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QuickTake:
Athena Aguiar, who is running to represent north Eugene’s Ward 5, is currently campaigning from an Airbnb. She said she is living through the very housing affordability pressures she wants to address if elected.
A candidate for Eugene City Council is currently living in an Airbnb and faces uncertainty over where she’ll live after the election.
Athena Aguiar, a first-time candidate and progressive activist heading to a runoff election in November with five-term incumbent Mike Clark to represent Ward 5, said she has not been permanently housed for months.
She said she has lived in Ward 5 throughout her campaign, in accordance with city election residency rules that require candidates and elected officials to maintain a residence within the area they seek to represent at the time of nomination — and then throughout their term if they are elected.
But Aguiar, 25, said she is struggling to make ends meet and is not sure where she will live — or whether that will be in Ward 5 — when her current month-to-month Airbnb expires after the Nov. 3 election. She said she plans to stay in the ward, and may be able to live with a friend in the area.
Aguiar said her housing instability has created immense stress, personally and for her council campaign. Eugene election law says a city official or candidate for city office who fails to maintain their residency within the ward will be removed from office or deemed ineligible to serve.
“I want to be a responsible adult and have my own place,” Aguiar said in an interview. “It’s just like, it’s pretty much impossible. It feels like everything’s against me.”
Aguiar said she makes $22 per hour as a canvasser for Eugene’s Clean Energy Fund, an initiative on the city ballot in November. She said she will need to find another job after the election.
“I have a lot of struggles trying to maintain an apartment, to be honest,” Aguiar said. “These campaign jobs are paying not full time, and we don’t get any benefits, and they’re hard to get, and we get taken advantage of.”
She said she has cycled through living with family and friends and in short-term rentals, and has changed her voting registration as she moves.
Aguiar first moved to Eugene in 2016, attending Sheldon High School before leaving the city for college and returning again after her graduation. Housing affordability and availability is a major component of her campaign for City Council.
She said she struggles to apply for apartments that require earnings three times the price of rent, and that waitlists for subsidized housing are “never even open.” She said she is looking for any leads on apartments or open rooms in her ward.
“I would like to continue living here, but as we can tell, I’m being priced out, which is very common,” she said. “I want to survive is my main objective.”
Aguiar received the second-most votes in the Ward 5 primary election in May, about 2 percentage points behind Clark. They face off again in November because neither candidate won 50% of the vote.
Her campaign has raised more than $40,000 in contributions this year.
On her choice to run for City Council, Aguiar said she sees her well-being as “interconnected and dependent” on the community’s well-being.
“I feel that this is the best use of my time to resolve the situation legitimately, is to try to get involved in community action and better the collective and all of ourselves, because that’s the only real way out of this situation,” she said.
Aguiar said she has met several unhoused people through her campaign who have “given up” on voting and other civic processes because their mailing addresses are different from where they sleep.
She said her personal experience with housing instability has been “humiliating” and “extremely difficult,” and that she wants to fight for others who have been in a similar position.
She pointed to Liz Campos, an unhoused City Council member in Ventura, California, as an example of someone who has done the same.
“Those barriers won’t go away if I get out of the situation without involving myself in the community,” she said. “Those barriers will still exist, and I may fall into this situation again. In order to make it so that this doesn’t happen to me, it needs to not happen to people in Eugene.”
