You keep making this claim, and I'm baffled by it. Can I ask you to point to the passage from my book where I defend or rehabilitate Robert Moses? Here's the sole mention of Moses, and the passage in which I make my view of the conflict between them plain:

"When the Dust Bowl set off an exodus out of the Great Plains, 300k migrants showed up in California, a place seen as the land of opportunity. The welcome was not warm."

This was talked about a bit in the book "Stuck" by @yappelbaum.bsky.social:

5. The post-1970s changes to zoning have, in effect, returned to city governments a "license law" regime, in which local governments are now consumed by these decisions, to the detriment of everything else they could be doing—and with the same invitation to corruption.

4. Prohibition failed, but the three-tier system of alcohol distribution introduced in its wake was intended to address the same problem—and largely succeeded. Retail owners still needed licenses, but the big money was in distribution and production, and they no longer cared who got the licenses.

3. One major (and largely forgotten) impetus behind the disastrous experiment with Prohibition was the desire to clean up city governments by removing the corruption spawned by the license laws, taking the liquor money out of local politics.

2. The saloon owners—and the beer and liquor distributors who supplied them—had more to win or lose in city elections than anyone else, and they spent accordingly. Officials catered to their interests, more than to voters. And corruption ran rampant.

You will never think of Jane Jacobs the same way again after reading this book:

bsky.app/profile/torr...

It makes me genuinely sad that if, as he says, he read the book, this is the impression he formed of the history it presents: www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/700580...

Jon, thanks for reading, but you've left me a little puzzled. Where did I write what you quote here?

Full story, from @matteowong.bsky.social www.theatlantic.com/technology/a...