Stuy Town was ushered into existence by Robert Moses in 1947, intended largely for returning veterans and their families—imagined as a middle-class oasis set in Manhattan, the product of an era when civic-minded people did things for the city and its residents because they were right, not because they were profitable. But it is also built on the ruins of the Gas House District, which Moses had bulldozed, displacing eleven thousand residents, and it was segregated until the sixties. The Gas House District was a diverse, working-class, neighborhood filled with light industrial businesses—the kind of place Moses considered a slum.

Stuy Town was ushered into existence by Robert Moses in 1947, intended largely for returning veterans and their families—imagined as a middle-class oasis set in Manhattan, the product of an era when civic-minded people did things for the city and its residents because they were right, not because they were profitable. But it is also built on the ruins of the Gas House District, which Moses had bulldozed, displacing eleven thousand residents, and it was segregated until the sixties. The Gas House District was a diverse, working-class, neighborhood filled with light industrial businesses—the kind of place Moses considered a slum.

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The Selling of Stuy Town - The Awl

Strange attempt here to paint past racist slum-busting as progressive civic-mindedness while implying the current willingness to subsidize 5000 units to the tune of $80 million is emblematic of an era of crass profiteering. Anti-gentrification liberalism is built on the bones of racist progressivism.