As it works on plans to guide growth, Eugene takes stock of discriminatory past policies

The forced displacement of the Kalapuya indigenous people by white settlers. Racially restrictive covenants. Sundown towns. Land-use policies that exclude lower-income families from certain areas.

Violent and discriminatory parts of Eugene’s history continue to shape its physical landscape today, city planners say. That’s why the city is undertaking an ambitious project to take stock of that history — and to use planning and housing to mitigate past harms and avoid them in the future.

Members of the city’s Planning Commission got a peek at the project during a meeting Tuesday, Aug. 12. Eugene is one of the first cities in Oregon to tackle this type of initiative.

The “Equity Atlas” is one part of a cross-departmental planning effort guiding Eugene’s growth over the next 20 years. It is a component of the city’s Contextualized Housing Need report — a state-required document that adds Eugene-specific context to new state housing requirements. 

Principal planner Terri Harding said the atlas will shape planning, housing and growth policies and help redress “past and current harms” from government-sponsored displacement, exclusionary land ownership and housing injustice.

“One thing we continually hear is that the city needs to take action to increase equitable outcomes, not just write reports or write plans,” Harding said. “I’m hopeful that this project is one of many steps in that direction.”

Senior planner Leah Rausch said research on the project began about a year ago. But Harding noted city planners’ broader shift to acknowledge Eugene’s history of exclusionary planning practices started in 2019, influenced by state laws like House Bill 2001 and the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement. 

“For most of my planning career, this history was absent,” said Harding, who began working for the city in 2006. “It was ignored by educators, city leaders and planners.”

How the state fits in

The Oregon Land Conservation and Development Commission — which sets local land use rules to meet statewide goals — adopted rules in December 2024 to implement the Oregon Housing Needs Analysis and boost housing supply and affordability.

In 2025, the needs analysis found Eugene must add more than 26,000 homes over the next 20 years to keep pace with projected growth. 

To meet that target, Eugene is required to prepare a housing capacity analysis, which estimates current and future housing demand over a 20-year period; and a housing production strategy, which outlines actions to meet those needs over an eight-year period, from 2028 to 2035.

Eugene’s Contextualized Housing Need report builds on those state-mandated analyses by factoring in local conditions, such as historically exclusionary practices documented in Eugene’s equity atlas.

A state grant from Oregon’s Department of Land Conservation and Development fully funded the project.

What is Eugene’s equity atlas?

Planners hope the atlas provides the community and city staff with a better understanding of Eugene’s history of exclusionary and discriminatory land use and housing practices.

It aims to provide a single reference for the exclusionary chapters of Eugene’s history and to inform future planning policies and actions that combat displacement, racism and discrimination.

To do this, planners developed a timeline of historical actions with inequitable impacts, which Rausch acknowledged is likely incomplete because of gaps and omissions in available resources.

Planners selected seven of those actions to feature in an online-accessible story map, presented to planning commissioners on Tuesday by associate planner Stuart Warren.

The featured actions span centuries, beginning with European settlers’ violent displacement and decimation of the Kalapuya people, who stewarded the land in the southern Willamette Valley for generations.

In the 1840s and ’50s, Congress gave 640 acres of land to white settlers like Eugene Skinner and Hilyard Shaw, often without formal treaties with local indigenous tribes who had long lived on the land.

The atlas identifies the parcels of land that the two recognizable settlers claimed — Skinner’s in northwest Eugene and Shaw’s in the western side of the University of Oregon campus.

When Oregon became a state in 1859, its constitution banned slavery but also included an exclusion clause that barred Black people from living in the state and stripped them of basic rights such as voting and property ownership.

Even when federal legislation made such exclusion illegal, it took decades for the clause to be repealed. Meanwhile, city officials, real estate boards and property owners began using provisions on land deeds to prevent people of color from owning or renting homes in many neighborhoods.

The atlas notes that though national law later banned these restrictions, it was not until 2018 that Oregon property owners had a direct process to remove racist covenants from home deeds.

Eugene also functioned as a sundown town from the 1920s through the 1970s, where people of color faced intimidation and violence after dark. In 1937, the city was home to the state headquarters of the Ku Klux Klan.

More recent history in the atlas includes Lane County’s 1949 demolition and displacement of the Across the Bridge community — the area’s first Black settlement, which included a church and a school — to construct the Ferry Street Bridge.

The area is part of what is now Alton Baker Park. Eugene’s Black Cultural Initiative is working with the county to build a monument in the park to memorialize the community.

In the 1960s, the construction of the county’s first public housing project, Parkview Terrace on 255 High St., displaced a dozen households, nine of them Black. A Congress of Racial Equality committee helped relocate former residents struggling to find new housing, in part due to property owners attempting to use previously outlawed racially restrictive covenants. The Parkview Terrace building now provides affordable housing.

The atlas concludes with the present day, stating that current land use maps and zoning regulations have intentionally and unintentionally excluded certain people, typically people of color and low-income, from living in certain areas in Eugene.

Among its examples: apartments are restricted to busier streets away from neighborhood amenities; apartments undergo stricter review than detached homes; and some areas are shielded from major development.

“It covers just seven events, spanning 200 years, but we know those events have profoundly shaped the Eugene we know today and continues to influence the lived experiences of the people here,” Rausch said.

The next step of the atlas, listed as “under development” in the draft, is examining “current patterns of integration and segregation.” 

How could the atlas affect Eugene?

Planners said the effort could shape Eugene’s comprehensive plan, including the “community context” section and draft policies. A survey to provide feedback on those policies closed Aug. 13. 

It may also shape Eugene’s implementation of Climate-Friendly and Equitable Communities, a state program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and support walkable and equitable neighborhoods through the local designation of Climate-Friendly Areas.

Eugene city councilors designated parts of greater downtown and Lower Coburg Road as these areas in 2024, making them eligible for potential future development, changes to urban design and reduced parking requirements. After staff complete work — including identifying strategies to mitigate housing displacement — councilors are expected to adopt the plan in 2026.

The atlas could also further inform the state-required fair housing issue area analysis, which considers housing access challenges for people of color, people with disabilities, tribal communities and low-income residents, as well as Eugene’s housing production strategy. More information will be available on that eight-year action plan in early 2026, per the city’s website. 

Rausch said citywide zone updates, such as those following HB 2001 — state legislation that required Eugene to allow duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes, rowhouses and cottage clusters to be built in single-family zones — illustrate how policy changes could mitigate exclusionary housing and land use practices. 

Community engagement and next steps

Rausch said planners presented the story map to the community advisory panel that informs Urban Growth Strategies, the planning effort for Eugene’s growth over the next two decades, and to the city’s equity and community engagement network. 

Rausch said the community and city generally supports the equity atlas, though community members requested it also include stories of resilience among marginalized groups and exist as a living, flexible document instead of one that gathers dust in archives.

Looking ahead, planners said they will share the atlas with the broader community. In the long term, planners will continue to research gaps and engage with the community members to verify and integrate stories into the project, Rausch said. 

Harding said city has reapplied for biennial state funding to continue the second phase of the project, and told Lookout Eugene-Springfield that planners hope to hear back by the end of September. 

“We are actively seeking grant money to supplement the work,” Harding said during the meeting. “It’s a pretty compelling case when there’s a state requirement to do the work that we ask the state for the money to complete the work.”

Thoughts from the planning commission

Planning commissioners voiced unanimous support for the atlas, though they had questions.

Commissioner Tiffany Edwards asked how planners intend to measure outcomes of the atlas. Rausch said it will inform what types, locations and characteristics of housing Eugene needs to meet its 20-year, 26,000-home goal, while Warren floated potential quantitative quality-of-life indicators. 

“We’re seeking to truly create an entire paradigm shift if you will, or a cultural shift, and to do that, it needs to be totally integrated into all aspects of our lives,” said Diane Behling, the commission’s vice chair, adding that the plan should be broader and more public.

In response to a question from Jason Lear, the commission’s chair, Rausch said other cities in Oregon with populations of 10,000 or more will have to take an inventory of “historic harms” as part of the state-required housing planning process over the next six years.

“It’s so new that we haven’t seen it from other cities yet, but larger cities will need to do this work at some scale,” she said.

Kathleen Yang asked if the atlas could quantify the economic benefit of equity-based policies in city planning. She also asked how the city will gather feedback on the atlas from community members in a way that brings people to reflect and engage, not “trigger more resentment.”

Rausch said planners will receive guidance from the city’s communication staff, adding that the community members are encouraging planners to balance the “light with the dark” while discussing the city’s history of violence and discrimination.

“I suspect there’s people in the community who are aware of [this history], but I also suspect there’s people like myself who maybe knew bits and pieces, but to see all of this and understand it, can be really powerful,” commissioner Ken Beeson said.

Eric Richardson, the former executive director of Eugene-Springfield NAACP, voiced his support of the project during public comment before planners’ presentation.

“Equity is very important to me and in this current situation we’re in, with our federal government really repudiating some of the equity work that has gone on in our nation through these last 75 years, I’d like to be a part of moving this work forward,” he said.