Mary Barton on Librivox audiobook; New Warby Parker glasses, Newman in Shoreline; Up-zone data.

I’m All Lost in…

What I’m obsessing about this week.

Week #12:

1. I’m upping the ante on one of last week’s obsessions, Elizabeth Gaskell’s debut novel, 1848’s Mary Barton.

I’ve read another 100 pages, and it just keeps getting better: The poetic language (“speaking out about the distress they say is nought”); the plot twists (John Barton’s creeping opium addiction); Gaskell’s classic craft (the protagonist’s best friend is going blind, and her wiser older ally is going deaf, as fateful decisions loom); and Gaskell’s clever craft (using a pronoun malapropism during a subtle feminist moment.)

This obsession has led me to a Librivox audio version of the novel; Librivox is an ad-hoc world of amateur actors reading public domain classics and posting them for free online. This one features an ace actor (not always the case) reading in a delightful British accent that shifts between a Manchester working class brogue and a proper drawing room lilt.

Currently: I read a chapter after dinner and then listen back to the same chapter on audiobook as I go to bed. I usually fall asleep to the dulcet tones before the chapter’s out, though not before, happily re-living one of the great sentences I’d read earlier in the evening and hearing it expand.

“Margaret had said he was not a fortune-teller, but she did not know whether to believe her.”

2. I lost my glasses last November during a discombobulated, rush-hour bike ride. This was the night before I left on my trip to New York. My eyesight isn’t terrible, but off I went on my trip without glasses. It was eye opening. It turns out, I do need glasses. For starters, I couldn’t read on the plane.

I’ve continued trying to read without glasses all month back home now. But I’ve needed perfect lighting to do so. I’m sure it’s hell on my eyes. Given that I’m most often reading in bars.

I did peruse the Warby Parker store in University Village when I got back from New York. But it wasn’t until narrowing down my choices at the Capitol Hill store a few weeks later that I finally ordered new glasses. They arrived this week.

I’ve been wearing Warby Parker brand since my trend-alert ex steered me to their debut Soho store a decade ago when I first started needing glasses.

I went with same Durand make and “Rose Water” color of the glasses I lost. But I switched to medium frames as opposed to my longstanding preference for wide frames. And I took the buy-two discount, getting an arty, sexy blue pair too. Specifically, mediums of “Newman frame in Shoreline.”

“Shoreline” is a sort of Toys-R-Us, beach-pail blue shade. I’m starting 2024 with a stylish dash of modernity.

3. As I made clear in my New Year’s punditry on PubliCola last week, I’m convinced the newly-elected, provincial city council is going to recommit Seattle to its single-family zone status quo.

Accordingly, I’m all in on last week’s Planetizen article by Todd Litman (Litman is the executive director of the Victoria Transport Policy Institute). Litman presents a set of recent studies showing that up-zones lead to more housing choices across the economic spectrum.

It’s, once again, the necessary rejoinder to the ubiquitous and conventional populist rhetoric that nefarious developers are corrupting neighborhoods; for the record, developers don’t sell oxy, they build housing.

Recent studies support the conclusion that broadly-applied upzoning that allows more compact housing types (townhouses, multiplexes, and multi-family) in multimodal neighborhoods, with complementary policies such as reducing parking minimums, can increase housing supply, drive down prices, and increase overall affordability.

I’m happy to report that the pro-housing density POV seems to be approaching critical mass. The New York Times ran two Yes-in-My-Backyard opinion pieces this week as well. Both pieces had data and headlines— I Want a City, Not a Museum and How to Make Room for One Million New Yorkers—highlighting how and why up-zones are essential to meeting affordable and middle-class housing needs. The second article, How to Make Room for One Million New Yorkers, had excellent graphics too.

There’s also this bit of specific analysis in the I Want a City, Not a Museum article that makes a point I keep coming back to whenever I write about the situation in Seattle: gentrification is happening under the existing, anti-development zoning status quo, not under the dystopian pro-development free-for-all that exists in critics’ minds.

Why? Because current NIMBY restrictions create a housing shortage and accompanying sky-high rents.

From the NYT:

Roughly 15 percent of the land in America’s largest city is reserved for single-family homes. Even in central neighborhoods, it is often illegal to build new buildings on the same scale as existing buildings: Forty percent of the buildings in Manhattan could not be built today. …

The result is an increasingly frantic competition for the available housing. In recent decades, rents have climbed much faster than incomes. In 1991, the median monthly rent in New York City was $900. By 2021, the median renter was paying $1,500 a month for housing.

While preserving 15% for single-family homes might sound bad to a writer in New York, it’s 75% in Seattle! (with a slight caveat allowing mother-in-law cottages.)