A piece of vacant downtown Eugene land — a scrap left over from city government’s nearly two decades of dithering over where to put City Hall — may be developed with housing.
The city-owned parcel in question is prominent: nearly three-quarters of an acre, now used as a surface parking lot. It’s immediately north of the popular Farmers Market Pavilion on East 8th Avenue that the city opened in 2022.
City planning staff are figuring out steps that would include a Eugene City Council decision on how to dispose of the land, and solicitation of housing development plans “through a competitive process,” says spokesperson Lindsay Selser.
It’s unclear whether the housing would be market-rate — based on market value and demand — or subsidized and below-market.
“We are early on in this process and do not have a proposal yet for this site,” Selser tells Eugene Weekly. “We have not yet identified a housing type or mix,” she says, adding, “We are currently reaching out to stakeholders to understand the opportunities and challenges.”
Zoning change needed
An initial step is to change the land’s zoning, so it can legally be used for housing, the city says. City community development staff recently filed a zone change request with the city’s planning staff to shift the zoning from the current “public lands” category to “major commercial,” which includes a provision allowing housing. The city’s long-range growth plans include the parcel in the city’s “major commercial” downtown core.
“The zone change is a first step in making the parcel ready for development proposals,” Selser says.
It’s unclear how many housing units could fit on the site or how tall the building could be.
A pending project on a similar-sized piece of land downtown gives a hint — and also suggests the project could take years. The city-owned former Lane Community College branch on downtown Willamette Street, an old department store, is tentatively slated to be given to a developer later this month, for demolition and replacement with a six-story apartment building with 68 rent-controlled units and 65 market-rate units.
But that project has lingered for years. The city picked the developer in 2021. Since then, the sides have haggled over subsidies and other terms to ensure some of the units are rent-controlled and affordable to people of average means. Under the latest agreement, the developer has until Feb. 1 to finalize financing and meet other terms in order to take title to the property.
Part of ‘butterfly lot’
The city has owned the site north of the market Pavilion since 2018, when it bought the entire so-called “butterfly” parking lot from Lane County.
At the time, city leaders wanted to build a small City Hall for executive staff, elected officials and public meetings on the north side of the butterfly parcel. But City Council members soured as the potential price tag jumped to $30 million. And they sweetened on a notion they had long rejected, of buying the old Eugene Water & Electric Board complex. The city bought the EWEB property and moved in last year, rendering the north butterfly lot surplus.
Before wanting to build a small City Hall on the butterfly parcel, city officials in 2006-07 spent more than $2 million to develop designs for a massive 300,000-square-foot new City Hall that would have cost up to $163 million. Councilors scrapped that idea after polling showed voters would reject the tax increases to pay for it.
No timeline is available for when the zoning application for the vacant parcel will be processed or when the council will broach the topic.
Bricks and Mortar is a column anchored by Christian Wihtol, who worked as an editor and writer at The Register-Guard in Eugene 1990-2018, much of the time focused on real estate, economic development and business. Reach him at Christian@EugeneWeekly.com.