The Power Broker by Robert Caro is a fantastic biography of Robert Moses, the person who set the template for this kind of development. Though in power in New

The Power Broker by Robert Caro is a fantastic biography of Robert Moses, the person who set the template for this kind of development. Though in power in New York, the projects he built (highways, parks, bridges, public housing) was at a scale never seem before him. He figured out how to cut through municipal red tape to build at a large scale using public money. Not that he wasn't a terrible person. But he wrote the rules that allowed a lot of this kind of development to happen.