Category: Neighborhood Newsletter

Land Use and Transportation in Sunnyside and Beyond!

Hello neighbors!  Last month I became a new Sunnyside Neighborhood Board member.  This month, I’m excited to introduce myself as your Land Use and Transportation Committee (LUTC) chairperson. There hasn’t been a LUTC in Sunnyside Neighborhood for a while, so it will take some time to get up and running again. At the moment, I’m the only member of this committee, which is tasked with tracking all matters related to land use and transportation that affect the neighborhood and communicating that information to the community. I’m particularly interested in this topic: my professional background includes 20 years in land use and transportation planning and design for communities along the West Coast and across the country. If you are interested in getting involved, email me at [email protected] or attend our next neighborhood association meeting.  Meeting details are posted at sunnysideportland.org.

Until we get enough folks interested to warrant regular meetings, this column will be my way of sharing what’s going on. My plan is to share happenings in the neighborhood as well as items from around the region that may impact our community. I look forward to hearing your thoughts!

In the Neighborhood

4738 SE Belmont St.

A new 3-story, mixed-use structure is proposed on the .13-acre site at the southwest corner of SE Belmont and SE 48th.  The proposed building includes 19 apartment units and ground floor commercial space. The ground floor will host 1,150 sf of commercial lease space along Belmont St. The building’s total square footage is 11,473 sf. A drywell on the south end of the site will dispose of stormwater.

We hope to have the architect present at the October neighborhood association meeting. Watch the website for a final agenda.

3114 SE Belmont St.

A new residential building is being proposed at 3114 SE Belmont. At our August meeting, William/Kaven Architecture shared design concepts for each floor of this five-story building. The building’s 24 units range from roughly 360 to 720 square feet, with 2 – 4 affordable units included. No commercial uses are proposed. The ground-floor of the building includes common areas, utility spaces, and some of the building’s bike parking. The building is set back and the height is stepped down adjacent to the single-family house on both the south and southwest sides. According to the architects, the building’s height and setback are similar to a typical 2-story house with a peaked roof.

Hawthorne Pave and Paint

The Hawthorne Pave and Paint project will repave and restripe the stretch of SE Hawthorne Blvd between SE 24th and SE 50th.  The City sees this as more than a routine maintenance project and has identified three key goals for the project: improving safety, supporting Hawthorne’s function as a Main Street, and connecting people to other parts of the city. See SNA President Dave Boush’s overview of the project and links to learn more and provide your feedback on page 1.

In the Region

Get Moving 2020 Transportation Measure

The Get Moving 2020 measure from Metro will be on your November ballot. This measure (26-218) proposes $5 billion in funding for a wide range of transportation improvements across Washington, Multnomah, and Clackamas counties. Watch this space for more information and learn more at at: https://www.oregonmetro.gov/public-projects/get-moving-2020/proposed-plan

Emergency preparedness before, during and after COVID-19

Sunnysiders, it’s Jan Molinaro, Sunnyside NET (Neighborhood Emergency Team) Assistant Team Leader and Co-chair, Sunnyside Prepared! (a committee of the Sunnyside Neighborhood Association)! Whoa, that’s a mouthful!

What is the work that I do in the neighborhood and how does that work affect all of you? In a nutshell, it’s my (volunteer) job to assist all of you to get ready for, and survive, an earthquake.

You can find out more about Sunnyside Prepared! at www.SunnysidePrepared.com. How can the resources listed on the site assist you in your preparedness journey? Reach out to me at [email protected] and I promise to support you in your efforts.

How prepared are all of you? Have you learned anything, or done anything, during this pandemic that has increased your resilience? Several members of the current SNA board are trained in emergency preparedness, including Russell Rinaldi and Lorraine Henriques. Dave Boush, the current SNA board president, is a NET applicant and will train as soon as in-person training can start again.

You don’t have to do this work alone, so reach out to your friends and neighbors and get prepared together. This is the same message I have been sharing with all of you for more than three years in the SNA newsletter. Now is always a good time to start.

Hawthorne at Home to Stay Up Year Round, Plaza at 37th Opens

Hawthorne at Home (https://www.hawthorneblvd.com/HAH), the online version of the Hawthorne Street Festival described in these pages last month, will now stay up year-round. The HBBA says it is not too late for Hawthorne businesses to develop their booth and it is free. Businesses “own” their booth and can use it for other online events too. The booths and other cool things on HBBA’s website are increasing weekly. There are now activities for kids, like a coloring page, a maze, and demonstrations from Echo Theater.  

The Hawthorne Plaza at 37th Avenue opened in September and should remain at least through October. There will be art in the street, places to sit and eat your lunch, to visit responsibly, and see the many shops nearby.  If you know an artist who would like to submit a design for the 11×100 center safety zone or for an 11×11 square, have them send their rough design to [email protected].  All pictures and no words, please.

Life with COVID as Life on Mars

How can we count the ways Covid-19 has changed our work and social lives, and the ways we cope? My partner and I started a haphazard Mars simulation at home, complete with indoor exercise rigors, decontamination area for groceries, etc, which has added some fun to the quarantine. With all that’s going on right now, and plenty of others to speak to it, I’ve decided to keep things light with this article, and talk about a few amusements that have sprouted during the isolation.  

It was an accident really, the path that sent some colleagues and me back to gaming. The journey began when we started sharing computing resources with the Folding@Home project. Folding@home (https://foldingathome.org) is a distributed computer cluster, made of up idle home computers belonging to whomever is signed up and has elected to contribute their idle CPU or graphics card time. Each node completes “work units” that run protein folding simulations with the goal of finding vaccines for the SARS-CoV-2 Corona virus (that causes Covid-19). One can choose to donate their computer’s time for various diseases including cancer, Covid19 or let Folding@home assign you to the highest priority project. At the time of this writing they show 98.67% progress on the current sprint to evaluate a batch of potential drugs, which began on Sunday July 26th at 06:31:13 UTC 2020.

To this end, I began folding back in March 2020 with my regular office grade CPU and video card. It took no time at all before I was curious about what a modern, more powerful gaming video card might be capable of. A friend kindly donated a not-so-new Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 Super for the project – a reasonably powerful card. Following installation of that graphics card, my workstation produced 1.7 million work units per day, up from ~200,000! When I spoke about this with other engineers on my team, one, an avid gamer, spoke up. She suggested that I also try to have some fun with a nicer video card. Needless to say I’m grateful for her advice, which has led to some astonishing, educational and entertaining discoveries. 

There are some excellent space-themes games on Linux/Steam that fit our “living on Mars” pastime, which you can find here: https://store.steampowered.com/games/. (Linux is now a pretty decent gaming platform. Who knew? I’m using Linux Mint and Steam.)

Vector 26 – Racing pods on the Martian Surface, the artwork is brilliant and the game is engineering-based. You can build skimmers and must be cognizant of mass, power vector distribution, etc. It’s easy to build a skimmer that looks great, but won’t fly. One can spend hours adjusting and changing parts until it does. 

Eversspace – Released in 2016 and reasonably priced on Steam, this is pure eye candy. It offers a bit of action, resource strategy, and just looks really nice. There’s a new release of this one coming up “soon”. 

X-Plane –  This flight SIM is one of the games that’s stronger on Linux than Windows 10. I’ve been piloting the add-on P51-D Mustang from Skunkcrafts, generally around Kona HI. I’ll probably renew my pilot license after Covid because of this game. 

Stellaris – A detailed, 4X grand strategy game in which you build and rule a future galaxial society based on the policies you choose. There’s a lot going on in this game and it’ll take over your life if you’re into strategy and not careful.

Surviving Mars – A classic SIM based on exploring, building and terra-forming Mars, a nice distraction you can play in-window.

These five take up ample time, so I haven’t even begun to explore the many other games available for Linux/Steam. As a side note, I have a Windows 10 drive on this same desktop for comparison and one might even say that the games I’ve played so far do seem to play a little better on Linux.

In short, this project has been exceedingly valuable in providing some escape. I wonder what avenues everyone else is exploring for leisure and relief. 

Back IRL (in real life), I’m aware from my walks and in talking with folks that we have some areas of concern. I miss seeing you openly to talk about things, and I’m looking forward to the day we can visit safely again. For now we’ll have to settle for occasional passings-by at the grocery store, or out walking, and the virtual Zoom Safety and Livability and SNA board meetings. 

The next Safety and Livability Meeting is September 1st, 2020 at 6:30 p.m – 7:30 p.m., followed by a general board meeting September 10th, 2020 at 7:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m. Both meetings are public.The information on how to join us via Zoom is on our website, https://sunnysideportland.org. Let’s keep talking. Please join us; if we’re going to discuss problems, please come with some ideas for solutions too. 

I just want to say, make sure you’re taking time for yourself, and finding avenues of relaxation and ways to decompress. Everyone be well and stay safe. Cheers!

COVID Times in a Three Generation House

I’ve been looking forward to 2020 for a long while.  It’s a year with great branding—what could be better than perfect vision?  This is also the year my only kid graduated from high school. Big changes were coming—the end of an era, surely, but also the start of an exciting new adventure for our family. Well, 2020 has certainly been the end of an era in many ways. Three generations comprise our family: Mom was born in 1944, I was born in 1974, and The Kid was born in 2003. We don’t agree on much, but we can all agree that the combination of COVID and the current president has resulted in the end of the future as we expected it. 

Remember my son, who was set to head off to college this fall?  When COVID hit in April, he was in the midst of deciding between U of O in Eugene and the U of A in Tucson and aiming to pursue interdisciplinary studies in business and psychology.  We were weighing pros and cons of cost, opportunity, and distance from family when it became clear that school might not even exist in the fall.  Best case, it would be primarily online.  Would it be worth the money and the risk to attend university in the first year of an untried and unproved approach to education?  In the end, we decided no.  So he is spending this next year at home self-educating and looking for ways to work.

My mom has had her own challenges.  In early April, she suffered a mild stroke and spent a week over at Providence Portland stabilizing and undergoing an endarterectomy.  She could only have one visitor during her stay, but we were grateful to have that!  Over the week, as I entered and exited the hospital each day, I watched the staff scramble to provide good care and good information with the protocols changing daily. In a chaotic and uncertain situation, they were amazing. In the months since, she has experienced ongoing health challenges made all the more so by the uncertainty around seeking care in a medical environment that could itself be life-threatening. While her recovery has taken much longer than anyone anticipated, recovering slowly is much better than the alternative.

And me, personally, I have ups and downs—over the weeks and during each day. I used to take the #14 bus or my bike downtown each morning and return with the flow of commuters in the evening. The commute time that used to be dedicated to enjoying the rising sun and a podcast is now dedicated once per week to The Trip to The Grocery Store.  This major production begins with suiting up in personal protective gear and ends with a decontaminating shower.  I’m no longer so sure that all of my commitment to not letting anything touch anything else until it’s been washed is rational, but I do know it calms my anxiety.  And I’m finally able to laugh at that anxiety when I’m watching a movie and see a crowd scene or two characters standing too close together.