When Eugene’s economy was sputtering to life in the late 1980s, entrepreneur Carolyn Chambers took a gamble and built a three-story office building on land she owned south of the Beltline/Coburg Road interchange.

Chambers completed the project — Holly Square — in 1989, found tenants and set up an office for herself in the place. Then, the boom along Coburg Road and nearby Chad Drive — which was mostly farmland — took off. A decade later, Chambers built a headquarters on Chad for her TV station, KEZI.

But in all this time, a prominent Beltline/Coburg piece of land owned by the Chambers family has failed to attract development: the empty nearly two-acre parcel of cracked asphalt and a smattering of trees immediately south of Holly Square. After Carolyn Chambers’ death in 2011, the lot passed to her family.

For many years now, it has sported a big “For Sale Redevelopment Opportunity” sign. Each winter, a Christmas-tree vendor sets up a stand on the lot.

Now, tentative plans submitted to the city show an Idaho development company is eyeing the acreage for a modest idea: a car wash and what would be Oregon’s first “7 Brew” brand coffee drive-thru. Whether the developer proceeds is uncertain.

At first glance, the 1.86-acre parcel — a separate property from the Holly Square building and its parking lots — seems a choice piece. It’s near high-income neighborhoods and fronts busy Coburg. “It’s a great location,” says Kenneth Lenz, a vice president at the potential developer, White-Leasure Development Co. in Boise.

The company recently met with city planning staff to talk over the project. “We’re back to the drawing board, to see if we can come up with something that works,” Lenz says.

The main problem? Coburg Road at the Beltline interchange has become so congested with lines of backup traffic that some Holly Square tenants and their visitors drive across the big vacant lot in order to access Coburg Road at points south.  

To ensure continued safe access to Holly Square, the Chambers family needs a dedicated 24-foot-wide street running through the vacant lot, from Holly Square to Elysium Avenue, a residential street to the south, plans show.

That cuts sharply into how much of the vacant lot can be used for money-making ventures.

Tentative plans submitted by White-Leasure show the 24-foot-wide access street snaking along the east side of the vacant land, with the car wash and coffee stand squeezed in on the west side, facing Coburg.

Lenz says there’s a 50/50 chance his company will proceed.

Drivers on Coburg Road can readily grasp the problem.

Traffic going northbound on Coburg can easily get in and out of Holly Square on the building’s official driveway. But in heavy traffic, it’s near impossible for a driver heading south on Coburg to get into Holly Square via the official driveway, or for a driver to exit from Holly Square via the official driveway and turn south onto Coburg.

Hence the workaround of Holly Square occupants driving across the empty parcel and onto Elysium, where a traffic light regulates access to Coburg Road.

Even with this drawback, the property isn’t cheap. It’s listed with Eugene brokerage Evans Elder Brown & Seubert at $3 million. That’s down from a previous $4.6 million.

Silva Chambers, head of the investment company that owns Holly Square and the empty parcel, did not return messages from Eugene Weekly. 

Bricks $ 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.