Reality check: The difficult history of Westside

In 1977, I moved from the 150 square foot treehouse that I had built on a hillside in the Kentucky Bluegrass and lived in for two years. The next two years, while I attended graduate school at UO, I rented a utility room converted to a tiny bedroom in a single-family home on Cleveland Avenue.

After graduation and getting a job at UO, I searched for a house to buy that was close to downtown and in an older neighborhood. At that time, it was a roaring "seller's" market, and buyers were outbidding each other. My search seemed hopeless. Then I found a completely trashed out, rental house that the slumlord who owned it was desperate to sell. With a small loan from my parents, I bought it.

The house had broken windows, doors off hinges, peeling wall paper, the remains of a "grow" operation in the basement and stolen car parts in the unfinished attic, leaking oil through the ceiling. When my partner moved up from Berkeley and first saw the place, she literally burst into tears at moving into a slum.

Over the month of April, my grad school friends and I tackled making the house livable -- washing, patching plaster, painting, repairing, refinishing floors. Over forty years, my wife and I have gradually reclaimed our cute little bungalow so it provides a warm home.

The first decades were rough -- The Westside was plagued with drug dealing, street prostitution, burglary, street fights. There were almost no families with kids. Mainly very old, often widowed individuals who had stayed behind as families moved to the suburbs during the postwar period. And, a few of us younger individuals beginning our careers and having no children. We called ourselves the "re-colonizers".

When the Westside was first zoned, circa mid-1930's, it was zoned "R-2 Two-Family." From the beginning, the Westside allowed ADUs, duplexes, fourplexes and smaller apartments. So-called "middle housing" has never been "missing" in the Westside. It was a stable, charming, affordable mixture of housing forms and household types, including many families with children who went to Lincoln School.

And then the "great experiment" began, which almost turned this close-in neighborhood to a Eugene version of a slum. In the 1960's, well-intentioned city officials decided that "sprawl" was a problem and the solution was simple: increase the maximum densities of residential zones and substantially relax limits on building height, setbacks and street frontage and access. The result, easily seen if you walk this neighborhood, was that developers interested only in profits, built and operated out-of-scale, poorly built and managed rentals where people lived because that's all they could afford, not because they wanted to be there. The results seriously de-stabilized the neighborhood as looming structures took away any privacy or sense of openness in adjacent backyards, increased traffic on alleys and caused other negative impacts. Families that were economically mobile moved out of the neighborhood. By the time I bought my house in the late 1970's, the neighborhood was virtually "red-lined" by Realtors because of crime and deteriorating housing stock.

This downward trend was reversed only by five-plus years of intense, on-the-ground work by neighbors to develop the "Chambers Special Area Zone" and the "Jefferson-Westside Special Area Zone." These were adopted by the Eugene City Council 7-1 and 8-0, respectively in the late 2000's. The zones allow all housing types, except for row houses and allow twice the density of Eugene's main single-family zone (R-1). Both zones are already almost fully compatible with HB 2001.

But, HB 2001 in-and-of-itself is repeating the failure of Eugene's "experiment" with the R-2 zone. It increases density and intensity without requiring assessment of potential negative impacts and necessary standards to protect the stability and affordability of older, vulnerable neighborhoods.

To learn more about the S-JW zones nd HB 2001, you can visit:
trusttheneighbors.org/hb2001/

Paul Conte
1461 W. 10th Ave.
paul.t.conte@gmail.com