I’m All Lost In, #70: Neo-Soul, new Urbanism, and new flowers.

I’m All Lost In …

the 3 things I’m obsessing about THIS week.

#70

Before I get to this week’s obsessions, I’ve got a listening recommendation: Start a playlist using Ego Ella May as your prompt (and maybe in particular, her song with Hector Plimmer, “Sonnet 17.”). You’ll know you’re floating in the right space if another slow-jams artist, Gotts Street Park, shows up in the mix. These musicians are all part of South London’s current neo-soul (or more accurately, neo-Sade) movement, which also includes artists such as ELIZA, Cleo Soul, and the KTNA.

I’ve also got an important reading recommendation: the LA Times’ obituary on city planning genius Donald Shoup. Shoup, a longtime UCLA professor, earned his superstar status among new-urbanists by upending conventional wisdom about parking policy. Shoup, who was 86 when he died on February 6, long challenged the notion that abundant parking is a good thing. The obituary summarizes his iconoclastic POV:

Free street parking, Shoup wrote, makes parking and driving worse. The low cost creates a scarcity of spaces that leads people to spend time and fuel circling blocks in misery. And city planners’ efforts to solve this problem by mandating that homes and businesses provide more cheap parking only worsen the situation.

According to Shoup, this parking conundrum is foundational to many of the ills in modern urban life: congestion, sprawl, pollution and high housing costs.

From Shoup’s LA Times obituary; pictured in the 1970s when his iconoclastic ideas about parking first emerged. And pictured recently when those ideas guided the neo-urbanist movement.

1) Shoup’s insistent and influential hot take on parking leads me to this week’s first obsession, State Sen. Jessica Bateman (D-22, Olympia)—or, more specifically, Bateman’s parking reform bill, which I wrote about on PubliCola last Friday. And thank you Erica for leaving in my goofball line about “car(bon)-centric lifestyles.”

Bateman’s latest bill, a longstanding urbanist wish-list item to get rid of mandatory parking minimums (they add hefty costs to building housing and perpetuate car(bon)-centric lifestyles), could once again force Seattle to up its game when it comes to enacting progressive planning policy.

My larger hope is that Bateman, who also chairs the state senate’s housing committee, steps in and altogether overrules Seattle’s touchy, anti-housing zoning code (and the blindly privileged rhetoric of Seattle’s provincial homeowner class who’ve been testifying ad nauseam at City Council this month against any inkling of density that’s proposed in Seattle’s new Comprehensive Plan). Bateman, who already nudged Seattle to build more housing with a starter upzone bill she passed in 2023, is well positioned to usher through the  long list of pro-housing legislation that’s cued up in the state legislature right now.

This list, chronicled and catalogued by Sightline Institute, of green metropolis legislative proposals includes reforms that could, among many Shoup-ista ideas, rein in obstructionist “historic landmark” campaigns, incentivize (rather than tangle up) eco housing innovations, and fund inclusionary zoning, or FIZ (something I editorialized for last February).

I followed up my parking news brief about Bateman’s bill with a full blown column about another one of the pro-housing bills in play in the state legislature right now, a transit oriented development mandate.

After this intro, “Calling Mayor Bateman, calling Mayor Bateman! We need your help. Again!,” I landed here:

What I love about the council’s high-pitched opposition to adding a small amount of tightly controlled density is that it exposes the mendacious reasoning behind a core NIMBY argument: “Concurrency.” Concurrency is the obstructionist idea that you can’t add density to neighborhoods until you first add bus routes and other infrastructure. It’s actually the reverse—and I’ll get to that in a second—but for starters: It’s disingenuous to claim, as the anti-housing (homeowning) contingent did at a January 29 public hearing, that you oppose density in your neighborhood because your neighborhood lacks transit—and then come out against a plan to target density along transit lines.

If the argument against adding density is that we don’t have the transit to support it, then why are council members like Moore intent on taking Maple Leaf off the list of new neighborhood centers?  The area of concern for Moore that’s slated for the upzone, between NE 85th and NE 91st, sits on a frequent bus line (the 67) between two light rail stops, Roosevelt and Northgate. (Moore called this workhorse route the “one little bus” that serves the neighborhood.)

2) Playing Scrabble

Similar to every item on last week’s list, here’s another dispatch from my Trump-era escapism.

Sunday night, 2/9/25

I’ve been hauling out my old Scrabble board this week, which had been tucked away on a shelf for a decade (… or maybe decades? There’s a faded anti-George W. Bush sticker on the box.)

Unlike, say, my old laptop, my Scrabble board still works. And not only did I still have nearly all the tiles, but there was a mysterious extra E tile that I doctored with a pen to fill in for a missing O.

I got in three games this week, even taking the board out of my apartment for one game at a cozy bar—the Pine Box (again), a new favorite spot on the downtown edge of Capitol Hill, “The Drag Beyond the Drag.” I like The Pine Box’s jackfruit sandwich.

My Scrabble scores aren’t quite up to form yet, lingering in the high 200s rather than the mid 300s, but a couple of 38-point plays (and my 2-1 record) have me feeling like my current sally away from doom scrolling will be a solid spell.

3) This week’s third item is also prompted by my revulsion to Trumpism. You’ve heard of the Iron Age? This is ancient Greek poet Hesiod’s and ancient Roman poet Ovid’s term for the grim final stage of humanity; the fifth stage (in Hesiod’s Works and Days) or the fourth stage (in Ovid’s Metamorphoses).

According to both poets, this bleak era in human history is characterized by a breakdown in the social contract when lies, war, greed, and borders are the norm. Wrongdoing prevails.

Enter the Greek goddess Astraea. I’m piecing together a few different stories, but Astraea, the goddess of justice, evidently paused to gaze up at the sky during her faltering sojourn on earth as justice gave way to abuse. Seeing no stars above—a reflection of the dark epoch—she started to cry. However, Astraea’s tears eventually enriched the ground and soon, bright star-shaped asters sprang up.

My takeaway? Even as President Trump and his creepy acolytes are busy abandoning justice, they are simultaneously sowing the seeds of their fascist movement’s own demise.

The district attorneys and lead prosecutors, including Danielle Sassoon, the acting U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York, who resigned in protest of Trump’s order to drop the corruption case against corrupt NYC mayor Eric Adams are this week’s flowers.

Hopefully there will soon be more.