Saving America's Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age. By Lizabeth Cohen

Historian Robert Caro's description of the destruction wrought by the building of the Cross-Bronx Expressway is one of the best-known stories of postwar urban renewal. In his epic book, The Power Broker (1974), Caro explains how New York City developer Robert Moses built the highway through a once vibrant neighborhood, displacing tens of thousands of people and destroying the local economy. Even today, his account is among the most popular images of urban renewal, and other historians have shared Caro's grim assessment of the subject. Recent work has shown how redevelopment across the country aggravated deindustrialization, helped segregate housing and employment, and hurt downtown businesses. Urban elites used federal funding to displace the poor in an effort to make cities more competitive with the suburbs. By some estimates, postwar highway construction alone displaced approximately half-a-million people in the United States, most of them people of color. So-called “slum clearance” often...