The Power Broker tells the story of one urban planner’s rise and the ways he used his position to shape America’s largest city. For Caro, Moses’s story provides “a drama of the interplay of power and personality.” Equal parts literature and history, The Power Broker chronicles its subject’s family tensions and psychology alongside the development of his career, constructing a portrait of someone whose early idealism gave way to a desire for control. The book has a juicy plot that makes its readers feel like they are seeing into the halls of power, where evil individuals conspire to further their own interests and suppress popular demands.

In the chapter “Two Brothers,” for example, Caro chronicles Moses’s fraught relationship with his older brother, Paul, who was equally charming but less deferential to their mother. As kids, both aspired “to ‘help’ the ‘lower classes,’” but by the time they had grown up, only Paul’s authentic desire remained. When Paul interviewed to be the commissioner of water supply, gas, and electricity in Mayor Fiorello La Guardia’s administration, hoping to regulate Con Edison, the giant utility that he felt was “defrauding the public,” Robert intervened and made sure he did not get the job. Winning a sibling rivalry superseded progressive governance.

At its best, the book shows how power functioned in the liberal state through the life of Moses, who once held a dozen titles simultaneously in New York. Unlike any public official before him, Moses figured out how to use his positions to take advantage of public authorities, quasi-corporate agencies created by the legislature that possessed powers to act on behalf of the city or state. Public authorities could issue bonds to finance infrastructure projects like roads, bridges, or highways without voter approval. After the project was completed, the authority could place a toll on the public improvement, generating the income to pay back bondholders. While most public authorities controlled a single piece of infrastructure and turned it over to the government once it became profitable, Moses used his influence to change the laws so that he maintained control of the surplus generated by his developments. He could use that money to construct more projects, all outside the limits of the democratic process.

The Power Broker paints the people who protested Moses, most famously the residents of East Tremont who lost their homes to the Cross Bronx Expressway, as local heroes fighting an autocratic liberal state. Caro conducted hundreds of interviews, including with everyday citizens whose lives were upended by Moses’s projects. Handwritten notes, some of which are on display at the New York Historical’s exhibition Truth to Power: Robert Caro’s The Power Broker at 50, demonstrate how attuned he was to the experiences of these individuals. “How’d u feel?” Caro scrawled at the top of a transcript, reminding himself to ask his subjects about the emotional consequences of urban renewal.

In a section describing the last evictees of the neighborhood, mostly elderly Jewish couples who had come from the shtetlach of Eastern Europe, Caro includes quotations from his interviewees that capture their exasperation. “As soon as the top floor of a building was empty, they’d start tearing off the roof,” said one. “While people were still living in it, they were tearing it down around their heads!” Residents were “lonely, scared, many of them old and alone,” mourning the loss of their community, where for decades they had prayed, shopped for groceries, and kibitzed with friends.

Caro’s affinity for those who stood in the way of power-hungry administrators like Moses is reflective of the period in which he wrote The Power Broker. In the 1960s and ’70s, left-leaning critics of postwar liberalism protested government agencies for being unresponsive to their constituencies and, in some cases, captured by corporate or personal interests. On a national level, Ralph Nader fought the cozy alliance between government, business, and labor that had coalesced after World War II. Leading a group of volunteer lawyers, Nader and his “Raiders” established advocacy organizations to defend citizens from a distant bureaucracy that privileged corporate profits over consumer interest.

In New York City, the urban theorist Jane Jacobs organized community groups against Moses, whom she saw as representing the unresponsive, monolithic state. Moses had, according to Jacobs, destroyed the city’s character, turning dynamic communities into vulgar housing blocks. She offered a political and aesthetic critique of urban renewal, arguing that Moses’s developments ignored the local democracies they supposedly provided for and replaced the mystic beauty of city life with modernist abstraction. Caro agreed with Jacobs’s judgment of Moses, and he cited her as the greatest inspiration for his book.

When The Power Broker appeared, New York was confronting various crises — urban, fiscal, and political. It is understandable that, to some, Moses’s actions looked like the causes of the city’s woes. Yet by the 1980s, the city’s priorities had shifted. Gone was the social democratic impetus of the municipal government. Instead of spending on public programs, infrastructure, and housing, politicians made cuts to budgets and subsidized development for the real estate sector. Market-based solutions to public problems became commonplace.

Neoliberal governance, however, was not just the product of top-down austerity. It gained legitimacy from communities that had lost faith in the state’s ability to provide for the public good and wanted to take matters into their own hands. As the historians Benjamin Holtzman and Suleiman Osman have shown, local actors, including Jacobs, transformed New York’s political economy from the ground up, offering private alternatives to government services. Independent schools, urban homesteaders, nonprofit management of public parks, and neighborhood watch groups all contributed to what Holtzman calls the “popular marketization” of the city. And as Osman argues, Jacobs’s alternative vision for New York, “thoroughly middle-class in its aesthetic,” celebrated private space, homeownership, and free-market capitalism.

Thanks in part to The Power Broker, however, Jacobs became a hero and Moses a villain to most of the Left. Yet as of late, some have come to view the antidevelopment, preservationist stance advocated by Jacobs’s acolytes as an outlook that inadvertently birthed neighborhoods filled with multimillion-dollar town houses, small-plate restaurants, and powerful homeowner associations. Activists and politicians interested in resolving New York City’s dire housing crisis have come to see regulatory frameworks designed to protect communities against unwanted development as special-interest tools hurting working-class families. In this new environment, it is hard to avoid being nostalgic for a time when the government had the capacity to build — even if those builders were self-obsessed bullies.

Reappraisals of Moses have found their way to the New York Times, which ran an article for The Power Broker’s fiftieth anniversary that argued Moses “left behind within the five boroughs an egalitarian legacy that has not been matched since.” In the years since The Power Broker’s publication, the article concluded, “too much has been foisted upon private entities who must seek profit as they provide for the public.” And in Jacobin, Matthew Lloyd Roberts has suggested that we ought to be suspicious of the Jacobs-ite view of community control, which he sees as “fundamentally a neoliberal assertion of the primacy of the market [in which only] developers decide what gets built where.”

As thinkers reevaluate Moses’s legacy, the nascent democratic socialist left in New York is envisioning and enacting a political program for state intervention in the green energy transition and housing crisis. To accomplish its ends, it has repurposed Moses’s favorite tool for state action: the public authority.

The campaign for public power picked up steam as leftists watched the private renewable energy industry struggle to meet New York State’s climate goals. In 2021, democratic socialists proposed to empower the New York Power Authority (NYPA), a sleepy New Deal relic that quietly supplied a disproportionate amount of the state’s renewable energy from hydroelectric dams, to build new renewables. In the recent, successful campaign to pass the Build Public Renewables Act, leftist advocates and elected officials made arguments that could have been taken from the mouth of Robert Moses.

NYPA’s status as a public authority and ability to access bond financing meant it would have “little trouble financing projects,” according to left-wing journalist Kate Aronoff. Deputy majority leader of the New York State Senate Michael Gianaris boasted that the bill would be “revenue-neutral.” Even as they touted NYPA’s proud history of building massive new generation capacity and its record of delivering clean energy, the leftists never mentioned the man who built and financed NYPA’s largest projects — Robert Moses.

Similarly, as the consensus that New York was facing a crisis in housing supply grew, YIMBYs hectored democratic socialists about their opposition to incentives for developers and luxury-for-affordability housing deals. Casting about for a credible alternative model to build new housing, they turned to the examples all around them: the vast stock of Mitchell-Lama co-ops woven into the fabric of the city. In 2024, leftists proposed creating a new public authority, the Social Housing Development Authority (SHDA), to build and finance new cooperative housing.

Emily Gallagher, a democratic socialist assembly member, explained SHDA’s promise in a comment to the press that would not have sounded out of place coming from Moses himself: “It is a government authority, and the reason why that’s important is because government authorities issue their own debts, and they can maneuver in different ways than any other kind of organizational model.” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez also turned to a Moses-built project, Co-op City, as she made the case for social housing in the New York Times. The development, she wrote, “stands as not only one of the largest housing cooperatives in the world — with its own schools and power plant — but also the largest, naturally occurring retirement community in the country, a testament to its financial and social sustainability.” Again Moses went unmentioned.

Hopefully new efforts to provide public solutions using Moses’s old tool, the public authority, will synthesize vigorous state power and democratic input. Yet NYPA and the SHDA are in their early stages. So far, no one has had to stand up at a community meeting and defend an NYPA battery storage facility in the Bronx, explaining to residents that the technology is safe and that several years of construction will be necessary. And SHDA is not yet a reality; its future staff of idealists have not had to devise a strategy to defend a proposed development from community backlash and lawsuits. Public opinion will surely test the effectiveness of these new authorities.

In our present moment, as writers, activists, and politicians reevaluate Moses’s legacy and borrow his techniques to build public works, we must change how we read The Power Broker. Instead of seeing it as the popularly imagined morality tale about heroic neighborhood activists facing down centralized power, we ought to use it as a guide to the perils and possibilities of state action. We should learn from Caro (and Moses) about how power operates within the nooks and crannies of the administrative state, but we should also see Caro’s book as a meditation on how democracy gives and takes away power — how the people’s will is channeled and bottled, directed and bought, in thousands of little ways. As the Left imagines a more muscular role for the state in meeting the crises of our time, The Power Broker frames the task ahead: How can the government take major action with true democratic consent? It’s easier said than done.