At a moment when the United States is awash in bitter divisiveness, Eugene’s mayor-elect Kaarin Knudson is being swept into office on a tsunami of popular support.
A political neophyte who has never held elected office of any kind since graduating from college, Knudson won the May primary, in which she faced two opponents, with 73 percent of the vote. In November, as the only candidate on the ballot, she drew 96 percent of the vote to become mayor of Oregon’s second-largest city.
As a result of that popularity, Knudson has spent most of the past year dealing with a public that treats her as though she were already in office, though she won’t be sworn in until Jan. 6 to replace incumbent Mayor Lucy Vinis.
“People have been asking me for months if I have a city email or if there’s someone that, you know, they can contact at the city to reach me,” she said in an interview a few days after the November election. “Now I have the title ‘elect’ for just two more months, and then I step into this really extraordinary role. I think the transition process has not really yet begun because it couldn’t formally begin. So I’m just starting to do some of that official transitioning process.”
Knudson brought an arsenal of strengths to her candidacy. An architect with a masters degree who teaches at the University of Oregon, she has been deeply involved in working on what many Eugeneans feel is the city’s most-pressing problem: homelessness. She is firmly in the housing-first camp, meaning her answer to the problem is to build much more affordable places for people to live in and around Eugene. “What we haven’t done is produce enough housing that people earning wages here can afford,” she says. “And we don’t have a lot of housing that has become more affordable as it’s aged over time.”
She has experience with large construction projects here, such as managing EWEB’s Riverfront Master Plan Commission while working as an architect at Rowell Brokaw Architects a decade ago. She founded the housing advocacy group Better Housing Together and is the co-author of a new textbook, The Sustainable Urban Design Handbook. More recently, she was one of the people who convened the 2024 Housing Summit: Solutions Exhibit + Policy Lab held at the University of Oregon in November. It brought nationally known researcher Gregg Colburn, co-author of Homelessness is a Housing Problem: How Structural Factors Explain U.S. Patterns, to talk about longer-term solutions to homelessness.
Asked for what short-term help the city can offer the homeless, Knudson again proposes broad ideas. “In the short term, I think we can find solutions that support people’s basic needs while building community support,” she writes in an email. “It’s winter, and we have to be better prepared for extreme weather events. Ice storms, heat domes and wildfires are no longer unexpected. So our community-based disaster response and city-county-state coordination need continual improvement and support.”
Personally, Knudson exudes an easy-going charisma that’s largely been missing from Eugene politics for decades. A track and field star when she was an undergraduate at the UO — she was a seven-time NCAA qualifier and was a member of the UO’s 1995 Pac-10 championship cross country team — Knudson has the poise of a ballet dancer, though she never took ballet as a girl. She’s married, with two daughters, and the family portrait she posted on Facebook could pass for a Hallmark card. In her campaign, she stressed accessibility, spending hours and days knocking on doors and introducing herself to potential voters.
Earlier this fall Knudson showed up for the EUGENE BRiGHT Parade dressed in a striking silvery outfit and hat, looking like a character out of Cabaret. When I mention that this was kind of glamorous by Eugene standards, she blushes. “I tried to dress as a human disco ball,” she says. “I also committed to our bike advocates in Cascadia Mobility that I would try to come up with something more fantastic every year, just so that we have that touch point as a community. It should be a big costume party!”
The months-long delay between winning the May election and her January inauguration has been helpful, Knudson says, giving her time to adjust to a major life change. “A responsibility like being mayor really transforms your work life — and work week,” she says. “There are, you know, very significant financial implications and time implications, and all of that has to be sorted through.”
When she first began to ponder what it might be like to run for office, the first people she asked for advice were her husband and their 10- and 15-year-old daughters.
She and her husband discussed the bitter anger that inflames local politics these days. “It’s not an easy time to watch a loved one step into public service,” she says. “I think that, as a person who cares deeply for me, he had to think through with me what that would mean.”
Her children had different questions. “Our younger daughter, her only concern was wanting to make sure that we still got to have our hot chocolate dates. And that’s the first thing that we just did on Monday morning to start our Monday,” Knudson says. “So the answer is, ‘Yes.’” Her older daughter was more pragmatic. “She said it sounded a lot like the work I already do.”
“I do take very seriously the responsibility that I’m the mayor of my daughters’ hometown,” Knudson says.
Theoretically part-time, the mayor’s job pays just $30,971.46 a year. Past mayors, though, have said it’s essentially a full-time post, if mostly unpaid. Its formal duties are largely ceremonial, as the city government is run by a city manager hired by the Eugene City Council. The mayor’s only real power on the council besides chairing its meetings and setting agendas is to cast a tie-breaker vote in the event of deadlock.
But Knudson clearly sees the mayor’s role as far greater than that. “The housing and homelessness crisis facing our community is very near the top of the list of things that I would like to see us do,” she says. “Related to that is work planning for our public realm, public spaces, infrastructure, investments. Lots of responsibilities and issues that connect together in the public and social space that we share in the city.”
An important part of a mayor’s job, she says, can be healing the wounds of political division.
“We have the opportunity in Eugene to take seriously the work of building community,” she said in the interview a few days after the November election. “I would say that there are a lot of forces and a lot of rhetoric that fundamentally are talking about tearing apart community. We can make a different choice here.”
When she talks about housing, Knudson looks back to 2004, when she came back to Eugene for graduate school after working for several years in California. In those days, affordable housing could be found here with a single phone call. She’d like to see that kind of availability return to Eugene.
“I wanted to live in an apartment that had daylight,” Knudson says. “I knew where I wanted to live. I reached out to a friend who knew the owner of the little brick apartment building that’s over by 13th and High. I reached out and said, ‘Hey, I’m going to be coming to Eugene in this number of months and I’d love to rent a studio.’” That’s all it took 20 years ago. No longer.
“I think it’s helpful for those of us who are stable in our housing to try to imagine what it would be like to craft a life here now, with very unaffordable housing,” she says. “That’s not what brought a lot of people to Eugene. What brought a lot of people here was this extraordinary place, all of these natural and built amenities like our university — and affordable access to housing. And thinking like, if we can afford a home, we can build a life.”