New York City was famously shaped by the powerful urban planner Robert Moses who, along with being a visionary, was demonstrably racist. Hopes&Fears takes a look at how his decisions, and those of his successors, still affect access and opportunity for minorities today. NYC is just one example of how systemic oppression affects the planning of cities across the country.

The fair housing laws passed in the last half-century have forced racists to devise whole new methods of discrimination, subtler but serving the same purpose: to keep people of color out of "white" spaces. The villains in these cases—landlords, brokers and neighbors—are often tough to identify, but, once exposed, are easy to loathe. It's harder to find fault with a sidewalk or a highway; when some feature of the city has seemingly always been there, you can lose sight of the fact that it was once new, conceived and constructed by people with their own inbuilt prejudices. But a city's landscape can exclude as effectively as any policy or person, in subtle but sinister ways.

The power broker

Sarah Schindler, a law professor at the University of Maine, recently took up the subject in a paper for the Yale Law Journal. In it, she cites The Power Broker, Robert Caro's vast, obsessively researched biography of the builder Robert Moses, a man whose grand vision and ruthless drive shaped huge portions of New York State in the early-to-mid-twentieth century. Moses was, without qualification, a racist. As Caro writes, "Moses had always displayed contempt for people he felt were considerably beneath him," such as the "colored 'subject people' of the British Empire." Caro also says that Moses considered African-Americans "inherently 'dirty'."

His prejudice methodically informed New York's present-day geography, most glaringly in the case of Long Island parks like Jones Beach. "Moses was interested in maintaining these Long Island beaches as pristine places for the people he wanted to be there," Schindler told Hopes&Fears. Moses' solution, in Caro's telling, was to intentionally build the Long Island Parkway overpasses with clearances as low as 7’7”, ensuring that buses would never be able to go under them. (In contrast, the minimum vertical clearance for overhead structures on the Interstate Highway is 16 feet in rural areas and 14 feet in urban areas.)