Roman Mars

Absolutely.

Oh.

That's me, baby.

Moderate.

Mitchell-Lama was launched in an era of big government liberalism.

The state was subsidizing not just housing for the poor, but for people of middle income, like construction workers and teachers.

In the Mitchell-Lama years, the program would finance over 100,000 units of affordable housing for the middle class.

Many of them would be cooperatives built by the United Housing Foundation.

By the late 1950s, they had finished a project called the Penn South Cooperative.

Ten buildings, all of them about 20 stories tall.

It was an absolutely massive development in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan.

15,000 people came to the dedication ceremony for the Penn South Cooperative in 1962.

In attendance was an absolute who's who of power brokerage.

Robert Moses, of course, but also Nelson Rockefeller, who was governor of New York at the time.

Eleanor Roosevelt was there.

And the president of the AFL-CIO, the president of the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union, and oh yeah, the president of the United States of America, John F. Kennedy.

The housing battles Moses is referring to is likely the community opposition to the Penn South development and others like it.

During each project, old neighborhoods had been destroyed and residents displaced.

Robert Caro, author of The Power Broker, estimated that Moses evicted 250,000 people to build highways in New York City and another 250,000 for urban renewal projects like slum clearance and housing development.

Efforts to rehouse the displaced were half-hearted at best.