Monday, June 08, 2015

Since the 2007 election that defunded Urban Renewal, downtown Eugene has steadily improved. Urban Renewal wrecked downtown for 60 years, and this recent relative relief allowed normal urban development to continue. Downtown has filled up to such an extent, that we can now take on a second interesting problem -- the connection between downtown and the university.

Twenty years ago I began to talk to people about the idea of 13th Avenue as a promenade between the two. To make this work involves some social changes and some structural changes.

The structural changes are easiest to understand: from the intersection of Willamette and Broadway, down Willamette to 13th, and from 13th down to Alder, there should be unbroken urban fabric. That is, we need to get rid of the dead parking lots that make this stretch not so interesting to walk by. These lots didn't used to exist: originally the street was lined with houses, gardens, small apartment buildings, and stores with housing or offices over them. The demand for parking led to these structures being destroyed whenever they experienced a temporary setback.

To create an unbroken urban fabric, filling these lots is not strictly necessary. We can use the street-facing half: wide enough, say, for small, ground-floor street offices or pocket services. These can then have one or two floors of housing above, each with four to six units on a typical half-block stretch: hopefully for the vendors or community workers on the ground floor. This should be in a community land trust, to maintain affordable commercial space, and affordable living space, with covenants against car-ownership (but with a car-sharing arrangement available, especially for the public-facing ground-floor spaces). This leaves the back half of these parking lots available for their current use, if they have one, or for trees, pocket-parks, back-gardens, or interesting extensions to the street-facing projects.