Thank you to the Lookout Eugene-Springfield Editorial Board for tackling housing in a five-part series. Your conclusion is fair: “We haven’t built enough homes.” The harder question is why. Change is hard. What a new building might take from a neighbor always feels bigger than what it could give the city, and our zoning is built around that feeling.

So we chase an impossible goal: a big lot and bucolic quiet, plus good jobs, walkable shops and city services. You can’t have it all. A city means density, walkability and change. Instead, Eugene zones a patchwork of single uses and asks residents’ permission to change any of it. The answer is usually no.

Other places stopped asking. Even Japan’s strictest residential zone allows small shops, and a project that meets the code doesn’t need case-by-case approval. When Auckland, New Zealand, upzoned three-quarters of its residential land in 2016, researchers estimate nearly 27,000 extra homes were permitted in five years.

Let the zoning decide. Allow apartments, corner stores and coffee shops by right, and require storefronts where the street needs them. Tweaks won’t get us there: the Royal Avenue zone, meant for “walkable neighborhoods and mixed uses,” has produced “one recently approved subdivision with a few dozen houses.” We can’t leave livability to developers chasing units and profit. The housing development at 13th Avenue and Olive Street — now called The Hayward — got a 10-year city tax break. It never built the ground-floor retail it vaguely promised, and it gave us two parking garages. Springfield’s Main Street shows the alternative.

Clear rules protect people, too. Nearly 10,000 people live within a mile of the J.H. Baxter Superfund site, and the land is still zoned industrial. The city’s new Public Health Standards mainly require applicants to list their permits; the buffers first proposed haven’t been adopted.

I’m a big-lot owner myself, in a neighborhood of single-family homes around a park. I’d welcome apartments, a grocery store and a coffee shop at its edge. Today that would take a rezoning fight. What I’d gain outweighs what I’d lose.

We’re a city. Let’s start acting like one.

Jeremy AAsum
Eugene