Public: Eugene upzoning brought Airbnbs, not housing

Instead of spreading out, Eugene wants to build up. At two city public hearings Monday, Oct. 19, differing views on whether to allow all R-1 lots to build up to 35 feet high. Tiffany Edwards:

Tiffany Edwards: My name is Tiffany Edwards and I serve as the vice chair of the Eugene Planning Commission, and I’m here tonight on behalf of the Commission to strongly encourage your adoption of our recommendations for the urban growth strategies adoption package No. 1.

Eugene faces a significant housing shortage and addressing it requires us to take meaningful action to remove unnecessary barriers to housing production. On July 28, following public testimony and extensive deliberation, the Planning Commission voted 5-0 with one abstaining to recommend approval of this package, including the proposed increase in maximum building height from 30 to 35 feet in the R-1 residential zone.

I’d like to focus specifically on that recommendation. Five additional feet may seem like a small change, but it can make a meaningful difference in whether housing is feasible to build.

Our recommendation was based on several important considerations. First, a 35-foot limit is consistent with Oregon’s model housing code and standards in comparable communities. It’s neither unusual nor unprecedented.

Second, this is not a new recommendation. The Planning Commission supported the same height increase during the 2022 middle housing code amendments.

And third, we heard directly from housing professionals that these additional five feet provide important design flexibility, particularly on smaller lots that can make three-story housing and additional dwelling units more feasible.

And finally, because R-1 is Eugene’s most prevalent residential zoning designation, this modest adjustment has the potential to benefit housing development throughout the city.

Importantly, this change doesn’t require anyone to build taller, it simply provides greater flexibility to those who choose to develop housing.

As planning commissioners, our responsibility is to consider differing perspectives while keeping the broader public interest in Eugene’s long-term housing needs at the forefront. At a time when our community urgently needs more housing, retaining an unnecessarily restrictive height limit without a compelling planning justification would be a missed opportunity.

We urge you to adopt the full packages recommended by the Planning Commission, including the 30-foot height limit. Our land use regulations should enable thoughtful housing development, not unnecessarily constrain it.

We have a three-page testimony that’s been submitted into the record, so thank you.

Sabra Marcroft: I’m Sabra Marcroft. I am here to thank you and everyone else who put so much obvious good effort into the microvillage and SRO (single room occupancy) portions of the planning stuff that you guys are doing right now.

It’s so important that people have affordable places to live. Most of the people that I know, my friends and my friends’ kids, and my kids’ friends, my kids are in their late 30s. They can’t afford to live here. Finding ways that that can become possible again is super important for us to have a good community going forward. So thank you.

I have three questions. I realize they probably can’t be answered tonight, but I just wanted to put them onto the record.

One is: If a house is converted to an SRO, can detached units be added to reach the maximum number of units for an SRO in a converted property?

The second is: Can an SRO have both shared bath and shared kitchen? It says, ‘or,’ and I’m not sure exactly what that means.

The third is how are we handling the situation with the SDCs, the system development charges? Is there any break available for projects that are specifically aimed at folks of lower income?

City: Our next speaker is Alex Chamberlin.

Alex Chamberlin: Hey, I just wanted to come say that I’ve read the whole thing, it’s pretty long, but I’m basically supportive of the entire thing.

I’ve got some questions… I understand the basic tension between preserving neighborhoods and allowing for new housing, and I see that reflected in this code.

But what I don’t see, and what I’m hoping arrives in a future note is a tool for encouraging desired development, to kind of provide a preferred path so that neighborhoods can shape what their neighborhood looks like in the future.

Because I walk down like alleyways and I’ll see, like, a really cute cottage that works with the neighborhood and, like, I’m proud to have that in my neighborhood.

But I’ll also see built—under the same code—kind of this large bland thing that looks like it came out of a can, like it—it’s not something that I like to see in the development and a lot of development conversation gets around removing and preventing those kind of canned solutions, the ones that don’t look good, but I feel like we need to take another tack and try to encourage the kind of preferred route.

But basically, good job.

City: Our next speaker is Joe.

Joe: Thank you for allowing me this chance to exercise my first amendment. However, listening to your disclaimer to begin with, it’s appalling that you limit what people are allowed to say, ask that we can’t say things when profanity has been voted on and and ruled by the Supreme Court that it is a First Amendment right, and this is a traditional public forum and you guys are squashing that, and that’s just a load of crap.

Like, I’m allowed, under the Constitution of this country, the United States of America, to come up here and say whatever I want so as long as it is not an attack or a physical threat against anyone up here, and you all should be ashamed of yourselves, that you would add that and vote in to ratify something like that, that squander, that dumps on our rights in this country…

So anyways, I love the fact that you’re working on affordable housing and low-income housing and making this happen.

I’ve currently been, I’m working on a few of these, working through a few of these, but have seen firsthand evidence that the planners and the City Council and people are greasing wheels already.

I attempted to get a FOIA request for some things for the public, and they want to charge me $250,000 for emails between a developer, that’s a low-income developer, and the city. It’s appalling. There is no such thing as transparency here. You claim that you have it and you don’t.

When it comes to these applications that are ‘clear and objective,’ they’re unclear, yet considered objectively, and then they ask for subjective application qualifications and standards to be applied to them and they’re given.

And so the double talk is really hard for me to swallow. When I come to this, when I’m a part of the community that actually builds these and works on these and helps these, I’ve experienced the benefit of things that have happened here with this middle housing and this, I’ve also seen the fact that developers get given things that they shouldn’t be given and are allowed to do things that they shouldn’t be allowed to do.

So, I hope that this council can exercise some caution while they go through this.

Joe: My name’s Joe, resident of Eugene, Laurel Hill Valley Citizens. I love how I’m supposed to say my name and it takes five of my seconds. But anyways, on to this point of a three-year extension for land use applications.

I’ll just say that I’m against this amendment, and I would hope that you would be too, because what it does is allows developers who are attempting to make developments cram them through without proper planning, and then sit in a queue after they’re allowed to have whatever sort of application they get through for land use and wait and then re-up for public funds, re-up for public funds, whether it’s through LIFT or through the trust fund here.

And they stay and their application stays active. So what they don’t have, if they’re not prepared when they come to do a development, is if this happens, what they won’t have is a consequence for not being prepared to move forward with a development.

Now I understand we want to remove barriers, but what we don’t want is to promote and support a landscape for developers to come to the table and ask for public funding—because the majority of these low- and middle-low-income affordable housing developments require and get money from the public, my tax dollars, your tax dollars, their tax dollars, everyone’s.

And then if you allow them to have an application that sits extended for three years and continue to re-up over and over and over again when they’re applying for funding, then what they don’t have is consequence for not being prepared.

They can just haphazardly throw pasta at the wall and see if it sticks. They don’t set a timer for the proverbial, to see how long something’s supposed to cook. They get to come in here without doing due diligence and get land use and then not move forward.

And it’s really, really, you know, being a part of it and having worked on these and currently and working on one that’s being built in town right now, from a developer and a builder who did do their due diligence and is following these plans and met some barriers and was able to get around those barriers.

You know, there is a way to have barrier-free right now. It’s the clear and objective land use application track for tentative subdivisions and housings and middle housing. It heads there, it’s available, you know, and the public doesn’t get to say anything and nobody can stop it.

The only person to appeal it is the developer themselves.

Jacob Fox: My name is Jacob Fox. I’m the executive director at Homes for Good and I’m also here representing A.C.T. Now Lane, a group that’s really trying to think about how to dramatically increase housing in our community.

So I’m speaking specifically on the ordinance concerning urban growth strategies, for housing and job code amendment.

I want to just call out three things that I think are really going to move the dial . So first, the new standards for micro village housing and single room occupancy communities.

I think there’s some real cost-effective opportunities sort of in that the maximum building height. We know the future is a more dense city of Eugene and then kind of around jobs and caring for our children, the daycare.

You as Council members and the city of Eugene staff have done a very, very good job of connecting with public testimony, and staff were thoughtful about connecting with private sector developers, non-profit.

And then what I’d leave you with is what we all know: This is a great step in the right direction, but if we want to dramatically increase housing production, we’re going to ask for your support.

Greg Bryant: I am Greg Bryant. I’m on the board of the South University Neighborhood Association and basically we’re trying to keep the South University neighborhood from suffering the same fate that the West University neighborhood suffered because of upzoning.

And I’m asking you to amend this plan to remove the proposed five-foot height increase. And also too, it’d be wonderful if, aside from that amendment to eventually remove the seven-foot bonus, because we’ve seen it was very harmful to really the fabric of the neighborhood—a very tall building that proposed to be middle housing, but ended up being four Airbnbs next to each other.

And, actually as a result of its impact on the neighborhood, basically made everything around it become Airbnbs. And so, in the midst of our residential neighborhood, we now have a little hotel district.

And it’s very expensive stuff, meant for people traveling from out of town to go to sports games and not go to hotels, but instead go to hotels that have been built in the middle of a neighborhood.

I think that this is an unintended consequence. But on the other hand, if one is in the mind of deregulating so that developers and the real estate industry can do anything they want, then, you know, wonderful, you’ve succeeded. But I don’t think that was the intention.

And I think, one of the biggest problems with middle housing, of course is that it is blanket and doesn’t really involve the neighborhood in any way.

We have no visibility into building permits, we have no opportunity to comment or reject buildings are built before the land use process even begins. And so they become moot.

And when they build four townhouses that become Airbnbs next to each other, we don’t get to say anything, and the land use decision doesn’t really make any difference because their neighborhood has been already destroyed.

The trees have been torn down, even city trees and the sun has been blocked and the sky has been blocked.

Presenter: The Eugene City Council hears from the public Oct. 19 on the latest urban planning proposals.