Moses shared the prejudices of his class and time, and poor neighborhoods were not where he spent political capital.
Writer Jane Jacobs (The Death and Life of Great American Cities) fought to save neighborhoods. SoHo and the Village were not cleared but they didn’t stay working-class. Moses displaced the poor with a bulldozer. The market, in the neighborhoods he was stopped from touching, displaced the poor with outrageously expensive real estate.
Moses poured concrete when American cities were desperate for parks, bridges, and roads, and he treated the people in the way as a cost of getting the job done. The roads he finished still carry traffic.
The neighborhoods Jacobs helped preserve are a reason lower Manhattan is a place worth caring about.–Grok