeniable, right, have you been to that park?
Speaker 1: Jackie Robinson's Yeah, it's a lovely Park. It's undeniable that,
Speaker 1: like he's the mastermind of making that happen. Um. But
Speaker 1: even while he's building things that carried real benefits to
Speaker 1: New York black citizens, he couldn't avoid the urge to
Speaker 1: be racist as all hell. And this quote from the
Speaker 1: Power Broker, you may need to brace yourself for here,
Speaker 1: all right, I'm strapped in Robert Moses had always displayed
Speaker 1: a genius for adorning his creations with little details that
Speaker 1: made them fit in with their setting, that made the
Speaker 1: people who use them feel at home in them. There
Speaker 1: was a little detail in the Playhouse comfort station of
Speaker 1: the Harlem section of Riverside Park that has found nowhere
Speaker 1: else in the park. The wrought iron trellises of the
Speaker 1: park's other playhouse and comfort stations are decorated with designs
Speaker 1: like curling waves. The wrought iron trellises of the Harlem
Speaker 1: Playhouse comfort station are decorated with monkeys. Oh my fucking god,
Speaker 1: not monkeys. I mean it's I mean, it's it's really
Speaker 1: saying the quiet part a loud, if you know what
Speaker 1: I mean. Yeah, it's it's not even yeah, it's not
Speaker 1: the quiet park for Bob Moses, Like well, It says
Speaker 1: a lot about New York City government culture too that
Speaker 1: like they're having they have there has to have been
Speaker 1: like a meeting where they're like, how should we uh
Speaker 1: and what what do you what do you want on
Speaker 1: these on these playground Treillis is in the Harlem side
Speaker 1: of the park, should we just add like the more
Speaker 1: of those wave designs? And He's like, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: let's put some monkeys in there. And everyone was just like,
Speaker 1: oh yeah, okay, go right along with it. They definitely
Speaker 1: had to have a meeting where this was decided and
Speaker 1: everybody agree it was a good idea that he must
Speaker 1: have signed off on it. All of that. Yeah, Now
Speaker 1: that Bloomberg quote, because again it's very funny to me
Speaker 1: as opposed to just saying that, like look his his
Speaker 1: Like anytime you talk about like a powerful white dude
Speaker 1: who's like Legacy was for a long time beloved but
Speaker 1: also was super fucked up, you have to call it
Speaker 1: complex um, which is I guess true because he was.
Speaker 1: He had a lot of power that he exercised in
Speaker 1: a variety of ways, and that is complicated. His racism
Speaker 1: isn't complicated the fact that he also made some playgrounds
Speaker 1: for black people is not does not make it complicated
Speaker 1: that he did all of this, other that he bulldozed
Speaker 1: neighborhoods and made people refugees. Right, it doesn't make it's
Speaker 1: like saying, hey, there was a complicated figure, right, he
Speaker 1: had he made some mistakes in Eastern Europe, But the
Speaker 1: Volkswagen is a pretty good car. Right. That's a complex legacy,
Speaker 1: you know, Like you wouldn't say that. Um, some people
Speaker 1: would say that, And Bloomberg fails to note in their
Speaker 1: talking about his complicated legacy that while Moses made two
Speaker 1: and fifty five playgrounds in New York City during the
Speaker 1: nineteen thirties, do you want to guess how many we're
Speaker 1: putting Harlem? Oh? How many? One? Uh, that's one more
Speaker 1: than I thought you were a park? What more do
Speaker 1: you want? Well, it really reminds me of how we
Speaker 1: started the previous episode about talking about sort of like
Speaker 1: how people can be like patronized in this way where
Speaker 1: it's like we'll give you a little something, but like
Speaker 1: you know, it's just crumbs, and we know it's just crumbs,
Speaker 1: and like you should still enjoy the park, and like
Speaker 1: you shouldn't turn up your nose at this park. But
Speaker 1: like you know, if you live in Harlem, you don't have,
Speaker 1: Like you live in Harlem, what more do you want?
Speaker 1: Do you want more than one park? Because like if
Speaker 1: you haven't noticed your poor so like yeah, and we
Speaker 1: need that space to to shotgun traffic into your neighborhood
Speaker 1: so the rich people don't have to see it and
Speaker 1: small and like keep you out. And this this was
Speaker 1: this by the way, Like obviously there's other black wound
Speaker 1: at neighborhoods in New York such as Stuyvesant Heights and
Speaker 1: South Jamaica in this period, and in both of those
Speaker 1: neighborhoods together he built a combined one park in the
Speaker 1: nineteen thirties. UH nineteen forty three grand jury investigation into
Speaker 1: the high crime rates in Stuyvesant in the neighborhood found
Speaker 1: one of the major causes was a complete lack of
Speaker 1: recreational facilities there, which again for nineteen forty three a
Speaker 1: pretty reasonable finding that like, well, yeah, one of the
Speaker 1: reasons crime is so high is there's fucking nothing to do,
Speaker 1: Like are our neighborhood is a parking lot, there's no parks,
Speaker 1: there's nowhere for people to like go be um so
Speaker 1: like kids get up to fucking ship. Um. Now, A
Speaker 1: stark example of how differently Moses valued projects meant for
Speaker 1: white and black people can be seen in the fact
Speaker 1: that he spent eight million dollars per mile on parks
Speaker 1: in the Western Manhattan Waterfront. These parks butted up against
Speaker 1: an almost all white neighborhood. Uh. Meanwhile, the four point
Speaker 1: seven mile stretch of the park that butted up against
Speaker 1: Harlem cost one point seven million per mile. So you've
Speaker 1: got this big long park, the Western Manhattan Waterfront Park,
Speaker 1: which is a huge park, eight million dollars per mile
Speaker 1: in the parts of the park that are next doors
Speaker 1: in white neighborhoods one point seven million per mile, and
Speaker 1: the parts that touch Harlem. Right, it's just very blatant
Speaker 1: when you actually look at the numbers. Um. Not a subtleman. Yeah,
Speaker 1: these these disparities are very stark. And again the fact
Speaker 1: that there are still people today who would look at
Speaker 1: his legacy and be like, oh, well, it's unfair to
Speaker 1: judge him by the standard, or it's very complex. It's like, no,
Speaker 1: it's not, it's not very complex. Well, and they make
Speaker 1: it part of like it is within their interest to
Speaker 1: make it seem complex. And part of how they do that,
Speaker 1: and this isn't just with Bob Moses, this is this
Speaker 1: is like what that kind of person does with everything
Speaker 1: is they'll zero in on some incredibly specific niche detail
Speaker 1: and so let's start arguing, like, well, what about this
Speaker 1: specific bridge, because this bridge, if you actually look at it,
Speaker 1: they say it's this height, but really it would have
Speaker 1: been this height at this point, and like if this
Speaker 1: bridge is that size, and like number one, they're ignoring
Speaker 1: a lot of other bridges. But also by zeroing in
Speaker 1: on this one thing that they can claim was was
Speaker 1: not wholly accurate about his legacy, they focus the discussion
Speaker 1: about this single rather than like the broad picture of
Speaker 1: how fucking racist the development that he engaged in was.
Speaker 1: And it's broad ranging consequences and they're always going to
Speaker 1: have with anything like this, one or two things they
Speaker 1: can redirect around, Like so the heart that they who
Speaker 1: built the best park in the city and it's in
Speaker 1: a black neighborhood and it's like, yeah, well, how many
Speaker 1: other parks city build in black neighborhoods, right, Like how
Speaker 1: much did you spend on I'm compared to the white
Speaker 1: neighborhoods right, but they don't. They don't want to have
Speaker 1: like again, this is just this is how you kind
Speaker 1: of redirect the topic of discussion and anger away from
Speaker 1: things people should be angry about and things that like
Speaker 1: have negatively impacted their lives, um and just try to
Speaker 1: be like, well, he was complicated, and we're not denying
Speaker 1: that there were problems with the man. But boy, look
Speaker 1: at look at the how nice this one park was,
Speaker 1: and look at how pretty these bridges are. And it's like, well,
Speaker 1: why don't those bridges have transit access or why did
Speaker 1: it cost an extra two million to put it in?
Speaker 1: And any way, Robert Moses operated with almost unchecked power
Speaker 1: until the late nineteen fifties, when resistance to his policies
Speaker 1: finally started to build. Uh and I'm gonna quote now
Speaker 1: from the Culture Trip. Often intransigent and prone to belligerence,
Speaker 1: Moses grew complacent. A series of flubs, such as a
Speaker 1: public tussle with the Shakespeare in the Park initiative, exposed
Speaker 1: him to criticism. More broadly, his rip it Up and
Speaker 1: Started Again approach to urbanism had begun to come under attack.
Speaker 1: His plan for a Lower Manhattan Expressway, which would see
Speaker 1: neighborhoods such as Greenwich Village and Soho leveled became a
Speaker 1: crisis point. Activists, including the journalist Jane Jacobs, who Moses
Speaker 1: never met but has come to be seen as his
Speaker 1: most eloquent nemesis, argued for a mixed use, street scaled,
Speaker 1: community conscious city rather than one driven from above by
Speaker 1: the all powerful planners. He was finally stripped of most
Speaker 1: of his offices in nineteen sixty two, when state Governor
Speaker 1: Nelson Rockefeller accepted a resignation that Moses had intended as
Speaker 1: a feint. By this time, he had become so despised
Speaker 1: that the destruction of Pennsylvania Station, which he had no
Speaker 1: hand in, were penned on his ideology. So he does
Speaker 1: like the tight of public opinion turns against him, But
Speaker 1: it's because he like Fox with Shakespeare in the Park
Speaker 1: and tries to build an expressway that would have destroyed
Speaker 1: Soho at Greenwich Village. Like it's because he got he
Speaker 1: like goes kind of mad with power, and people are like, well,
Speaker 1: number one, the folks that you're attempting to funk over
Speaker 1: with your policies has changed your exerting power against the folks.
Speaker 1: You're exerting power against are like wealthier than they used
Speaker 1: to be and wider than they used to be. So
Speaker 1: that's going to be a problem for you. Um, but yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it takes forty years of of of basically having
Speaker 1: total power over like construction in the city of New
Speaker 1: York for any of that to happen. Yeah, it's so
Speaker 1: funny to me that you say that he was even
Speaker 1: though he wasn't involved in Penn Station. It's like his
Speaker 1: his ideology is sort of what shaped it. I don't
Speaker 1: know if you have been to Penn Station lately, but
Speaker 1: there is not a fucking single place to just sit
Speaker 1: the funk down for one second. It's like, it's like
Speaker 1: I have never seen anything like it. And it's like
Speaker 1: even though he wasn't involved in that, in that redesign,
Speaker 1: but there's no place to sit. So he shaped And
Speaker 1: we're about to talk about this nationally, the attitudes towards
Speaker 1: how you use architecture and how you use the layout
Speaker 1: of a city to stop things like people sitting where
Speaker 1: you don't want them, right, like the wrong people sitting
Speaker 1: where you don't want them to sit, you know, exactly.
Speaker 1: And it's so fund up because like even if you're
Speaker 1: saying like, oh, we don't want on house people to
Speaker 1: be sitting here, blah blah blah. That's sucked up. But
Speaker 1: even if that's what you're going for, it makes the
Speaker 1: experience worse for everyone, right, Like everyone loses, well everyone
Speaker 1: but Bob Moses. I mean he eventually lost, but you know,
Speaker 1: and he does. One of the things that's nice is yeah,
Speaker 1: he gets he kind of ends his career in disgrace,
Speaker 1: like he he does a power play with Nelson Rockefeller
Speaker 1: and it's like, well, I'm going to resign if you
Speaker 1: don't do this, and Rockefeller is like okay. Um, So
Speaker 1: he doesn't get to destroy Soho or Gringach Village, which,
Speaker 1: depending on your opinions of those neighborhoods, could either be
Speaker 1: seen as a good or a bad thing. Um. He
Speaker 1: does live to see the publication in nineteen seventy four
Speaker 1: of The Power Broker by Robert Carrow, which effectively Sabbage,
Speaker 1: savages his reputation and paints him as an outrageous bigot.
Speaker 1: He spends his last years in a state of modest disgrace,
Speaker 1: rich white person disgrace until he dies in nineteen eighty one.
Speaker 1: By the time he passed, the New York City subway
Speaker 1: system was in a disastrous state of repair. The financial
Speaker 1: crisis of the nineteen seventies contributed to this, of course,
Speaker 1: but the fact that Moses has been decades worth of
Speaker 1: boom time money on choking highways played a larger role.
Speaker 1: One year after his death, the m t A announced
Speaker 1: a massive plan to revitalize the transit system. It has
Speaker 1: remained in a state of deferred maintenance ever since, right,
Speaker 1: Like this is I mean, you know, right, have you been? Right? Yeah?
Speaker 1: I love the New York City subway system, but it
Speaker 1: is not in It is in a state of disrepair,
Speaker 1: and it has been for a really long time. And
Speaker 1: it's it's a I guess we're talking about infrastructure from
Speaker 1: so long ago that it has never really been updated
Speaker 1: or modernized. No, and it part of why is because
Speaker 1: Bob Moses made it a lot harder to do it.
Speaker 1: And I'm gonna quote from a write up by Curb
Speaker 1: to kind of make that point. As Raskin says, we're
Speaker 1: still playing catch up from the mt A program initiated
Speaker 1: in the nineteen eighties, and the current stakes are much higher,
Speaker 1: as wridership levels recently hit the highest numbers since ninety eight.
Speaker 1: Just this week, the MTA began the slow process of
Speaker 1: addressing those issues. Chairman Joe Lhota revealed an eight hundred
Speaker 1: and thirty six million dollar, thirty point action plan to
Speaker 1: address the key drivers that account for subway delays and
Speaker 1: system failures. As he said in a press conference announcing
Speaker 1: the plan, we're here because the city New York City
Speaker 1: subway system is in distress. But some see it as
Speaker 1: too little, too late. Despite Moses's focus on highway development,
Speaker 1: modern day New York emerged as a city whose inhabitants
Speaker 1: depend not just on automobiles, but trains, buses, ferries, and bicycles.
Speaker 1: And the period of development under Moses stands as one
Speaker 1: of New York's great lost opportunities to invest in and
Speaker 1: expand public transit. Because when it comes to Moses, as
Speaker 1: Draper puts it, if he wanted to get it done,
Speaker 1: it absolutely would have been done. And that's what an
Speaker 1: indictment he had. This was again, there was more money
Speaker 1: back then, there was more money to put into and
Speaker 1: it was cheaper to do these developments. And when that
Speaker 1: we had this kind of precious period that would not
Speaker 1: wind up coming again. He poured all the money into
Speaker 1: highways that he made deliberately like difficult to add transit to.
Speaker 1: And that's like if you actually think this is not
Speaker 1: a man who like murdered people, right, But if you
Speaker 1: think about the lost human hours and like traffic and
Speaker 1: transit in New York City, I don't know if that
Speaker 1: seems like a body count, right, especially comedy people died
Speaker 1: by getting hit by cars or whatever, run over across
Speaker 1: walks and ship who might not have been if the
Speaker 1: city had been built by a guy who was not
Speaker 1: basing his attitudes on traffic on how nice it is
Speaker 1: to be driven around in a limousine. Absolutely, and just
Speaker 1: like asked someone who lived in New York not that
Speaker 1: long ago, just the quality that the quality of life like,
Speaker 1: I don't know. I I firmly believe that poor people
Speaker 1: people around people, we doesn't we still do we deserve
Speaker 1: like a nice quality of life. We didn't don't deserve
Speaker 1: to be sitting in traffic and being claws like like
Speaker 1: having all the respiratory and health impacts of things like
Speaker 1: you know, environmental factors, like I think that it's easy
Speaker 1: to not see these as deliberate choices and deliberate like
Speaker 1: strategies to make our lives more difficult. And I think
Speaker 1: the last he may not have murdered people, but the
Speaker 1: lasting legacy of that, I think is really really something
Speaker 1: to contend with. Yeah, it is something to contend with.
Speaker 1: And you know what else is something to contend with,
Speaker 1: bridget what's that the sponsors of this show. Uh, we're
Speaker 1: back um talking about the legacy of Robert Moses and
Speaker 1: probably you know, we've just talked about his influence on
Speaker 1: the subway, which is extremely negative, and a number of
Speaker 1: things he did in New York, Um and how people
Speaker 1: are still grappling with the consequences of that to this day.
Speaker 1: Perhaps the greater long term consequence of Robert Moses, though,
Speaker 1: is the concept of exclusionary architecture. Well, again, he didn't.
Speaker 1: He's not the first guy to do this. He was
Speaker 1: its most successful, influential, long standing practitioner, and his work
Speaker 1: provided models for cities around the United States. In Detroit
Speaker 1: in nineteen forty, a private developer constructed an eight mile long,
Speaker 1: six foot high wall to separate an existing black neighborhood
Speaker 1: from a new white one in development. You may recognize
Speaker 1: this from the eminem documentary Eight Mile Now This was
Speaker 1: not done just because the constructing company was racist. This
Speaker 1: was done because the Federal Housing Administration at the time
Speaker 1: refused to finance new developments and less neighborhoods were segregated.
Speaker 1: The wall still exists today, and Detroit is still the
Speaker 1: most segregated metropolitan area in the country. Another divider is
Speaker 1: a tin foot high, fifteen hundred foot long fence that
Speaker 1: separated the mostly white development of Hamden, Connecticut, from the
Speaker 1: majority black housing projects of New Haven. The fence, erected
Speaker 1: in the nineteen fifties, was eventually torn down in two
Speaker 1: thousand fourteen, but in the decades prior, it meant that
Speaker 1: residents of New Haven had to travel seven point seven
Speaker 1: miles just to buy groceries at a store three miles away. Right, Like,
Speaker 1: that's again, and we talked about food deserts. This is
Speaker 1: come down just in like what happened in Buffalo, right
Speaker 1: the mass shooting at the at that supermarket, which like
Speaker 1: people had to fight for for years to get because
Speaker 1: of ship like this um due to inadequate public transportation
Speaker 1: in New Haven. It took two hours to complete this journey.
Speaker 1: And again, Bob Moses is a New York guy. He
Speaker 1: barely leaves that fucking state. His work is in New York,
Speaker 1: and you're not going to find people saying Bob Moses
Speaker 1: told us to do this in Detroit, Bob Moses told
Speaker 1: us to do this in New Haven. But as New
Speaker 1: York goes, so goes an awful lot of As we
Speaker 1: talked about f DR patterns, the way his government is
Speaker 1: kind of set his administration is set up during the
Speaker 1: New Deal on New York. It is a model in
Speaker 1: a lot of ways for the rest of the country.
Speaker 1: So people are following Bob's example, right, Not that they
Speaker 1: not that they would not have tried to segregate neighborhoods
Speaker 1: if he hadn't been around, But he provides a very
Speaker 1: effective bluep it for how to do it. He's good
Speaker 1: at it, and people pay attention. You know. Um. And
Speaker 1: I'm going to close out this episode, probably by quoting
Speaker 1: from the Yale Law Review quote. Often cities use barriers
Speaker 1: and blockades to mold traffic patterns. For example, the concrete
Speaker 1: barriers and ballards that exist throughout the streets of Berkeley, California,
Speaker 1: were installed to calm traffic. However, the barriers do this
Speaker 1: by preventing people from driving down the streets on which
Speaker 1: they are placed. In Shaker Heights, Ohio, the city installed
Speaker 1: a traffic diverter, which was called the Berlin Wall, for
Speaker 1: black people by nearby neighbors in Cleveland. Yeah, I mean again,
Speaker 1: people always like, know, how fucked up this is? Right? Oh?
Speaker 1: People know? And again, like, I think that you've done
Speaker 1: a great job of showing how like not only was
Speaker 1: it effective, but it gave that like plausible deniability of
Speaker 1: like it's you. You can't say he specifically is the
Speaker 1: reason he didn't tell them to do this, But people know,
Speaker 1: people feel it in their communities, like you you know
Speaker 1: when you're being boxed out. Yeah, you know when you're
Speaker 1: being boxed out. And it's like, again, this is a
Speaker 1: broader problem than Bob Moses. He's just one of the
Speaker 1: most successful problems solvers in the community of people trying
Speaker 1: to solve the problem of folks who aren't rich and
Speaker 1: white hanging out near folks who are rich and white, right, Like,
Speaker 1: that's that's that's what's happening here. I'm going to continue
Speaker 1: that quote. In some communities, the purpose of rerouting traffic
Speaker 1: is to inhibit harmful behaviors tied to drugs and crime.
Speaker 1: Concrete barriers were put in place near the highways of Bridgeport, Connecticut,
Speaker 1: to block quick access into the city by those who
Speaker 1: wanted to buy drugs. The strategy, according to police, was
Speaker 1: that buyers would fear driving all over looped streets, stopping
Speaker 1: and turning around trying to find drugs with the possibility
Speaker 1: of having their nice cars though jewelry their money ripped
Speaker 1: off as they look. A similar technique was implemented in
Speaker 1: Los Angeles, which put traffic barriers in place on certain
Speaker 1: streets that allegedly provided quick escape routes for gang members
Speaker 1: who had committed crimes. Sometimes transit will allow a person
Speaker 1: to get close to a given area, but not all
Speaker 1: the way. They're leaving the writer in a dangerous situation.
Speaker 1: This was the scenario faced by Cynthia Wiggins, a seventeen
Speaker 1: year old woman who was hit and killed by a
Speaker 1: dump truck while she was attempting to cross a seven
Speaker 1: lane highway to get to the mall where she worked.
Speaker 1: Wiggins took the bus from the inner city where she lived,
Speaker 1: to her job at the suburban mall. However, the mall's
Speaker 1: owners had actively resisted requests to allow the bus to
Speaker 1: stop on its property. Rather, the bus stopped outside the
Speaker 1: mall on the other side of a large highway. Documents
Speaker 1: produced during the trial revealed that this transit sitting decision
Speaker 1: was motivated at least in part by race or class bias.
Speaker 1: A local transport official wrote in an internal document that
Speaker 1: quote mall decision makers feel it will not bring the
Speaker 1: type of people they want to come to the mall.
Speaker 1: One mall retail store owner recalled a conversation with a
Speaker 1: mall official who said something like the people who rode
Speaker 1: the Walden Avenue bus were not the kind of people
Speaker 1: they were trying to attract to the Walden Galleria. The
Speaker 1: mall did, however, allow some charter buses to stop on
Speaker 1: its property. Members of Buffalo's black community asserted that the
Speaker 1: mall was trying to use the highway as a moat
Speaker 1: to exclude some city residents, a classic example of architecture exclusion.
Speaker 1: The case settled, but it presents a stark exam ample
Speaker 1: of the dangers inherent in exclusionary transit design. And so again,
Speaker 1: like there's a there's body counts to this ship, right,
Speaker 1: like when the walls are made up of moats of
Speaker 1: fast moving cars. People are going to die trying to
Speaker 1: get from A to B. People who can't afford public trains.
Speaker 1: People are gonna get arrested hopping onto public transit because
Speaker 1: they can't afford it, because it's expensive because funds have
Speaker 1: been drained away, Like people are going to the consequences
Speaker 1: of all this are so titanic and echo out so
Speaker 1: widely in our society, and they all come down to like, well,
Speaker 1: we don't think it's good for the mall if certain
Speaker 1: people come here, right, it's not good for this neighborhood
Speaker 1: and Manhattan if certain if the traffic comes out here,
Speaker 1: so we'll rout it the Harlem and will put more
Speaker 1: lead into like the air in Harlem and will put
Speaker 1: more traffic onto the streets and where kids will get hit, right, Like,
Speaker 1: it's not. The plan is not I want more black
Speaker 1: kids to have bad lungs and to get hit by cars.
Speaker 1: The plan is I want to protect this nice neighborhood
Speaker 1: from the consequences of the traffic that I have needlessly
Speaker 1: increased in the city. But that's what happens, you know,
Speaker 1: and who cares if there's a human cost, If that
Speaker 1: cost is poor or black or brown, well, and it's
Speaker 1: you know, the argument is always the argument always comes
Speaker 1: down to when you're looking at the people who are
Speaker 1: like defending this ship, Well, I just want my neighborhood
Speaker 1: to be nice. I just want my housing price to
Speaker 1: go up, right, I just I I uh, you know,
Speaker 1: I don't I, as the person spending all this money
Speaker 1: on this mall and this business, have a right to
Speaker 1: try to ensure that like the right kind of people
Speaker 1: come here that like, you know, isn't that isn't that
Speaker 1: important too. I'm trying to keep I'm trying to improve
Speaker 1: the neighborhood right and and and the justifications change through time.
Speaker 1: Now you would have a lot of trouble being like
Speaker 1: we're going to build a nightmare highway interchange system with
Speaker 1: a bunch of like loops in order to stop people
Speaker 1: from buying drugs in this neighborhood. Um. But instead it's like, well,
Speaker 1: we need to, um, we need to carry out this
Speaker 1: project to like make it more difficult for homeless people
Speaker 1: to like sleep under this overpass, or we need to
Speaker 1: carry out this project, like we want to put a
Speaker 1: park here. We want to keep this space green and open,
Speaker 1: so we can't allow um new construction it would ruin
Speaker 1: the look of the neighborhood if we allowed higher density
Speaker 1: housing developments to live here, right, don't people deserve to
Speaker 1: have like their property values stay high and whatnot? Like
Speaker 1: it's it's these are the kind of things we're talking
Speaker 1: a lot these days about, like the literal Nazis and
Speaker 1: the literal fascists always trying to take power. But it's
Speaker 1: worth noting that, like for decades a lot of the
Speaker 1: worst problems in our country that have like contributed massively
Speaker 1: to everything that's wrong with it. Today, we're like not
Speaker 1: people being like I seek a white ethno state, but
Speaker 1: we're people being like, well, I have a right to
Speaker 1: and I have a right to look out at a
Speaker 1: nice hill, don't I? Yeah? And I think like what
Speaker 1: you describe that as sort of soft power. I think
Speaker 1: that it's almost kind of more dangerous that we associated
Speaker 1: with like well, like like it's on its face, that's
Speaker 1: so that's so relatable. It's like, of course you want
Speaker 1: green spaces and pretty places and blah blah blah. Like
Speaker 1: that really allows for people to do a lot a
Speaker 1: lot of like pretty terrible stuff that has a human
Speaker 1: cost um without really having to take take ownership of
Speaker 1: how bad some of that stuff is. Yeah, we don't.
Speaker 1: We're not talking about this today. Perhaps we should. We'll
Speaker 1: get to it at some point, but like, there's a
Speaker 1: lot to be said about And I love the National parks.
Speaker 1: Who doesn't like a nice park, But there's a tremendous
Speaker 1: amount of racism in the National park system and how
Speaker 1: it's constructed and why it's constructed, in the idea that
Speaker 1: like white people need a place to go be in nature. Um,
Speaker 1: and that doesn't include indigenous people, right, because then we
Speaker 1: can't claim that this is untamed wilderness because actually it
Speaker 1: was all like tamed and heavily like regulated by different
Speaker 1: societies for thousands and thousands of years. Um. But we're
Speaker 1: going to kick them off and we're going to like
Speaker 1: try to manage it ourselves. And oh god, now there's
Speaker 1: forest fires everywhere because it turns out we actually suck
Speaker 1: at forestry. Um, let's sell access to our forests to
Speaker 1: people who want to make paper and do that under
Speaker 1: the ages of we're protecting the forest from forest fires.
Speaker 1: Oh no, everything keeps getting worse. Um. Anyway, it's all
Speaker 1: like it's all the same story one way or the other.
Speaker 1: It's it's this like, I want things to be nice
Speaker 1: in a specific way where I live, so I'm going
Speaker 1: to push these laws to protect the area around me
Speaker 1: or to make this thing that I want to have happen.
Speaker 1: But there's all these knock on effects, and you ignore
Speaker 1: or shut down anyone who complains about the knockdown effects,
Speaker 1: knock on effects by saying like, well, I have a
Speaker 1: right to this, you know, I have a right to
Speaker 1: keep my neighborhood this way. I have a right to
Speaker 1: to drive a car. You know, I have a right
Speaker 1: to one another high way, to one less traffic. Um.
Speaker 1: And I don't want to spend money on the public
Speaker 1: transit system. UM. I don't like public right like I
Speaker 1: have a right to want my city to be this way. Um.
Speaker 1: But of course, the reality is always that even though
Speaker 1: they justify it as saying they're doing it for the people,
Speaker 1: they're doing it for this community, they're doing it for
Speaker 1: the city. UM, it's always done for a tiny chunk
Speaker 1: of the people who live in that city. And it's
Speaker 1: it's again often administrated by people like Robert Moses, who
Speaker 1: are all either completely unelected or who, because of the
Speaker 1: nature of local politics, are elected by like five dudes right, like, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's cool. It also manifests in like a lot of
Speaker 1: different ways where people like prioritize like a building over people,
Speaker 1: and like like like a pile of bricks matters more
Speaker 1: than than than a person. We saw that a lot
Speaker 1: in people are like, well, but there's property damage, don't
Speaker 1: I don't care, Like I don't care about your building.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry it doesn't have It's not a person. It's
Speaker 1: very insane, Like I've gotten caught up in a degree
Speaker 1: of this myself where it's like I don't like I
Speaker 1: don't like living in in like I don't like condos, um,
Speaker 1: I don't like the way they look. And it was
Speaker 1: had to be pointed out to me by like a friend,
Speaker 1: and again I had like an argument over this and
Speaker 1: they pointed out, like no, they actually like they do.
Speaker 1: Like while there are stupid luxury developments that are dumb,
Speaker 1: the higher density housing lowers housing prices, lowers rent prices,
Speaker 1: like it makes areas more affordable, and people who cannot
Speaker 1: afford a house are not going to afford a house
Speaker 1: under the current system. But if you allow this thing
Speaker 1: to be subdivided in such a way, they can't afford
Speaker 1: to actually own and thus not be like fucking renting
Speaker 1: a place and subject to all of the fun UPHI
Speaker 1: about the rental market, or we get moved to have
Speaker 1: to like live on a trailer park, which are really
Speaker 1: problematic in a lot of exploitative ways. And like, as
Speaker 1: a general rule, I believe in keeping as much of
Speaker 1: the world as possible free of development, but we're going
Speaker 1: to have cities, and cities should be high density and
Speaker 1: geared towards being livable as high density things because that's
Speaker 1: what makes sense environmentally and it's what makes them more humane.
Speaker 1: Right yeah, yeah, anyway, Robert moses, just people need to
Speaker 1: care more about people and less about piles of bricks,
Speaker 1: less about piles of bricks and uh yeah, I don't know, um,
Speaker 1: build more public transit burned down the carry out a
Speaker 1: series of terrorist attacks on the on the are we
Speaker 1: not should we not urge a series of terrorist attacks?
Speaker 1: That is that a federal crime Sophie problem? Okay, well,
Speaker 1: let's bleep all of that out and adding me doing
Speaker 1: a plug for um because loves our nation's highway system
Speaker 1: and interstate system because it's the most efficient way to
Speaker 1: kidnap children. Right when they try to head into the
Speaker 1: bathroom at a race track or something bam, and then
Speaker 1: they're off to the island and Indonesia where we hunt
Speaker 1: them for sport. That's the promise, Sophie. No children are safe, Bridget,
Speaker 1: do you have any plugables for us? I sure do.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much for having me. You can hear
Speaker 1: me on my podcast there are no girls on the internet.
Speaker 1: You can follow me on Twitter at Bridget Marie or
Speaker 1: on Instagram at Bridget Marie in d C. Well lovely,
Speaker 1: Thank you, Bridget. Thanks for talking fucking parks policy and ship. No,
Speaker 1: this was this was this fun than like people being
Speaker 1: you know, yeah, taken out back and shot. You know,
Speaker 1: it's not not cheery, but it wasn't you know, it
Speaker 1: wasn't as dark as I thought it was to be. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you've gotta understand guys like this because they they exercise
Speaker 1: just as much an influence on like why things are bad. Um,
Speaker 1: But they're just like guys in suits who who are
Speaker 1: building stuff in ways that's like secretly really shitty and
Speaker 1: it's it's just much. It's it's a kind of evil.
Speaker 1: I guess we don't get into enough, like it's it's
Speaker 1: it's that kind of UM. It's it's more subtle than
Speaker 1: like Mitch McConnell evil, which I think is the kind
Speaker 1: of political evil we're used to. UM, but it has
Speaker 1: just as much of an impact. And so yeah, uh,
Speaker 1: if you want to read pages about Robert Moses, check
Speaker 1: out The Power Broker. UM. Otherwise, just like, drive around
Speaker 1: in New York City and you'll be you'll be the
Speaker 1: proper amount of angry. I'm walking here, yeah. Exactly Behind
Speaker 1: the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media. For
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