A curious omission in this is Robert Moses [0], who is almost single-handedly responsible for the creation of the South Bronx with his Cross Bronx Expressway [1]. Although waning in power by the mid-1960s, Moses began (and ensured the completion) of a number of public construction projects with disproportionate impacts on poor (and usually non-white) communities.<p><i>The Power Broker</i> by Robert A. Caro is one of the best political histories of New York, which I recommend if you're interested in exactly why the city's infrastructure (and lack thereof) is the way it is.<p>[0]: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Moses" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Moses</a><p>[1]: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_Bronx_Expressway" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_Bronx_Expressway</a>
<i>“Yeah, when we get the recommendations of which firehouses to cut, sometimes you get one that would be down the block from where a judge lived or it would be in a powerful city councilman’s district. We would skip that one and move down the list.” Where they knew they were going to get pushback, they actively did not cut in those places.</i><p>In other words people directly caused the problem not algorithms.