To the community,

It is hard to write about my experiences related to SnowGlobe.

I am not against SnowGlobe, but I think that it is to big, too loud and too dangerous to be held at the center of our city. It stands in the middle of a forest, which if ignited, may be an unstoppable disastrous blaze.

Certainly Chad Donnelly has good intentions and is willing to repair our ball fields, but take a look at the road to Emerald Bay. A forest fire that started in a December pouring rain storm.

Yes, his eyes mist over at the mention of the 19 year old girl who died as a result of attending SnowGlobe but he has not the ability to bring her back, to compensate her family or to prevent a disaster that staging this entertainment might cause.  Sorry Chad, but we need to get it out of our forest.

I first became aware of it’s presence by accident. I was working inside the city building on Rufus Allen Boulevard. A friend and I were remodeling it for Unity at the Lake, our church. It was  a construction site so there was a certain amount of noise. All of a sudden a freakish bellow shook the building. It was alarming and indescribable. I had never heard anything so loud and unidentifiable. In a few minutes, we realized it was a massive PA system.

I went home to face a blistering, pounding assault which had begun that afternoon and was to go on for eight or more hours each day and into the night even after midnight for the next three nights.

This was our New Year’s weekend. We had no warning and had made plans to stay home and avoid the dangerous winter driving and hazards of intoxicated or hung over revelers on the roads for that weekend.

The din was uncomfortable to put it mildly and my wife, who is a headache sufferer, was beaten for over 25 hours and could find no refuge. She couldn’t even put a pillow over her head as the bass waves were relentless and went through everything.

I was on the phone trying to get authorities and organizers to decrease the volume. It was a horrible experience. I made recordings of it from my deck and took dB measurements. I went to the venue and made measurements from the fence. When I was there, Bob Marley was the between set music and it was reaching 97dB regularly with the unstoppable bass pulverizing the audience, the forest, the neighborhood, the city. We were prisoners, unconsenting and unable to escape.

I have hours of thoughts about my experiences with SnowGlobe and I intend to relate them. Imagine being forced to listen to my lament for hours. It will be similar to being forced to listen to the event or being forced to leave your home to avoid it.

I will offer to play my recordings of the event at the recorded dB levels for our City Council and anyone who wants to hear what I hear for 25 hours on a winter weekend. Any takers?

I am 100 percent sure that the City Council cannot conduct a two-hour meeting while it plays so why should we be forced to endure 25 hours of it?

Let’s get real and not sacrifice safety and the peaceful environment we treasure, for money.

Respectfully,

Dory Smith, South Lake Tahoe

By Michael Ian Black, New York Times

I used to have this one-liner: “If you want to emasculate a guy friend, when you’re at a restaurant, ask him everything that he’s going to order, and then when the waitress comes … order for him.” It’s funny because it shouldn’t be that easy to rob a man of his masculinity — but it is.

Last week, 17 people, most of them teenagers, were shot dead at a Florida school. Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School now joins the ranks of Sandy Hook, Virginia Tech, Columbine and too many other sites of American carnage. What do these shootings have in common? Guns, yes. But also, boys. Girls aren’t pulling the triggers. It’s boys. It’s almost always boys.

America’s boys are broken. And it’s killing us.

Read the whole story

By Scott Ramirez

SnowGlobe has been a popular local event to those who attend, a frustrating bombardment of sound to nearby residents, a story of safety planning for SLTPD, STPUD, Barton Hospital and other local public services and a story of unplanned issues for both the city of South Lake Tahoe and those running SnowGlobe.

This event began when then City Manager Tony O’Rourke brought the event to town. The first year included no defined noise limits at all and there were many complaints. The complaints were so bad that SnowGlobe offered those with noise sensitivities to go to Murphy’s Irish Pub on Emerald Bay Road between 9-11pm for drinks and appetizers on them. 

Nancy Kerry, then spokeswoman for the city of South Lake Tahoe, arranged for bass levels to be turned down and had one night end early.

The following years the city negotiated the 95 dB based in discussion with SnowGlobe. They spoke with other agencies and venues to come up with this number given most concerts are measured at 110-114 dB within the venue which plainly was too loud for an event in the middle of a bunch of residential neighborhoods. It was eventually agreed that three city employees would test for 95 dB levels with hand-held meters and ask SnowGlobe to turn down the sound if it peaked over 95 dbs. Only if there was sustained sound over a 10-minute period above 95 dBs would there be a violation.  Considering the typical EDM sound runs 6-8 minutes it is unlikely that 10 minutes of sound would happen. Plainly these regulations were not thought out in terms of length of song, the venue itself or how the sound radiates to neighboring areas. 

Other cities have hired sound engineers to evaluate a site before a concert is brought in. Typically, there would be limits established that are cumulative and not simply over a sustained amount of time just as the effects of sound are cumulative on those subjected to those sounds.  Levels might be set for the sound booth (loud), the perimeter of the venue (moderate) and in surrounding areas like neighborhoods (lower).  Also, using decibels or dBs does not account for low frequency noise (LFN) or bass, which is one of the root sounds used at EDM concerts. The city and SnowGlobe have failed to plan for the noise from this event from the very beginning.

The same story can be found with regard to the play fields. There have been discussions on how to protect those fields from heavy trucks, tents and 20,000 people tramping over a field of grass meant for soccer. But there have not been any guidelines beyond having the city parks and recreation staff inspect the field and that plywood boards be used to protect the ground when heavy equipment is in use.  SnowGlobe has talked about million dollar ground coverings and are responsible for repairing our playfield but there currently are no defined requirements to protect the turf from 20,000 people jumping up and down to the sound of thumping bass.

SnowGlobe is seeking a multi-year contract. If the sound issues, specifically LFN or bass sound management is not addressed, our local homes will again be bombarded with sound that has been an on-going problem since this event started. If the fields are not protected, they will yet again get destroyed and the new field the Public paid for will be little more than a rebuilt field not available until late summer (digging rules prevent repairs from happening before spring). SnowGlobe is also suggesting that the current $50,000 in cash that the city subsidizes this event with may go away and they are hoping to expand to 27,000 people. More people will mean they need louder sound because all those people’s bodies absorb the sound (this is also why testing sound levels in a crowd doesn’t work). Seven thousand more people on these fields is not going to improve the fields. Do we really want to grow this event when we are already having major issues?

Local businesses are likely happy with this event. It is described as having brought mounds of cash to town. I have to ask, if our local businesses are the ones gaining while the city is already paying $50,000 to subsidize this event for their benefit, should these same local businesses possibly be asked to help fix some of this? I am guessing that comment will not make me popular, asking those who benefit the most to possibly help SnowGlobe and the city of South Lake Tahoe correct the problems of a venue that was never designed for large concerts of 20,000-plus people. Maybe a better question is why are we having this event where it was never intended and why aren’t we looking for a more appropriate location?

The city cannot make any changes for 2018 unless there was a breach of contract. Coincidentally, SnowGlobe held an impromptu after party event at Bijou Park this year. It was well after the negotiated turn off time and in the Bijou Park. Maybe this is the time to cancel the contract and look at other venues.  Wouldn’t an off-season event at Sierra-at-Tahoe when our city could use the business and rooms are empty be amazing? How about SnowGlobe at the old Echo Summit Ski Area with kids bused up from town? I would suggest Harveys Outdoor Arena, but Douglas County has strict noise restrictions that prevent this option. There are other options, it is just a question if our City Council will have the courage to pursue them.

Scott Ramirez is a resident of South Lake Tahoe.

By Joanne Marchetta

Like many communities across the country, the Tahoe basin is facing an affordable housing crisis. The high cost to buy or rent a home is simply unaffordable for most Tahoe residents. It’s a problem for people of many economic backgrounds, including middle-income teachers, nurses, police, and firefighters.

Mountain towns throughout the Western United States and our neighbors in the Bay Area and Reno are also struggling with affordable housing. Today at Tahoe there is unprecedented recognition of this problem and broad consensus that we must work together on solutions. Dozens of community partners are joining forces to address this issue on the North and South shores.

Joanne Marchetta

This January, the newly-formed Mountain Housing Council, a coalition of 25 partners including local governments, utility districts, nonprofits, and other community stakeholders, as well as TRPA, provided an update on solutions forming to help ensure people have access to achievable local housing in the Tahoe-Truckee region.

The council is targeting construction of at least 300 new affordable housing units over three years, with 295 units either already approved and in progress or under construction. While this amount is far short of what’s needed to solve Tahoe’s housing crisis, meeting the milestone would mark a major step in the right direction and lay the groundwork for future progress.

The council is working to flesh out ideas for renovation programs to help ensure the region’s existing affordable housing is in good repair, and for increasing the funding available for housing programs. It’s also looking for ways to shift more of the second-homes owned by out-of-basin residents, which make up more than half of Tahoe’s housing stock and are sitting empty for most of the year or being used as short-term vacation rentals, into longer-term rentals for Tahoe’s workforce.

On the South Shore, the Tahoe Prosperity Center is working with public and private partners, including TRPA, on a pilot project to redevelop an old motel lodging site into local workforce housing. This would create not only new housing, but a working model that others could use to repurpose Tahoe’s old buildings to provide much-needed housing. This is a collaborative opportunity to revitalize the region and improve its economy, environment, and community.

We must remember there is no silver bullet to fix Tahoe’s complex housing problems, no one agency that can solve these problems on its own. But there is a dire need to continue to move forward together.

Incomes for Tahoe’s workforce have not kept pace with rising housing prices. Studies find fewer than 20 percent of Tahoe residents earn enough money to afford the region’s median housing price. That means we have significant headway to make to align Tahoe’s median incomes and housing prices so residents can afford to live, work, and raise families here.

Land costs and construction costs are the largest barrier to building affordable housing. The vast public lands that we all enjoy at Tahoe protect the lake’s environmental health and make this region a natural splendor, driving its recreation-based economy. But they also mean there is precious little land available for new housing, driving up the cost.

Together, land and construction costs account for almost 60 percent of the cost of building new housing at Tahoe. Permitting fees, utility hook-up fees, and the cost of development rights together account for about 10 percent of the total cost.

While permitting is a relatively small part of housing costs at Tahoe, TRPA and local governments are working to streamline the basin’s permitting through a welcome mat initiative to make processes easier to understand and navigate.

TRPA is also working to revamp its development rights program. Potential changes on track to be considered later this year would make it easier for people to acquire and transfer development rights and convert them between commercial, tourist, and residential housing uses. Another proposed change would make some of TRPA’s pool of residential development rights for low-income housing available for a broader range of incomes. That could help provide housing for the “missing middle,” people who earn too much to qualify for low-income housing but too little to afford market rate housing.

A broad range of partners are working together like never before to relieve Tahoe’s affordable housing shortage, but we have much more to do. Progress on Tahoe’s housing problems will not come easily or quickly. But by continuing to work together to identify and implement creative solutions, we can and will gain ground on housing. That will benefit local families, the economy, and the environment, as more and more residents can live, work, and raise families at Tahoe, and fewer people are forced to drive into and out of the basin each day to or from work to make ends meet.

Joanne Marchetta is executive director of the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency.

By Ted Gaines

Orange police chased hit-and-run suspect Steve Montee for three hours before his truck ran out of gas, but the drama did not end there. Montee refused to exit his vehicle. For two more hours, the officers negotiated and offered Montee opportunities to surrender. They shot pepper spray into his truck cabin, but Montee would not budge and the standoff was moving toward a dangerous and volatile resolution. But the officers had one more card to play, and they dispatched a highly-trained, highly-effective police asset named Bosco to rescue the day.

Ted Gaines

Bosco ran forward alone and incapacitated the suspect so the officers could move in safely and arrest the driver. Bosco, the hero of the encounter, is a dog.

It’s because of dogs such as Bosco that I have introduced the Police Dog Protection Act of 2018. Under current law, harming a police dog is what’s called a “wobbler,” meaning it’s a crime that can be charged as either a felony or misdemeanor. My bill will automatically make it a felony – every time – for anyone who willfully and maliciously harms or kills one of these law dogs.

Police dogs, usually German shepherds or Belgian malinois, can cost departments upward of $10,000 to purchase and put into service, and continuing health, upkeep, and training can run as much as $100,000 over the course of their service lives. The investment pays off.

These dogs are deployed in hundreds of law enforcement agencies around the state. They protect their handlers – just ask Montee – but also search for drugs and explosives, locate missing persons, and find crime scene evidence. Their amazing sense of smell, 10,000 times more powerful than a human’s, coupled with intense training, makes them a unique weapon in the fight to keep our neighborhoods safe.

Dogs and their handlers also visit schools and community groups throughout the year, demonstrating their expertise and special skills, and in the process build healthy bonds between officers and the people they protect and serve. They are vital community outreach tools.

Sadly, at least 10 of these K-9s died in the line of duty over the past five years in California. That’s 10 too many. And at a time when prison “realignment,” Proposition 47 and Proposition 57 are flooding our neighborhoods with criminals who should still be behind bars, our officers need all the help and support they can get.

These are extraordinary animals playing a special role in our society, but it also comes down to this: An attack on any part of law enforcement is an attack on every part of law enforcement. We need to drop the hammer on anyone who tries to hurt those who are protecting us all.

My Police Dog Protection Act will do just that.

State Sen. Ted Gaines represents the 1st Senate District, which includes all or parts of Alpine, El Dorado, Lassen, Modoc, Nevada, Placer, Plumas, Sacramento, Shasta, Sierra and Siskiyou counties.

To the community,

The team members from Heavenly mountain operations snow surfaces work really hard to make skiing at the resort a truly enjoyable experience. On Feb. 12, the Adopt A Day sponsor crew from the snow surfaces operations brought the same dedication to helping the Bread & Broth volunteers provide a tasty meal and fun evening to the grateful dinner guests.

“As part of the Heavenly EpicPromise program, it is an honor to work with Bread & Broth to support and feed the less fortunate members of our community,” said Tyler Lehman, grooming manager. “These programs are such a vital part of the community.”  

Joining Lehman were David Hager, snowmaking manager; Bryan Hickman, senior manager of snow surfaces; and Frank Papandrea, sustainability manager. These four Heavenly team members are seasoned volunteers who have helped at previous Heavenly sponsorship dinners and they were a delight to having helping with the dinner’s setup, serving and cleanup.

B&B would like to thank Heavenly for their $300 sponsorship donation and for encouraging the incredible team members from Heavenly to come to help others in need of assistance and who always giving freely of their time and effort to make a difference in our community.

Carol Gerard, Bread & Broth

By Joe Mathews

Good news, Sacramento! “Lady Bird,” a coming-of-age film set in Sacramento—and written and directed by local product Greta Gerwig—has been nominated for five Academy Awards, including best picture.

Here’s the better news, Sacramento! Gerwig says she will make three more films about her hometown.

Joe Mathews

“I would like to make a quartet of films in Sacramento,” Gerwig, told the Sacramento Bee. “I have three more before the quartet is done.”

What will these films be about? No one, perhaps not even Gerwig herself, knows. But here’s hoping Gerwig explores Sacramento’s severe challenges, from soaring housing prices to a weak jobs market, just as “Lady Bird” takes on the city’s relatively low levels of college graduates.  

The title character—a teenager named Lady Bird—is so disappointed with Sacramento’s second-tier cultural and higher-education offerings that she leaves for a private college in New York. This brain drain is all too common. Sacramento ranks 58th out of 102 American metro areas in educational attainment.  

So—in the spirit of civic renewal—I offer the Oscar-nominated director my own treatments for four sequels.

1.   “Lady Bird Gets Her Tree”

A homesick Lady Bird, in her late 20s, moves back and visits coffee shops for six months before deciding that Old Soul best fits her aura.

She and her artist boyfriend (Michael B. Jordan) fall behind on the $1,500 monthly rent on an Oak Park one-bedroom, because their only steady job is driving for Lyft. After their landlord evicts them so he can rent to richer Bay Area refugees, Lady Bird relocates to the American River homeless encampment. But then, inspired by the beauty of the regional tree canopy, Lady Bird builds a treehouse in West Sacramento, and the housing-friendly council lets her keep it.

2.   “Lady Bird Returns: Hired Liar”

In this black comedy, Lady Bird returns from the East Coast to lobby for children’s groups. She discovers not only that legislators don’t care about children—but also that, in a horror movie turn, they keep millions of children in a secret, off-budget city beneath the Capitol. She tells local media, but they don’t have enough reporters to cover the story.

Lady Bird falls into despair. But then she meets a wealthy British-born telecommunications lobbyist, who is a British-born graduate of Stanford (Tom Hiddleston). They carry out a torrid love affair in his San Francisco pied-à-terre and his Tahoe chateau. She likes the fine life, and becomes a lobbyist for developer Angelo Tsakopolous.

When her beau proposes in a luxury box at a Kings game, Lady Bird replies: “Yes, on one condition. Promise me we’ll never have children. Because the schools here suck.”

3.   “Lady Bird in the Swamp”

After eating a deep-fried, bacon-wrapped peanut butter cup at the State Fair, Lady Bird becomes disoriented on her way home and drives into a Delta slough.

She’s rescued by an improbably handsome seventh-generation pear farmer (Chris Pine), who makes her his wife. The film becomes a climate change pastoral, as Lady Bird observes the worsening cycles of flood and drought in the swamp, struggles with subsidence, and takes on the DIY job of putting her home on stilts.

Then mysterious engineers appear on the property. Powerful water agencies are secretly drilling an underground water tunnel that was abandoned after a court fight long ago.

In a final act straight out of “Erin Brockovich,” Lady Bird investigates and digs a hole that puts her body in front of the tunneling machine. She is killed, but so is the tunnel project. Finally.

Sacramento Film 4: “Lady Bird versus the Apocalypse”

Yes, Gerwig is only doing three more films, but I’m sure her agent will want her to do a bigger payday action film—set in Sacramento, of course.

In 2050, years after her death in the Delta tunnel, new technology brings Lady Bird back as a part-human-part-machine cyborg. She settles happily in Sacramento—until a Pineapple Express system arrives and rains over the city for months, collapsing levees and completely flooding her hometown.

Searching for higher ground, she heads first to the foothills, but a vigilante squad of gun-toting locals shoots at her and other city refugees, because they vote too Democratic. So, after building a raft from old wood furniture, she heads west across the flood waters to Davis. There, NIMBYs express sympathy for Sacramento’s dispossessed but refuse to accept the refugees, saying they cannot possibly support any more development.

Out of options, Lady Bird swims through the floodwaters south to downtown Stockton, where she takes shelter in the abandoned Federal Building. Inside, she discovers an old, rugged man who is also part machine (Harrison Ford). He takes her on his catamaran back to Sacramento, where they restore order and kick some serious butt.

After that, everything is OK in California’s capital.

Joe Mathews writes the Connecting California column for Zócalo Public Square.

To the community,

This isn’t easy to talk about. The backlash has been very hurtful and without compassion. I’m not against SnowGlobe, but the idea of having several festivals a year as things are now is just not something I can endure. 

Thirty-plus years ago I had a bike accident and have dealt with nerve pain and migraines ever since. There are times when the pain is so severe I wonder if it will ever end. It’s a really hopeless feeling. Sometimes I can’t even lie down and put my head on a pillow because the pain is so intense—even though sleep is what I need most. This doesn’t happen as often anymore because I’ve figured out what I need to do to avoid it. What I depend on most is my home. It’s my sanctuary—the place I can go to hit the reset button when I feel the pain coming on. SnowGlobe takes that sanctuary away from me and actually sets off the chain of events that lead to severe pain.

It’s the cacophony of disembodied bass sounds that does it. First they enter my home through its structure and then invade my body through my feet and chest—buzzing and booming relentlessly. I can deal with it OK for the first couple hours, but then my heart starts beating faster and faster and the muscles in my shoulders and neck feel like they’re in a vice. I do all the things that would normally help, but at some point I become exhausted and begin to lose the battle. Nine plus hours a day for three days is just too much. Inflammation begins, nerves are on fire … and then the migraine sets in. I’m in my own private hell.

Nothing can take the pain away at that point and it doesn’t end when SnowGlobe ends. The damage takes a couple weeks to repair. This impacts my business as a freelance designer during what is always a busy time for me. My brain just can’t function optimally with that much pain and distraction–especially when troubleshooting code or strategizing for a client. 

Sometimes the festival quiets for a little while and there’s a respite, but that booming, thumping, and buzzing always comes back with a vengeance. If it can get quieter like that for a couple hours, why not for the entire time? I’ve reached out to SnowGlobe and offered to help figure this out, but there was no response. The city has offered me tickets to SnowGlobe and suggested I rent my house out during the festival. But we live in the real world. I have a business to run and my husband has a job. Time off in the tourist industry during the holidays is just not something we can count on—especially if we start having multiple festivals a year.

Love you Tahoe. Now let’s fix this.

Kristen Schwartz, South Lake Tahoe

By Jeremy Jones, New York Times

Ever since I took my first turns on a snowy golf course on Cape Cod, my life has revolved and evolved around snow. As a professional snowboarder, I’ve ridden the steepest mountains in the world and spent weeks outside on foot-powered expeditions. Today I live in Truckee where I share my love of mountains with my wife and children. When we watch the Olympics, it still makes me joyous, but these days I also feel a little wistful.

As the world celebrates the achievements of athletes gliding over, down and across snow, I’ve been reflecting on what I see in the mountains and for the future of these very Games. And for good reason. A team of researchers led by scientists at the University of Waterloo has found that if global emissions of greenhouse gases are not significantly reduced, only eight of the 21 cities that have hosted the Winter Olympics will be cold enough to reliably do so again by the end of this century.

Closer to home, the snowpack in the Sierra is at just 14 percent of the historical average. I never imagined I would see this in the middle of February.

Read the whole story

By Mitchell L. Moss

Only one person born and raised in New York City resident has been elected president of the United States during the past 100 years: Donald J. Trump.

Most successful politicians from New York City — Al Smith, Tom Dewey, Nelson Rockefeller, Rudy Giuliani —  failed when they ran for president.

By contrast, Trump never made it in New York City’s business, cultural or civic world.

That’s why he won.

From the moment of his birth in Queens, Trump was an outsider, the son of an outer borough real estate developer. Trump was not even elite in Queens. He went to the undistinguished Kew-Forest School and then attended the New York Military Academy, rather than the nationally ranked Jamaica High School near his home.

Trump’s father, Fred Trump, a real estate developer, lived in what was designed to be a gated, very white, insular enclave: Jamaica Estates, Queens. The Trumps didn’t live in either of the two higher-status neighborhoods of Queens: Forest Hills Gardens or Douglaston. 

Trump had a bigger handicap in his father’s German heritage. Fred Trump, who built middle-income housing in Brooklyn and Queens, had been arrested in 1927 at a KKK protest rally in Queens, according to the New York Times. Since World War II, a German heritage has been a liability for prospective politicians in New York. In fact, the current mayor of New York City, Bill de Blasio, was born Warren Wilhelm, Jr.,  and was called Bill Wilhelm before he legally changed his name to Bill de Blasio, adopting his mother’s maiden name as his own just in time to run for city council.

Trump then missed out on opportunities to expand his exposure to other cultural groups. Although of age for military service during the Vietnam War, he successfully avoided the draft with four deferments—and one medical deferment after colle

As an ambitious young man, Trump made the leap into Manhattan by using his father’s political connections and his own negotiating skills to get control of the aging Commodore Hotel next to Grand Central Terminal. With financing from the Hyatt Corporation, and a generous tax abatement from the city and state, Trump Tower was built in the 1980s, at 56th Street and  Fifth Avenue, a prime Manhattan location.

But these real estate successes were not followed by integration into the city. He wasn’t rich enough to compete with billionaires like Michael Bloomberg, or generous enough to qualify for the boards of cultural institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the city’s leading medical centers. Trump never actually owned many properties—he was focused far more on licensing his name, and attaching them to buildings, like a barbarian marking what he had seized.       

Trump never became a member of the Real Estate Board of New York, the leading organization of property owners in New York City. And the city’s major law firms and real estate consulting firms were reluctant to work for Trump, since he is known for not paying his bills. Most major commercial banks in New York refused to finance his real estate projects, especially once they became aware of his use of bankruptcy laws to protect whatever money he had earned from projects, while hurting investors.        

In New York City, Trump, like any interloper, took advantage of the tools available to him. Specifically, he manipulated the Manhattan-based mass media to create a national identity as a celebrity. But he

never absorbed the values of New Yorkers and the importance of immigration, global trade, higher education and the free press. Trump’s presidency is actually based on a rejection of “New York values.”

But his career assaulting the political and cultural elites of New York taught him one lesson: Even a bad bully can have a fan club.

News reports now have him marveling that New Yorkers who once wouldn’t give him the time of day—like the former Goldman Sachs chieftain Gary Cohn—now work for him.

In light of his history, the Trump campaign promise to “take back America” was more than an empty slogan. It’s a genuine reflection of his inability to fit into the cultural and economic arena of  New York City where he was never recognized as a person of consequence.   

Mitchell L. Moss is Henry Hart Rice professor of urban policy and planning at New York University.