Friday, May 22, 2026

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.