BY ALAN PITTMAN
Grassroots Development
Citizen group brainstorms ideas to bring downtown up.
espite tens of millions of dollars
spent on parking garages and rip-
ping out the pedestrian mall, down-
town Eugene has never looked bleaker.
Ugly broken windows and graffiti line
vacant buildings along Broadway where
dozens of street kids often hang out. The
long-empty buildings are owned by Tom
Connor and Don Woolley, who last month
announced they wouldn’t follow through
on plans for a $165 million redevelopment
project. The brickwork put in when the city
ripped out the downtown pedestrian mall is
now falling apart. Plans for a non-profit
research center in a new green building
across from the library fell through, leaving
an ugly hole. Pedestrian traffic counts are
only about a third of what they were 20
years ago.
But where developers and city planners
have failed, a grassroots group is hoping to
succeed with a community-based revital-
ization of the heart of Eugene.
Friends of Eugene (FoE) organized a
community forum on downtown last month
and drew about 50 participants who brain-
stormed ideas for three hours.
“Downtown is not dead,” FoE President
Kevin Matthews said. A number of projects
ringing the downtown core including the
new Tate and Aurora residential buildings,
the federal courthouse, Whole Foods gro-
D
cery and plans to move EWEB’s industrial
operations and build a new City Hall, show
promise, he said.
The flop of the Connor and Woolley rede-
velopment plan offers the opportunity for
their many neglected and empty buildings to
be sold and finally redeveloped with more
community input and diverse ownership,
Matthews said. “They’ve been sitting on quite
a bit of real estate downtown, and that’s been
detrimental to the vitality of downtown.”
encouraging owners to leave buildings
vacant. A city fee to fund Downtown
Eugene Incorporated, a downtown property
owner group, is charged only on occupied
space. Speculators with vacant buildings
don’t pay anything.
The grassroots group also had a bunch
of other ideas:
• Make downtown greener with a
restored millrace, green spaces, parks,
community gardens, green corridor con-
downtown could provide more appropriate-
ly sized spaces and room for broad side-
walks for street cafes.
• Swap the hole in the ground across
from the library for the Center Court build-
ing and tear it down to make a big plaza at
Willamette and Broadway.
• Buy the butterfly lot from the county
and convert it to a year-round Farmers’
Market.
• Make the EWEB riverfront industrial
property into a historical museum/plaza
featuring the old steam plant.
• Create a shelter for the homeless, a
community center that mixes youth and
‘Downtown is not dead.’
No one at the meeting called for more
parking garages downtown, the main focus
of the city’s failed redevelopment efforts
over the past three decades. But there was
no shortage of grassroots ideas for saving
the heart of the city.
A popular idea was to push speculators
like Connor & Woolley to rent or sell their
vacant downtown buildings through regula-
tion, condemnation or taxation. City
Councilor Betty Taylor has said she would
like the city to impose a tax on empty build-
ings downtown, which can be an eyesore
and attract vandalism and loitering. City staff
say some such tax would be legally possible.
Currently, city taxes do just the opposite,
necting downtown to the river, rooftop gar-
dens, a playground, water fountains, play
fountains, a waterfall in a greenhouse, rest
rooms and other amenities. Such improve-
ments could be financed with parking
garage money and would help the city
compete to attract new residents, business-
es and tourism.
• The city manager system has left
Eugene with a dead downtown for three
decades and the system should be changed
in favor of a more responsive and demo-
cratic form of government that’s account-
able for planning failures.
• Downtown lots are too deep for mod-
ern retailers. Restructuring the blocks
— F O E P RESIDENT K EVIN M ATTHEWS
seniors, a co-op with affordable housing, a
micro-enterprise business incubator, a free
wi-fi computer network, and a center for
non-profit environmental groups.
• Re-write the city’s existing downtown
plan to make it more of a plan and less of a
list of vague policies and aspirations.
• Provide for alternative transportation
with pedestrian-friendly streets, stairs up
Skinner Butte, a downtown shuttle painted
like Ken Kesey’s psychedelic Further bus,
more bike racks, a new pedestrian mall, and
no more publicly financed parking garages.
• Restrict the building of more suburban
chain and big box stores that destroyed
downtown.
ew
JUNE 1, 2006
13