The power broker at 50 years old. That of Robert Caro fascinating account of the career of New York urban planner Robert Moses is once again celebrated as a modern masterpiece, and it is difficult to argue with that judgment. Certainly not. The book’s 1,162 pages provide an education in urban politics that decades of journalistic reporting cannot match.

Caro documents the misdeeds of an unelected but long-unstoppable “master builder” in detailed and depressing, but entirely compelling, detail. Moses needlessly destroyed the functional, close-knit community of East Tremont in the South Bronx to build the monstrous Cross Bronx Expressway. He refused to make room for public transportation projects, subjecting his city to the automobile traffic jams that still prevail. He pushed forward high-rise apartment buildings that quickly deteriorated into dangerous, decrepit monstrosities. He usually got what he wanted, but not always, as when he sought to ram a highway through Washington Square in Greenwich Village and three others that would have cut through the streets and neighborhoods of Lower and Midtown Manhattan.

Caro gives Moses credit for the parks and recreational facilities he created early in his career, but overall he portrays Moses as a stubborn dictator, and readers have little reason to dispute this judgment. There is no need to go into further detail at this point. The facts are there for any reader to discover.

But thinking of The power broker now, decades after I first discovered it, I have the unexpected feeling that something is missing. Not inaccurate, or even misleading, but simply absent. It is the knowledge that the types of disasters Moses created were not unique to New York during much of his tenure. They occurred, to a greater or lesser extent, all over the country.

Pick any major city from the 1950s, when many of Moses’ worst visions were coming true, and you’ll find neighborhoods bulldozed, hideous highways built, and barely habitable housing projects being built. Moses’ misdeeds were not just a New York phenomenon: they were a reality in postwar urban America.

A few examples should make the point. In civilized St. Paul, Minnesota, the bustling black neighborhood called Rondo was razed by the construction of Interstate 94 in the late 1950s. The toll shows 700 homes destroyed and 300 businesses forced to close. It was just as arrogant as what Moses had done in East Tremont.

In New Orleans, the historic and vibrant 7th Ward and surrounding Tremé community were demolished to make way for the construction of Interstate 10 through the city. Claiborne Avenue lost valuable old oak trees and 500 homes. As in the rest of the country, the federal government, not local leaders, footed most of the bills.

Moses built a lot of dysfunctional public housing in New York in the 1950s, but it was no worse – perhaps not as bad – as high-rise projects like Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis and the Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago, which were destroyed. long since deleted. These buildings, along with many highways built around the same time, were made possible by the Federal Housing Act of 1949, which allowed cities to declare neighborhoods “blighted” or “slums” and request more a billion dollars in federal loans to destroy properties. and replace it with new construction under the label of urban renovation. All of this would have happened all over urban America if there had never been a Robert Moses.

NONE OF THIS WORKS Moses’ massive and misguided efforts to remake New York according to his vision. But it sheds light not only on urban planning, but also on our attitude toward public problems of all kinds. We assume they are local when in reality they are societal.

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, local leaders wondered what they might have done wrong by pushing their residents to the suburbs. Sure, they made mistakes, but there would have been an exodus to the suburbs no matter what they chose to do. The suburbs offered the living space that postwar American families wanted, as well as relatively cheap mortgages subsidized by veterans’ preferences and other federal largesse. You cannot name a city in this country where urban flight has not occurred, no matter what local political expedients are attempted. Some cities tried to stop the leak by build the equivalent of suburban shopping centers in the center of downtown, but it produced more harm than good, like most of the other projects concocted by each. We became heavily suburban in the second half of the 20th century. This was not a failure of local leaders.

But the mistake of locating broader trends goes well beyond questions of urban planning. City leaders have worried for decades about the poor performance of their inner-city schools and tried everything from mayoral control to neighborhood empowerment to fierce competition between schools. None of the school reform projects have accomplished much. The most important reason is that academic performance depends largely on demographics and not educational strategy. If you know the demographics of a school system, you can fairly accurately determine which schools will do well. I do not offer this as a criticism of any population cohort or group. It’s just a societal reality.

In 2002, Chicago-based sociologist Eric Klinenberg published Heat wavea shocking and well-researched book documenting more than 700 deaths in the city during a period in July 1995, when the heat index reached 120. I don’t dispute any of Klinenberg’s evidence, but I still found it demographically incomplete. Slum conditions were as bad in Baltimore, Cleveland, St. Louis, and many other inner cities as in Chicago. It is logical to believe that similar tragedies did not happen there. The reason we haven’t heard about it is because no one has researched it as conscientiously as Klinenberg.

DISCOURSES BY BEHAVIORAL SCIENTISTS about a cognitive syndrome they call availability bias. This means that we tend to attribute events to causes that are obvious around us, ignoring equally plausible evidence that lies beyond our reach. This may seem obvious, but it’s a point that usually escapes us. A generation ago, mayors saw families moving to the suburbs and thought they were making mistakes. The broader truth is that they were falling into the trap of availability bias.

We move away a little from the case of Robert Moses. Nothing I have written is intended to excuse Moses’ misdeeds or denigrate Moses’ achievement. The power broker was and is. This is simply a caveat: when we try to explain important public situations and events, especially negative ones, we need to look a little deeper than we are accustomed to doing.

Regardless, the most widely absorbed lesson of Moses’ career was not so much the substance of what he did but the unchecked power he was able to accumulate without ever holding elected office. At least that’s the lesson other cities and governments seem to have absorbed. Distrust of unchecked authority has led cities across the country to throw up roadblocks to planning projects, which can make it difficult for even the most well-intentioned developers to build anything within the city limits. This syndrome is incisively documented in an upcoming book by Marc J. Dunkelman, Why nothing works. “The determination to protect against modern Robert Moses types now serves not only to thwart abuses,” Dunkelman writes, “but also to undermine the ability of government to do great things.” »

It is perhaps ironic that the weakening of governmental authority is the only consequence of Caro’s masterpiece that transcends its localism. When we solve this problem, we won’t do it in just one city. We will do this in several places at once. That’s how these things work.