Eugene needs a housing scoreboard. Here’s what one could look like.

In her State of the City address this month, Eugene Mayor Kaarin Knudson ran through a familiar list of housing statistics: permits issued, projects underway.

Milestones like that matter. But they also make it easy for city leaders to avoid the only question residents care about: Do permit approvals actually become occupied homes? And how long does it take to get from “yes” to keys? Without some kind of public clock, city hall can point to activity at one stage of the building process while families remain stuck at the end of the line.

Some West Coast cities have begun to close that gap by publishing dashboards that track permitting stages and the time between each stage, not just volume of permits. Portland, for example, reports a median 147 business days from application to permit approval for large residential projects, broken out between city review time and applicant response. That’s a start, though it still stops short of following projects all the way to occupancy.

Knudson offered one concrete figure: Eugene permitted 413 units of new affordable housing in 2024. Fine. Now tell the rest of the story. A permit tally isn’t delivery, and Eugene doesn’t publish an end-to-end view showing consistent stages or the elapsed time from approval to occupancy. Until it does, residents are left counting motion — not homes.

Eugene should fix that with a simple, monthly housing delivery ledger — a public scoreboard and stopwatch. Track five stages in the process from when a housing proposal is first developed to its completion:

• Accepted (for review): the application is complete and accepted for review, the first honest point to start timing
• Approval: the discretionary land-use decision, when one is required
• Permit: the building permit is issued (not merely submitted)
• Start: construction begins, marked by the first logged inspection (a defensible proxy already used in city reporting)
• Completion: occupancy, tracked by a certificate of occupancy, or a finaled permit status when a certificate isn’t recorded

Report both the counts and the time between each step. If the city’s rules are working, the ledger will prove it. If they aren’t, the bottlenecks will be visible, measurable and harder to explain away.

That matters because Eugene’s own planning estimates roughly 26,000 homes are needed over the next 20 years — about 1,600 a year. With an Urban Growth Boundary, more of that has to come as infill, where timelines and variability can matter as much as the total.

When the time from decision to occupancy whipsaws, developers absorb carrying costs. Lenders tighten terms, and some projects simply don’t pencil out. Economists Edward Glaeser and Joseph Gyourko have described the widening price-to-cost gap as a kind of “regulatory tax” — a sign that barriers and uncertainty are throttling supply. In housing, time isn’t an abstraction; it’s the bill.

Which is why “permits aren’t homes” isn’t rhetoric — it’s a warning about how easy it is to count motion that hasn’t changed anyone’s living situation. As Glaeser has noted, rules can “deter development through the uncertainty that it creates.” The ledger makes that uncertainty measurable.

The city’s own Housing Implementation Pipeline makes the basic point in plain English: permitted units still aren’t built or occupied, and they can take years to reach completion. And not every delay sits inside city hall.

When residents can’t tell why delays are happening, they can’t tell whether the system works. And when officials can tout “progress” at one stage while the public is stuck waiting at another, trust is the first casualty.

A ledger won’t end the housing argument, but it could help end the guessing about our housing progress.

When it comes to the amount of time between each step, the monthly ledger I’m proposing would include two metrics:

• Total elapsed days (what the public experiences)
• City processing days (pausing the count when an applicant is responding to questions or incomplete information)

Publishing both would keep the diagnosis fair and prevent blame games based on incomplete data.

Then put the data on one public page: a monthly housing delivery ledger that residents can see. Report counts at each stage with clear definitions, broken into basic housing-type buckets so the public can see what’s actually getting delivered. And report the median and 75th-percentile time between steps.

Again, the goal is make bottlenecks visible so city staff can test whether a fix works. Maybe the answer is fewer discretionary steps. Maybe it’s more staff or different fees. The ledger doesn’t pick a side. It merely reports whether policy changes reduce the time between steps.

When she steps into the job, Eugene’s new city manager, Jenny Haruyama, should direct the city’s Planning and Development Department to publish the first ledger. Do that, and Eugene will finally have a citywide accounting standard.

I can already hear three objections, and each deserves a straight answer.

First: “Isn’t this pro-developer?” No. It’s pro-rules, pro-evidence and pro-equal treatment. If Eugene wants tougher neighborhood standards, write them clearly and apply them consistently. Once the rules are set, approvals should be predictable, and the ledger lets everyone see whether city hall is delivering that predictability.

Second: “Does this silence community voice?” Actually, it puts the community’s voice where it belongs: in making the rules. After that, permitting shouldn’t become an endless, ad hoc referendum on every project. Fairness means standards adopted in public, then administered the same way for everyone.

Third: “Aren’t starts and completions outside the city’s control?” Exactly, and that’s why the city shouldn’t add avoidable uncertainty to the part it does control. Track the time and variability in city handoffs, and reduce them.

City Council should require a quarterly bottleneck review of the three slowest city-controlled steps: what changed, what didn’t and whether the clock improved. If staffing is the constraint, say so, then either fund it or narrow the scope of their work.

Eugene doesn’t need more plans to admire. It needs homes people can actually move into. Housing policy that doesn’t track how long it takes to turn an approval into an occupied home is just talk. So publish the ledger, update it every month and let the numbers show where the bottlenecks are — and whether reforms actually make delivery faster and more predictable.