Sunnyside Neighborhood Association

Happy Spring, Sunnysiders! This is my favorite season. The star magnolia in our backyard is blooming, and to me that signals the start of the season. Walking down Taylor Street this evening, I admired my neighbors’ hyacinths, daffodils and dogwood. This is when we realize all that rain was worth it!

At our March General meeting, we had councilor Steve Novick as our special guest. He talked about a few things that are before the Portland City Council right now.

Our streets are crumbling and we don’t have enough money to fix them. Councilor Olivia Clark has proposed a fee on residents ($12 a month per household and $8.40 per apartment) but that would only raise $47 million. That would either help repair existing streets (for example Hawthorne and Salmon), Novick said, or it could go to paving streets in outer neighborhoods that are not yet paved and adding sidewalks—but not both. Discussion ensued.

Novick talked about the discovery of $106 million in the Portland Housing Bureau and acknowledged that some of it is earmarked for particular programs. There are three schools of thought on how to spend the money that is not earmarked. Novick said we could:

1.) Create more housing (which is expensive).

2.) Prevent people who are at risk of losing their apartments or homes
by giving them temporary rent assistance.

3.) Spend money on shelters. We had some debate in the room on which of these values was most important, with several people suggesting
Single Room Occupancies (SROs) and tiny home villages as a less-
expensive option than building full-fledged apartments. 

Mayor Wilson has suggested tapping $75 million from the Portland Clean Energy Fund to help renovate the Moda Center, using renewable technology to reduce its carbon emissions. There was some debate in the room about whether Governor Kotek should have agreed to cough up $300 million of public money when we don’t have enough money in the state to pay for schools or roads adequately.

At our Board meeting we talked about a few projects we’d like to do in 2026 or early 2027.  These include a community potluck, a neighborhood-wide yard sale, and a potential Bingo Card with Hawthorne businesses that would raise money for the SNA. Stay tuned. We’ll post info to our social media channels! A reminder: on Instagram we’re @Sunnysidepdxna and on Facebook we’re Sunnyside Neighborhood Association.

Board elections will be at our May 13th meeting at 7 p.m. Please plan to attend! We have five positions up for election this year, one of which is an “open” seat. Please reach out to Chris at [email protected] if you are interested in running for a Board seat and would like to know more!

“You knew I’d write a book about you someday. You said once that I’d dredged up the whole hit parade minus you. I’ll never know how you’d tell it. For me it begins here. Like this.”

So opens Lily King’s magnificent sixth novel, Heart the Lover. A companion of sorts to her previous book, Writers and Lovers, it returns to the same protagonist, centering on her time in college. The story begins when she meets Sam and his best friend Yash — two intellectuals whose world she becomes swept up in. They bestow her with the Gatsby-inspired nickname “Jordan,” and her senior year quickly becomes a tangle of witty banter, literary discussions, and a raucous card game from which the title originates.

In their company, friendship deepens as do her own intellectual ambitions. Jordan begins a romantic relationship with Sam, but slowly realizes that Yash, in all his fervor and offhand charm, embodies the kind of love she desires. Around its halfway mark, the novel skips in time, cloaking the aftermath of Jordan and Yash’s ardent, volatile relationship. The last act, fixated on a few days decades later, is a culmination of all that has been unresolved and misunderstood. Jordan, who feels so shaped by these boys, finally realizes how central she herself has been to their lives and story. She is forced to reckon with not just her own grief, but the role she has played in the emotional ecosystem the three have constructed.

King’s prose is immersive without being showy. It has a kneading quality — pressing into a moment, folding it back, testing the tension. The familiar elements of a collegiate love story are present, but they are handled with restraint. Nothing is strained or exaggerated for effect. Even at its most conventional, the novel never feels manipulative. The emotional pitch rises naturally from the characters’ limitations: what they fail to say, what they fail to see. While the novel has every chance to fall into cliche, King’s sincerity steers it away from being saccharine or melodramatic. A skillful writer, King handles both the heavier themes and the sweeter moments of her novel with finesse. Heart the Lover stands as an artificially constructed meditation on how people inevitably shape our lives, and how we, perhaps unconsciously, shape theirs.

This article was first published in The Franklin Post.