People are just trying to survive, or thrive, and don't pay a lot of attention to antics and strategies of the ruling class grifters stealing from them. 

Under these conditions, memory is fleeting. Still, it was understood, by lots of people, not long ago, that corporations and the rich from out-of-town, who come to "invest" in a town, are almost always doing so to extract from a town, not to give to it. 

With the data center boom people are now seeing that clearly. But certainly they saw it during the fracking boom? During the destruction of urban renewal?

One of the primary causes of the housing crisis today is the increased inequality in the US. Frankly, there were very few times of 'equality' in the US, and it was very unequally distributed. In the words of George Orwell, some people were more equal than others.

But everyone understands that the richest are getting richer and more powerful than ever, and everyone else is living under increasingly precarious conditions. But there was, for a few decades after the second world war, a successful taxing of the wealthy and redistribution of the spoils of manufacturing. It should be noted that not only wasn't this entirely equal, but it was done on the backs of the global south, plundered as always to support the imperial core. 

But people in the core were doing better in those decades than they are now. In housing, that meant that developers could focus on building homes the majority could afford and desire under those conditions.

Under current economic conditions, they don't. Developers either build rentals or the build for the rich. When they're given government incentives and subsidies to sell affordably, which is a minuscule percentage of development, these are stripped down and small, to maximize profit.

The capitalist boosters of supply-side housing, with mottos like "all housing is good", and camouflage like "construction flexibility" and "housing choice", are focused on destroying existing neighborhoods and replacing them with different ones. Now, certainly, some neighborhoods need judicious and democratic mixed-use introductions, much better public transit, and permission to build in the vast areas dedicated to cars. But that's not what's happening. There is wholesale deregulation, and the subsequent destruction hurts affordability, ecological and climate goals, and quality of life. Unfortunately, this deregulation has come at a time when democracy is at an all-time low. And deregulation (i.e. neoliberalism) is the cause of this increased inequality in the first place. In Oregon, and especially in Eugene, corporatists have partnered with city planners to remove deliberative, democratic processes that used to protect people and neighborhoods from the force of predatory profiteering.

At the same time as this attack on democracy in Eugene, the rulers of the University of Oregon have become increasingly hostile to neighborhoods, workers, and students.

The answer is of course to reverse this: through ballot measures, organizing, and community wealth building initiatives, like community land trusts, and community development corporations. And of course we need more regulation of the abusive, predatory investments that are sending housing prices through the roof, creating more homeless, while increasing traffic and making the town less green and lovable.

In response to this:

Jan 5, 2026 at 8:47 pm

The development Knudson is proud of is frankly terrible. That river park is a multi-million-dollar scattering of random boulders placed in a sea of concrete. The ugly, market-rate housing blocks are owned by Wall Street and suck $20 million a month from the Eugene economy. Her free-for-all zoning deregulation is paving over gardens, increasing traffic, and demolishing historic neighborhoods. It’s clear that if a dissembling, talentless urban planner becomes mayor, with a city staff full of dissembling, talentless urban planners, then things will continue to get worse. This is the most terrible moment in Eugene’s history: everything that was cool is being trampled, destroyed, defunded, or run over. The mayor calls it ‘growth’, with a shrug of the shoulders. As if the City government had nothing to do with this bad growth. The list of victims is getting unsustainably long & the town is increasingly unaffordable: yet the clichés and rhetoric from the mayor … address nothing. Because she likes deregulated growth, having started a lobbying group to support it. She’s a pro-capitalist-booster of the real estate industry, but pretends to be good. A perfect politician.

In an April 1 FB conversation about tearing down the hospital:

If Eugene was a democracy, and if capital didn't have such complete control over all levels of government, the city wouldn't tear up its most important buildings, services, facilities, and neighborhoods. The list of good stuff we've lost is endless. We live in a waste-based 'economy'.

In response to this:

Apr 29, 2026 at 10:31 am

Buildings are torn down for bad reasons all the time. That’s the case here. The new student housing creates a monopoly of Wall Street-backed rentals, which collude on price and vacancy to maximize asset value, and maximize extraction from students and the local economy. Every new investment-grade student tower increases inequality locally, and inequality (along with capital’s demand for ever-increasing returns) is the cause of the housing crisis. The feeling of loss of a hospital, due to nothing but our for-profit healthcare system, is not nostalgia. When healthcare is removed, people die. Hamilton dorm was completely paid for, and the university could have provided its 400 units of free housing to its student workers, putting downward pressure on rents. But they don’t care about the financial struggles of students. The loss of affordable commercial space for local neighborhood cafés similarly increases inequality, and lowers quality of life for everyone. In fact, buildings can last many lifetimes. But the increasingly unregulated-and-unruly ruling-class demands a culture of waste and destruction, so they can concentrate their profits amidst these social disasters. When a building is torn down, something is wrong.

On May 5, to clarify and add to this:

It’s important to understand why this is a pivotal story, and what’s at stake for Eugene.

Investor-backed predatory developers are slamming into town. They take advantage of deregulation (upzoning) that was pushed by pro-capitalist real-estate interests at the State and City level. They build expensive, market-rate rentals, backed by Wall Street’s obsession with compound growth, increasing profits, and monopoly control of housing.

The 14,000 units they’ve built so far continually raise rents in Eugene, and suck the local economy dry. $20 million per month leaks from Eugene through these rentals. Every market-rate building hurts affordability in Eugene, because these corporate landlords collude to fix prices and vacancies using RealPage. To maintain scarcity and asset value, 1,000 of those units are vacant.

At the same time, this development destroys life: the very qualities that make Eugene a desirable place to live. They destroy healthy trees, lovely gardens, permeable soil, beautiful buildings, public services, small businesses and non-profits, local history, and a caring community.

We’ve seen the destruction wrought by the money-sucking towers on 13th and Alder, and the disrespectful 37-foot-high monster at 22nd & Alder, which inspired the neighborhood to try to buy land, to prevent this from happening to more neighbors. Nobody wants to live next to extractive rentals that permanently block the sun, tear out trees and gardens, destabilize adjacent housing, create heat islands, and make it impossible to see the sky ... while suffering two years of construction noise.

People moved to Eugene because it wasn’t that kind of city. But our city government wants to destroy its existing neighborhoods, built over the last 150 years, and let developers do anything they want, at the expense of nature, of resident renters, and of resident owners.

The anti-democratic, technocratic planners at the city, and the planning academic quoted in the article, always side-step the core issues of quality-of-life and participatory-planning. They invoke normalized, incorrect economic interpretations of the situation, in order to hypnotize people into believing that deregulation is the right direction. But it was deregulation, ‘supply-side’ neoliberalism, promoted by the capitalist ruling class, that caused the crazy levels of inequality that we experience in the US today. And it’s inequality that caused this housing crisis. Investors and developers now build either expensive housing for the well-funded, or rental housing that squeezes everyone else.

If we want a fair, affordable, and ecological city, the only way is through solidarity, including growing the commons by using institutions like Community Land Trusts. That means not selling our resources, our people, and our land, to Wall Street. Investors only come to towns to take away, never to give. We must demand that we grow the city ourselves, together, through our collective decisions -- not through plans enforced top-down by oligarchs and their professional-managerial servants in government.

In response to this:

May 5, 2026 at 10:39 am

Athletic donations crowd out academic ones.
There are influential studies on this, starting with research by a UNC group in 2012. Every university executive has read it, and ignores it. The wealthy thus direct universities, as they do all investment in our extreme form of capitalism. Universities then become increasingly like corporations, losing their original purpose: “universitas magistrorum et scholarium” i.e. a community of teachers and scholars.

In response to this:

May 5, 2026 at 12:10 am

You’re right about the unfairness.
But unfairness was the point!
In 2017, when the on-campus housing rule was passed, the UO was run by a hedge-fund managing Chairman (Lillis) and a capitalist lawyer President (Schill), both supported by the ‘business world’. The story to the public was “on-campus life leads to student success”. But university senators at the time argued that only well-funded students could live on campus and maintain a high course load. The ‘success’ is just ‘selection’, coming at the cost of eliminating precarious and non-traditional students. It didn’t matter. Johnson Hall’s goal was to get wealthier students. Schill said to me explicitly, after a meeting where we argued about this, “we will decide what kind of students we have.” By making access to higher-education unfair, by catering to people who can find more money, the university achieves a higher success rate, and can charge more going forward. They happily started a class war with students. They didn’t admit that to the public, of course. But it’s obvious from their actions. Look at how they tore down (using flimsy pretense) 400 already-paid-for, permanently affordable units in Hamilton Hall … because they don’t want to support the 50% of their student population who are food and housing insecure. They’d rather be rid of those precarious students — but they can’t quite manage that politically, yet. So instead they keep hiring an army of insanely expensive executives and consultants … and all of them are unnecessary, because the campus could self-manage, far more effectively. By the way, off-campus housing is not ‘full’ … but all those new towers collude to raise rents to the highest possible level. There is a monopoly of off-campus housing by Wall Street: 14,000 investment-grade market-rate units, and they keep about 1,000 of them empty to maintain scarcity (see the RealPage price-fixing scheme). They have destroyed affordability near the UO, sending precarious students into neighborhoods further from campus. Each new tower makes affordability worse. Which suits the UO administration just fine … they’re busy begging the wealthy to determine the direction of this increasingly centralized institution.

In response to this:

May 12, 2026 at 12:29 am

This city planner pretends that the city ‘engages’ with its residents, or cares about them in some way. It doesn’t. The city council and staff is strongly anti-democratic, and does the bidding of the ruling class, whether it’s those unnecessary and overpaid university executive administrators, or the titans of the real estate industry. The latter have convinced politicians to deregulate development to increase profits and inequality across the state. All the actions of Eugene’s planning staff increases inequality locally, as they actively invite ‘investment’ from Wall Street, which then sets up machines that suck money out of town. The most vulnerable members of our community are the first to feel the pain of this destruction and extraction, which the city planning staff is very happy to facilitate, while spreading marketing propaganda to convince people that they ‘engage’ with residents. They do no such thing. Their job is to prevent residents from bothering the power structure, which is building expensive market-rate towers to jack-up rents endlessly while monopolizing housing for Wall Street investor-landlords. And destroying any possibility of an affordable, self-sufficient, resilient, ecological city here.

In response to this:

May 16, 2026 at 9:38 am

Just cutting all positions that ‘earn’ over $200,000/year would save the UO over $80 million annually. Those people are dragging down the academic mission. The university can self-manage without them wonderfully. That would bring the salary ratio to 6:1, rather than the current 300:1. It would also reduce inequality locally. Inequality is the cause of all our problems, from lack of affordable housing and healthcare, to high traffic deaths, to lack of democracy.

A May 13 conversation on FB:

Given the amount of private student housing built in the recent past in Eugene, I'm flabbergasted that they still see sufficient demand.

There isn't sufficient demand -- 1,000 of those 14,000 private, investment-grade, market-rate student units are empty. Yet the rents keep rising. This is because they double as Wall Street assets, so they need to monopolize the market through price-and-vacancy-fixing (see RealPage). On the face of it, it looks like university housing wants some of that gravy. That's why they tore down an affordable dorm (Hamilton) to build expensive dorms. And generally, as you know, the UO administration wants richer students, hence the on-campus fresher requirement, which selectively reduces the number of precarious students.

Yup. Build a spec student building, keep the rents at the right level for a couple of years so it's sufficiently full and the cash flow pencils out to support a desired cap rate. Then load it with an underlying mortgage or two, package it up to sell to an REIT, and you're out.

A May 14 conversation in the same thread:

Exactly where is this money for East Campus housing coming from? Is this private-UO partnership or fully private that will lease the dorms to UO?

The buildings will be publicly-owned, but the money is borrowed from the private sector. These loans to the university come from the bond market, or selected underwriters, lenders, or purchasers. The board of trustees approved $180 million in borrowing, through revenue bonds, for this project (only the first building + related infrastructure). The bond is based on projected rental income, but the whole university is responsible for the payments. For this one building, the university pays the bondholders (very roughly) $10 million a year, for 30 years. That's for 870 beds. The UO just tore down 800 beds (400 units) in Hamilton that were already paid for ... which only cost the university some maintenance. Each new bed in East Campus will cost the university $11,400 a year in loan payments alone! The most expensive, fanciest dorm bed on campus is now about $24,000 a year, room and board. Hamilton's cheapest was about $12,000. A new dorm, in exchange for an old one, raises both the cost of attendance and the university's debt. And destroys another neighborhood. Such brilliance is why UO executives get the big bucks.

The UO is currently paying about $55 million in annual debt service. This project would make that about $65 million a year. Which is how much the UO says it needs to cut, because 1,000 fewer out-of-state students wanted to attend our giant sports-obsessed construction site. No doubt all of these debts were for equally brilliant projects.

The rich are getting richer. Corporations are more powerful than ever. The protections for people and nature that were won in battles fought for centuries -- are ignored with impunity. The two corporate-backed political parties in the United States are ever-more actively supplicating themselves to oligarchs & overlords.

The supplication often comes in the form of deregulation.

We're in an age where allowing the powerful do whatever they want, to people and planet, is not only considered acceptable, it's considered correct, despite evidence to the contrary. So it's been accelerating. 

But in Oregon, deregulation of the development industry has been particularly bipartisan and destructive, although it takes pains to pretend otherwise, dividing and conquering citizens by a distracting them away from capitalism and towards a nonsense 'yimby/nimby' marketing war. The New York Times and the New Yorker even put two of its opinion writers on the case, arguing that further deregulation was the way democrats could return to power. Disingenuously, they picked on cases where the regulations were put in place by corporations and people in power, to keep people and small business in place. Those are not the deregulations they'd be allowed to make.

A series of statewide bills signed into law by our enthusiastically corporate-friendly governors have eliminated all protections for neighborhoods from bad development. This signaled to cities that they must self-destruct their city codes, and anything they did to reduce traffic, maintain trees and gardens, improve water permeability and carbon sequestration, improve accessibility and safety, protect solar access, protect historic and affordable housing, and generally asking developers to improve a neighborhood, in harmony with neighbors.

Now, they can ignore all of that. 

150 years of people trying to make their neighborhoods into paradises are thrown out the window, betrayed so Wall Street can back developers turning everyone into a renter.

The first sign of a bad developer is that they ignore the existing city rules, because they want to do what they want, and they want to prove they can overcome city offices that have been weakened by deregulation.

So first, they kill trees. Neighbors' trees, trees on their own property, and city trees.

In a mind-bogglingly arrogant step, they then, with help from a sycophantic city government, ignore the city code.

They turn owner-occupied neighborhoods into rental neighborhoods, because the goal of capitalism is to extract as much as possible from everyone. If you're not onboard with "growth", and instead just want to make things better for residents, you are stuck in the past. The future is owned by the oligarchs.

I'll just end by providing my posts from 2025 across social media, for posterity. 

This new year's eve, a former mayor wrote:

We need to figure out how to build an economy that supports all our families without destroying our rivers forests, farmland, ocean and all that grow and live here. Technology is key but it can destroy all. In Oregon we have so much and too little. It’s a long time conundrum.

And I replied:

To echo the comments here: it's not a conundrum at all. We need to stop supporting speculative, exploitative, insensitive, and extractive capitalists. We need to move towards a local self-sufficient economy that respects people and nature. We know exactly how to do it: replace corporate imports with local production; take advantage of local knowledge by democratizing workplaces, governments, and institutions; don't do top-down planning, because then capital wins -- instead, communities should drive change; elect politicians who will stop talking and instead listen to all residents -- not just the rich, fashionable, and powerful ... Now, Eugene and most of Oregon, is fast losing all its resources to Wall Street, the super-rich, and their destructive local wannabes. We need to elect candidates who are willing to make a strong case for the right direction -- which we've all understood since the '70s -- to the general public.

The same day, I wrote this in reply to to a Eugene Weekly column:

Unfortunately Christian Wihtol is editorializing, not reporting, when he writes this terribly mistaken sentence: "in a city of sky-high rents for all — students and non-students — these new units must be counted a blessing. When students move into them, they free up space in older rental housing — or other new high-rises further from campus." The evidence is very different than the laissez-faire, Reaganesque, supply-side-capitalist ideology suffusing that sentence. Rents in Eugene rise every year despite these new towers, because the Wall-Street-investors in these building have no incentive to lower rents: they need to maintain asset value. They can't even build them unless they know rents have more 'headroom'. 14,000 units, here in Eugene, guarantee these rent-hikes by using a price-fixing scheme (RealPage, the target of many lawsuits) to continually push rents upwards. The more investment-grade, market-rate private units that get built, the more they influence and monopolize the local rental market, driving up the cost-of-living. They also siphon $20 million a month from the real local economy to out-of-town investors, hurting small local businesses, raising the cost-of-living again. All this destruction-construction also makes Eugene less livable for owner-residents, who abandon neighborhoods they can no longer protect or improve, creating more high-priced rental neighborhoods by campus. Students and staff who can't afford this, end up commuting from the edge of town, creating more traffic. The only construction that helps is permanently-and-truly affordable non-profit or public housing. But, again, the UO tore down 400 units of affordable housing this year, to build unaffordable housing. Things are getting worse, and the City of Eugene and the UO are increasingly to blame for inviting the destruction of life in Eugene. Praising these towers is like praising conquistadors who've come to force our city to become more expensive, less green, and less lovable.

Two days earlier, the local paper, now part of a chain or poorly-funded local papers, published a series of photos of the two city halls that were demolished, against the public's wishes and better judgement. Just another autocratic destruction of public property by the capitalist-friendly rulers of public property. I wrote:

The ignorance and anti-democratic character shown by Eugene's City government -- in both these demolitions and countless actions to this day -- never fails to astonish. That's why the council and staff worked hard to stop the formation of an independent auditor's office: something that would be seen as corrupt anywhere in the world.

Three days before that, the struggling local weekly paper asked for suggestions for the "top ten dick moves" of 2025. I wrote:

The City of Eugene's countless betrayals of its residents. The City has displayed a strong distaste for public participation, and disdain for community-driven policy, by approving insane numbers of permits for projects that nobody wants. In the City Code we have long-deliberated purpose statements about livability that the City consistently, intentionally ignores. These are supposed to address safety, traffic, transportation, stormwater, solar access, accessibility, affordability, ecology, etc. The City issues building permits before the only public process -- land-use change permits -- even gets started. With City permission, developers: tear down trees, including City and neighbors' trees; create impermeable masses that cause storm fragility; ignore planting requirements intended to reduce heat island effects; destabilize neighboring properties; destroy well-loved historic buildings; and build inhumane out-of-scale towers, with an intention to uproot owner-residents and replace them with renters. These developers include the UO, which tears down protected trees and destroys affordable housing (Hamilton Hall). The City has permitted so many student apartment towers that whole affordable commercial and residential neighborhoods have been destroyed -- all in order to enable Wall Street investors to take $20 million per month out of Eugene's real economy, for pennies of property tax. The City staff simply doesn't care about quality-of-life: they don't even believe in it, which is obvious by watching Planning Commission meetings. They certainly hate democratic and civic participation, although they have a marketing department tasked with pretending otherwise. The City does nothing to make Eugene better for its residents, but they are happy to allow developers and institutions -- such as the UO, Peacehealth, Blackstone, Greystar, RealPage, etc. -- to make Eugene worse.

On December 22, The City of Eugene's propaganda page on FaceBook asked people to support little businesses that were being surrounded by insane levels of speculative student-rental tower construction, which destroyed many other important small businesses already. These are not likely to survive, and it seemed cruel for the City to pretend otherwise. I wrote:

It's hilarious to think the City of Eugene cares about small business. It doesn't even care about its residents. The City only cares about the rich and powerful, as demonstrated by its actions. They have enabled these high-rise construction projects -- bad for neighborhoods, people, nature, education, and small business -- because they always do what big corporations want. 1,000 units are vacant, in this wave of Wall-Street-backed, unaffordable student housing blocks. Supply-and-demand doesn't work: they won't lower the rents, because the buildings are assets, backing the construction of other expensive towers, destroying other cities. Tall buildings are disasters, ecological & social, according to decades of research (google "ucl-energy high-rise"). Wall Street sucks $20 million a month from our local economy with these buildings, and contributes almost nothing (add up the numbers on their price-fixing website "realpage"). And new housing, since deregulation started, has been over 90% market-rate and unaffordable, even by the government's ridiculous standards. Developers can't even get construction loans unless rents are going up. And let's not talk about the government subsidies they get. We're losing green neighborhoods, historic neighborhoods, loved businesses, and owner-occupied shelters, at a rate anyone can see. They want a city of unorganized renters, paying everything they earn for the privilege of giving money to speculative investors, while doing minimum-wage work in chain stores. "Construction is a necessary process for a growing community, bringing jobs and economic activity." Really? Trust your gut on this one: this is disinformation from the City staff. The real estate industry, and their friends in city government, are destroying what you enjoy about Eugene. And they want you to be happy about it.

Someone replied that more housing will get people out of their cars. I wish. I replied:

Sadly, it's increasing commutes. People who can't afford to live in these increasingly-expensive towers need to rent further away. Not coincidentally, the number of traffic fatalities doubled in Eugene in the last year. You'd be right if they were genuinely, permanently affordable, public housing units -- such as the 400 units the UO shamefully tore down this year. See my comment for why tall buildings are unsustainable, but especially expensive ones, which push out the working poor and middle class.

In response to the destruction of a bunch of century-old buildings, including a storied café with a lovely garden:

A thousand of these new student housing units are empty. Which means Eugene could house just as many people, while having kept Roma, Glenwood, and the Excelsior. Blame Eugene's insane pro-capitalist planners, mayors, and councilors. To top off the year, the UO destroyed 400 units of affordable housing on campus, which could have put downward pressure on rents.

On the City's FaceBook propaganda page, they posted a photo of some trivial lights they strung across an alley, with urban renewal funds. I wrotee:

Just a reminder -- it was Urban Renewal that destroyed hundreds of downtown Eugene's small businesses and historic buildings in the '50s, in favor of big corporations and big property owners; destroyed even more small businesses in favor of parking structures in the '60s and '70s; destroyed more historic buildings and devastated the arts community with the construction of the Hult and conference center in the '80s; refused to allow local non-profits to develop parking lots in the '90s, knocking protesters out of trees to favor out-of-town corporate developers; tried to destroy most of Broadway and put the city into hundreds of millions in debt in 2006 for the benefit of corrupt Portland developers and rich commercial slumlords. Downtown Eugene only recovered, albeit temporarily, when the City of Eugene government was stopped from using Urban Renewal, by popular vote, in 2007. The City needs a permanent, independent auditor -- but they prevented that from happening by obfuscating the ballot measure -- something that would be an obvious sign of corruption anywhere in the world. Meanwhile, they've allowing Wall Street's corporate landlords to drain tens of millions a month from the local economy, while destroying livability. Eugene's planning department doesn't believe in quality-of-life -- only unregulated growth -- so neighborhoods all over the city are being tortured by predatory rental developers, who make the affordability crisis worse through price-fixing. All this explains why the City of Eugene spends so much money on superficial marketing: to prevent the complaints of Eugene's residents from influencing City policy.

In August, this was my letter in the Eugene Weekly, complaining about their pro-capitalist real estate columnist.

Colluding, not Competing

“Bricks $ Mortar” repeated some stories about housing that our corporate-friendly politicians have been promoting (EW, 7/31). It’s not true that “there’s little doubt more supply is good news for students and non-student renters.” Today, every investment-grade, market-rate apartment complex built in Eugene will raise rents. 

Instead, we need permanently affordable public housing to put downward pressure on rents. This should be long-lasting, beautiful, protective of the environment and managed by neighborhood groups. Private market-rate rentals cannot lower rents — they only get built when rents are rising. Otherwise, investors would put their money elsewhere. Nearly 14,000 investment-grade rentals in Eugene are in a price-fixing scheme, known as RealPage, being sued by the DOJ and the state of Oregon. 

The scheme fixes vacancies (now close to 1,000 empty units) to maintain scarcity and drive up rents in a coordinated fashion. There’s no “competition” among these buildings. They are openly colluding. The units in this scheme are responsible for $20 million per month leaving Eugene’s economy, sending it to Wall Street. 

Meanwhile, during an affordability crisis, the University of Oregon is criminally tearing down 400 permanently affordable units at Hamilton Hall, which could be given to student workers, freeing their current housing. Doubling the crime at Hamilton: the UO is killing mature trees on the site (and elsewhere on campus) in the midst of heat waves and a climate crisis. Please protest every market-rate private rental project, from middle-housing to giant towers, if you want an affordable, livable city.

GREG BRYANT

EUGENE

One of the worst of the many City of Eugene betrayals is the destruction of the South University Neighborhood, allowing apartment towers to block the sun and destroy the gardens and homes of residents, essentially declaring a resident-owner neighborhood to be a future rental neighborhood. In New York City, with 8.5 million people, 70% of them are renters. Is this what we want? Is this right for any city? Don't we always want to be moving in the opposite direction: towards ownership, sovereignty, solidarity, community, democracy, affordability, beauty, and lovability?

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.

I'm very supportive of a year-round, indoor farmers market in Eugene. Like our outdoor farmers market today, vendors there will sell all kinds of locally-produced foods. Because of the association with Saturday Market, other local goods will probably be sold there as well. 

This is probably the best next thing that could happen to the local Eugene economy. 

The Saturday Market and the Farmers Market are incredibly important incubators of local consumer-producer relationships, a role played since Saturday Market launched in 1970. 

This is Paul Ollswang's original poster for the first Saturday Market. Most people don't realize that Eugene's market inspired Portland's market, which inspired Manhattan's market, etc. It was the revival of a natural idea at the right time, in the right place.

The butterfly parking structure is a good location for a permanent market, facing the park blocks. It's actually the original location of the Farmers Market downtown, which opened in outdoor structures there in 1915. A step-up was the building of Eugene's first indoor market in 1929, a community-built, extremely pretty salmon-and-terracotta building on Broadway & Charnelton.

This building is covered-up by a stucco shell today, and the City tried very hard to tear it down, along with surrounding blocks of businesses. It housed the Tango Center at this point, an organization that fought back, ultimately defunding Urban Renewal through measure 20-134 in 2007. This defunding is the reason for downtown's revitalization: there were no remaining incentives for giant commercial slumlords to hold onto unmaintained properties, waiting for an urban-renewal payday, so they sold to smaller owners. These  new owners were genuinely interested in the success of their buildings. The Farmers Market/Tango Center building became Lord Leebrick Theatre (now the Oregon Contemporary Theatre). 

Basically, with the coming of Urban Renewal after World War II, our local governments developed a habit of wasting downtown. They destroyed a beautiful County Courthouse where the current one sits, a beautiful City Hall on Willamette Street, a Carnegie public library on 11th, blocks and blocks of small local shops … even the park block landscaping was far more beautiful in the past. Urban Renewal provides incentive to destroy, for its own sake -- not preserving the good, not fixing the bad -- just destroying. It indiscriminately eliminates small businesses, schools, non-profits, small producers, local ownership, local jobs, pretty parks, pretty buildings, trees, people, etc. Its record is horrendous.

So, the butterfly parking lot is, once again, a perfect location for a permanent farmers market -- actually, Saturday Market was held upon this structure for several years.

But a few questions come to mind:

Why can't Lane County build this farmers market? Have they no responsibility to Eugene's downtown?

Why does the City need to trade half of the City Hall lot, of all things, to get the County to do the right thing?

Now, I've never been a big fan of the early '60s City Hall. But, frankly, it's much better than most civic buildings erected since. It's open, it's inviting, it's humble, it's full of greenery, it has amusing artwork and fountains ...

It's also so 1960's … it's practically a 'mid-century modern' history lesson. It could have been enhanced and lovingly preserved as a "cool 60's" tourist attraction. But instead, it was wastefully, purposefully allowed to fall apart … an act of government-sponsored vandalism, in my opinion. With trivial improvements, it could have been made more sound, more livable, and a center of activity again.

At a time when the City, County, and University all complain about a lack of money, they still exhibit a total addiction to their wasteful Urban Renewal habits, even if the funds themselves are no longer available. 

This City Hall could easily be converted into a useful, colorful and charming relic. But there's no imagination, just destruction, in the Urban Renewal mindset. 

We saw the City's wasteful lack of sensitivity and imagination during the battle over downtown, when, in an early attack, they tore down the Sears Building, a powerful structure that, with a few new windows, could have become a palatial community center. Instead, the City left a hole in the ground on the site... for years. And when the County finally built something there, it was the least-human new government structure in Eugene since the horrible new federal building.

So, by all means, get rid of the butterfly parking lot, and build a beautiful Farmers Market … but why tie that to destroying city hall? 

And why are so many millions of dollars continually wasted on plans for a new city hall that is never built? Where does this bureaucratic culture of waste come from?

I must point out that it's everywhere, not just in Eugene. 

We live in the United States, whose government has been the greatest obstacle to world peace since the end of the Second World War. Corporate-government collusion is anti-people by design, supporting only wealth and power. And this established power only does something good when people force it to do so. Left to its own devices, corporate-government waste constantly interferes with the possibility of good life.

I'll pick another example from local headlines, although there are so many ...

Imagine a student from a poor village anywhere in the world, witnessing the PR spectacle of allowing US students to graffiti a perfectly functional, expensive building, in preparation for tearing it down, to build an uglier, bigger, more expensive building, which students will be paying off for years to come.

This is the insanity of the destruction of the 1970s skylight wing of the EMU at the UO campus. Now, I'll admit that I watched this building emerge during its construction, and I'm part of a movement that's generally critical against this kind of architecture, and I didn't enjoy it's tiny elevated concrete balconies, its odd-shaped rooms, etc. 

But, I did enjoy the central open spaces, the light, the fact that it was always possible to host an event in a corner without really disturbing anyone … the student offices, the craft center, the ride board, the rental boards, the forum room with its wooden panels and carpeted step-seats, the giant pillow sculpture hanging several stories from an impossibly high skylight …  

It's not how I would design a student union, but it's certainly much better than the design that will replace it, which is bloated, hideous, sterile, and senseless. 

But the worst part of this story is the sheer waste of tearing down the EMU Skylight wing. 

This is an expensive building. It's only 40 years old. It could stand for centuries. It functions perfectly well, once you start to hang out there. Why not fix it, conserve it, improve it, and restore it … instead of tearing it down? Why spend over a hundred million dollars to perpetrate this waste?

I'll just pick one little victim, among all this carnage. There are a few lovely trees outside, that will be torn down soon, that provide great shade for study in the summer, and a kind of unusual connection to activity inside the building. It doesn't look pretty enough: there are too many concrete beams and bunker traps … but, like a few public buildings from the 60's and 70's, it's idealistically-motivated, and it kind-of works. And, as is common in the last 20 years of UO campus construction, it will be replaced by something far worse.

At the time this wing was built, as I've written about before, the University was embarking on an experiment with an extraordinary participatory planning process known as the Oregon Experiment. It was set in motion by architect Christopher Alexander in 1970, when the UO was reeling from student-and-faculty rejection of top-down planning. I don't think anyone could read The Oregon Experiment (Oxford, 1975) and come away with a desire to tear down big buildings and build bigger buildings. But that essentially describes the work of the UO planning office today, building big buildings in an attempt to impress donors.

Instead, here's the key message from Alexander's work: make small changes, fix the worst things, keep the good things, and use people's feelings -- about what makes them feel more human, on the site itself -- to make judgments. Your heart will never tell you to tear down beautiful trees to build a concrete megastructure! We'll get better buildings if we follow our desire for natural structure, and design around the existing trees and landscape. 

There are larger issues raised by all this extraordinary waste.

About 10% - 20% of the people in Eugene are unemployed or underemployed. Another 50% desperately want to do something else. If there was any government body that carefully nurtured money, acted in the public interest, and gradually improved the environment and the economy, so that it was more local, self-sufficient, fun, humane, environmentally sustainable, free of cars and parking lots, etc. ... then all of these problems could be resolved in a few years' time.

Instead, the City's resources are continually wasted. The stories of waste get reported, but people are fearful for their livelihoods, so they don't make waves, and they often disparage those who do. We unfortunately live in an economy of patronage and wage-slavery.

Take homelessness. It's a simple problem, that many cities have dealt with, through a simple solution: just provide housing to these people. It's not that hard!

It's the main thing people complain about after downtown's revitalization: "too many homeless people". 

Well, fix that. House them, and pull them in. Make them part of the solution. 

We have plenty of money to do this: just look at the millions wasted!

Most people in Eugene know this, but for some reason we can't get candidates into office who understand this (well, two councilors do understand it, but they are an extreme minority). They are beholden to business interests well-served by this obsolescence-consumption cycle.

If we want a unique Eugene, a sustainable Eugene, we must address this waste of people, money, property, nature and buildings. The waste is at the heart of life here today. 

Yes, I know, it's a common problem all over the US … 

… but Eugene has a history of innovation … read these articles, if you need a smattering of ideas. 

And let's get to work eliminating waste.

Another giant out-of-town development conglomerate -- funded by the financial sector's collusion with the Federal government -- wants to land in Eugene, receive a property tax break from the City, build a huge-and-ugly apartment block, and extract as much local income from student housing as possible. This is part of the financial sector's continuing colonization of our lives.

The money these development corporations want is survival income for struggling, local, very small-scale landholders: the kinds of people who rent rooms and extensions in their houses. These people never get a tax break, from either the City or the Federal governments. And these local smallholders spend into the local economy -- so the downside, the cumulative economic ramifications of these out-of-town projects, is huge. Not surprisingly, nobody in City government calculates the downside of projects like this.

Certainly, when little Eugene struggled mightily to build a world-class university, by hand, over 140 years ago, none of those small-town idealists could have imagined this: a City government so insensitive to the local economy, that they'd give special privileges to huge absentee corporate landlords, rather than dissuade them from stealing business from harder-working locals. 

Unfortunately, this is the policy of many cities in modern times. This is how downtowns were destroyed, along with their diverse local businesses -- by shopping malls, by big-box stores, and by Urban Renewal, which serves large-scale corporate free-lunches at the public expense.

Local governments, dismissive of democracy, and lost within their internal pressures, have little concern for -- or understanding of -- public interest. They tend to believe it's the same as the wealthy and powerful interests within the city, and the giant corporations and government agencies outside of it. 

Instead, of course, local government's constituency should be the population at large. But unless the population speaks up (which they can, with as little as an email) it's very unlikely that the public interest will be served.

Eugene's City government, like that of many other cities, is trying to optimize for one thing only: future tax revenue. 

Tax revenue is a horrifically incorrect indicator of general public welfare. If I ran a totalitarian 19th-century company-town, with a population enslaved to sweatshops, with compliance enforced by city police, my City's tax revenues might be quite high! 

Not coincidentally, a focus on tax revenue leads to city policies that give away everything to wealthy out-of-town interests (and some large in-town interests), disenfranchising the citizens, and destroying broad local opportunity, in exchange for tiny increments in property tax revenue. 

Another thing the city is giving away -- its environment. Oh, this building might be "energy efficient", in some PR sense, but it obviously couldn't be more unnatural and disharmonious. It's completely lacking in properties that the majority of citizens consider a sign of good life and a healthy urban ecology.

The artist's rendering for this Core Campus building looks more-or-less like a Borg cube --straight from dystopian science fiction. It will land in downtown Eugene and suck up all the local revenue, impoverishing the citizens who work so hard to make life for student residents more interesting ... which they usually do because they are themselves graduates of the University of Oregon. That cooperative, pay-it-forward spirit is hurt every time a project like this is built.

This particular building is also strikingly out of proportion to its surroundings, and any human sensibility. 

Most people correctly believe that Eugene's architectural peak was long before the decline in standards after World War II -- and that's true of the world in general. But Eugeneans are lucky to have a great natural urban ecology ... a profusion of trees and flowers that any city in the world would envy. Developments like this Core Campus cube, which is planned to be 12 stories in height, immediately disrupt any sense of harmony with nature, or harmony with the people who enjoy nature. The building sticks out like a sore thumb, towering over neighborhoods, and isolating its residents from their surroundings.

Most people don't know the local history around an important alternative to bad modern architecture. 

In 1970, protests at the U of O led to a number of democratic changes, including a world-renowned experiment in democratic planning and construction. The extraordinary mission statement of this UO initiative was published by Christopher Alexander and his associates in a book called The Oregon Experiment. This was essentially the main research project behind the best-selling book on architecture, or cities, of all time: A Pattern Language. Many of the patterns in the book are taken from the UO campus. APL is such an important book in modern intellectual history that it should be required reading here in schools, given its Eugene connection. (Just as an aside: the wiki was invented by an Oregon programmer for the purpose of publishing software patterns modeled after APL, thus connecting Eugene to world-changing events such as wikipedia and wikileaks.)

There are clear alternatives to this governmental-corporate collusion. Just as a start, the City needs to get its citizens involved in deeper democratic decision-making, to the level of line-item ballot referenda -- and the citizens need to make a clamor until this happens. Until then, it will just be business as usual, as big money comes to town, distracts our local sycophants, and slowly turns Eugene into a maze of massive concrete and glass, occupied mostly by struggling wage-slaves.

Also, a note on the Capstone colonizing housing development, right downtown. This is so offensive that I've actually heard people cry out, on site, "they've killed this part of Willamette Street forever!" There is no room for trees, and the building has no interaction with the street. It simply pushes up against the sidewalk, and creates recreational facilities for students inside, as if the building wasn't designed to sit downtown, but was instead intended for the middle of a desert. I hope this isn't a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy.

There was a citizen's movement against this building, but it gained insufficient momentum, since housing "of any kind" downtown was the rallying cry for many years. But, it turns out, we don't want just anything. Eugene's citizens lost the opportunity to leverage the tax break given by the City, which could have forced the developers to build more in harmony with its surroundings. Of course, there were many other ways to get housing downtown besides these kinds of private-public deals. 

Now what? 

It is possible to fight this sort of project after it's built. It's important to help incoming students to understand the stakes, and since their education is also colonized through student loans, this kind of town-and-gown alliance would not be difficult to achieve. With a successful housing boycott, across the country, Wall Street could be forced to abandon this investment, and perhaps it could be converted into low-income housing, and renovated somehow to improve the structures' negative impacts upon the city. 

The fact that people around the world are forced to deal with such situations, where corporations use city governments to directly attack citizens and the environment, is simply a fact of life. This could have been stopped. Until the people of Eugene regain control of their government policies, the situation is going to simply get worse.

Everyone appreciates the effort and care put into downtown by its new workers, commercial and non-profit, during the recent boom. Some lovely and touching stuff is emerging.

Again, the history is quite important: when Eugene's citizens united to defund urban renewal at the ballot box in 2007, they kicked out the heavies: large developers, commercial slumlords, and terrible urban interference by the City. As a result of the vote, ownership in the buildings broke up, empowering smaller owners, who partnered with others in energetic ways, to improve their spaces and create unique activities.

So I shouldn't be critical. This is an important and positive story.

But, although it's early days still, there is a kind of imbalance, which I think could correct itself, if enough people talk about it, and if enough people support others who want to fix the imbalance. 

I'm talking about: the old Diva space on Olive and Broadway; the empty spaces in the Lord Leebrick buildings; and the large unleased storefront across the street. These make Broadway between Olive & Charnelton seem quite unloved (especially compared to the jumping atmosphere between Pearl and Olive. )

Here we see a consequence of the ownership history of the block. It is still suffering from its past, when a single slumlord owner, who owned both sides of the street, was simply waiting, for years, to cash-out via urban renewal. Luckily this cash-out was prevented in 2007, but the block still suffers from the history. Interestingly, this is despite the block's hosting many innovative projects like The Tango Center,  DIVA, New Zone, Lord Leebrick, The Jazz Station, Helios, the Weekday Market et cetera. The other blocks on Broadway had a smaller-scale ownership history, so the energy invested in activity simply stuck more easily.

So, let's "make balance happen"! It's high time to "make an issue" out of this slow development between Olive & Charnelton. "Making an issue", out of an observation that anyone could make, will help spur a solution to the problem. 

Really, if you have an urge to create an activity in these spaces, you should knock on the doors of the landholders -- they might sell, further diversifying ownership. If this block could get popping, Broadway would have no "odd chasm" and could form a continuous, exciting urban fabric.