This week, we’re listening back to Down by the River, a recent series of KLCC stories on Eugene’s developing Riverfront District. You can find the individual stories here.
Transcript
Zac Ziegler: I’m Zac Ziegler, and you’re listening to Oregon Rainmakers from KLCC. On this edition, making the most of a massive infill project in Eugene. KLCC recently aired a series of stories, Down by the River. They look at a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity going on in downtown Eugene, the redevelopment of nearly 30 acres that was previously an operations yard for the Eugene Water & Electric Board.
On this episode, we’re going to do something a little different. We’re going to string those stories together so you get a deep-dive into what is going into Eugene’s new Riverfront District, looking at the economics, politics, history and ecology of the area and the project.
We start with a look at what’s been done so far.
Randy Gudeika: So we're now in the River District.
Ziegler: It’s a sunny day, and Randy Gudeika, who goes by the moniker 'The Walking Historian,' is leading a tour through the northern part of downtown Eugene.
Gudeika: We had quite an industrial area. In the middle was the mill race that began four miles that way at the river. And they used water wheels to capture the power from the mill race, and that was how they powered the industrial area from the 1870s up until 1928 when they switched to regular electricity.
Ziegler: That switch to electricity came with the building of a steam plant and then the headquarters of the Eugene Water and Electric Board.
EWEB’s eventual move cleared the path for what today is the kind of large urban in-fill project that rarely comes along in cities the size of Eugene.
Portland-based developer Atkins Dame was selected by the City of Eugene to take on the project. Jim Atkins is a principal and partner with the firm.
Jim Atkins: Last year, we opened Heartwood, which is 95 homes. Today, we're celebrating the opening of Portal, which are 130 homes everywhere, from studio apartments to family friendly three bedroom apartments.
Ziegler: But 200-plus new market rate apartments aren’t the only thing coming to the area. It’s part of an infill development that’s been in the works for decades.
Atkins: This property was essentially a hole in the donut that was left behind after EWEB decided to move to a different site in west Eugene. And beginning in the late 1990s the city and EWEB began planning on how they would redevelop this as a multi-family mixed use neighborhood.
Ziegler: One of those “mixed uses?” A playground, like this one, just south of City Hall. Joining me here are Eugene Mayor Kaarin Knudson and the city’s executive director of planning and development, Denny Braud.
Denny Braud: I've had very few goose bump moments at the City, but I was standing right over there the first day the park opened, and some kids came up with their mom on bikes, and the moms were like, ‘Oh my God, it's open.’
Ziegler: Knudson says chances like this are incredibly rare in a city.
Kaarin Knudson: 27 acres of city center land and a really unique, once in a many-generation opportunity to re-inhabit something that had been used for industry for 100 years.
Ziegler: In the 1990s, this spot would have been the operations yard behind E-WEB’s headquarters, full of the trucks and equipment used to keep water and electricity flowing around the city.
Knudson: Where we're standing right now would have been inside an eight-foot razor-wire fence, basically impervious surface as far as the eye could see. No accessibility to the public, though it was publicly owned with our public utility. But that was the beginning of, I think, in the early 80s, people really dreaming about reconnecting the city with the river.
Ziegler: But realizing that dream would take decades. The area was considered a brownfield, a term that describes an area with promise for development, but not until contamination has been abated.
Developer Jim Atkins.
Atkins: Today, where we're at all of the all of the site has been declared clean by DEQ.
Ziegler: Before getting that Oregon Department of Environmental Quality declaration, work had to be done to ensure that any soil contaminated by metals or petroleum byproducts wouldn’t harm the new residents or get into the river.
Contaminated soil was either sealed under impervious surfaces like streets and building foundations or hauled to a landfill.
Mayor Knudson says redevelopment of post-industrial waterfronts is happening in many places now.
Knudson: But this is a really unique one, and we're a couple of solid steps into, I think, a really good story about how the City of Eugene is taking care of land and creating more opportunities for people.
Ziegler: In fact, you don’t have to look far for an example of former industrial space that’s been given a new life, just a bit west.
The Fifth Street District, a mixed-use project with hotels, restaurants and apartments that many cite as inspiration for what’s happening on the Riverfront.
Gudeika: So how's everybody doing? Well, you're not throwing anything at me so you must be doing pretty good.
Ziegler: We’re back walking around north downtown Eugene with Randy Gudeika, The Walking Historian. We’re a bit west of the Riverfront, in an area that once included a sawmill, wool processing and the manufacturing of a product called excelsior.
Gudeika: What it was was shredded cottonwood. It was a packing material, before bubble wrap, they used excelsior.
Ziegler: In the 1970s, as those plants shut down, a new project moved into the area. A local developer bought the building at Fifth and High streets and opened a spot that would accommodate six small, casual restaurants. Gudeika says what exists now is a revitalized neighborhood spanning six blocks…thanks in large part to one man’s vision.
Gudeika: In the 70s, he became a planning commissioner, city councilman, and then in the early 80s, he was our mayor.
Ziegler: The developer is Brian Obie of Obie Properties, and the property is the Fifth Street District. Many of those interviewed for these stories mentioned this district as proof of what could be.
Developer Jim Atkins, who’s part of the firm selected by the City of Eugene to take on the Riverfront project.
Atikins: There had been a provision, an allowance for riverfront restaurants, and there were going to be several. We felt it was much better to extend the energy that Brian Obie created from the Market District and extend it directly to the river down Fifth Street.
Ziegler: Denny Braud, Executive Director of Eugene Planning and Development.
Braud: We envisioned this as a mixed use neighborhood, and Fifth Street Market is part of the neighborhood, so the retail, the restaurants, that all contributes to the mixed use of this neighborhood.”
Ziegler: Eugene Mayor Kaarin Knudson.
Knudson: Fifth Street Market is a great success story and a great example of incremental development over a couple of generations at this point.
Ziegler: The Fifth Street District plays an important role in the planning and development of the Riverfront. But, as Brian Obie himself will tell you, he didn’t have a master plan.
Brian Obie: Certainly we did not start with this vision that it has developed into, but have kind of looked at the next opportunity, the next thing that made the most sense.
Ziegler: He says lessons learned during his time with the city introduced him to a concept that he employs in his district.
Obie: One of the things that we studied, or that I became aware of, was a concept called urban village. It was all about people living and working and playing in the same place. And that concept stuck with me as this began to evolve.
Ziegler: Obie’s mixed-use development has attracted many new and established businesses. Including the recent announcement that a longtime downtown Eugene staple is moving into the Fifth Street Market.
Obie: Poppi’s Anatolia is a great, great example.
Ziegler: Poppi’s co-owner Shanti Walling told KLCC recently that concerns about downtown are among the reasons the restaurant is moving.
Shanti Walling: It has gotten quite hard to conduct business outside. I’ve had people move in from outside tables enough that it’s noticeable. And, of course I have tons of compassion for the folks out there but it does make people’s dining experience a bit challenged sometimes.
Ziegler: She said the new location will also be better able to accommodate the busiest nights with more seating and a larger kitchen. Overall, Obie says he’s happy to see the area grow.
Obie: It’s a compliment, frankly, that they would choose to make those kind of investments adjacent to us, and well over $100 million invested there that is benefiting from what's gone on here and we benefit.
Ziegler: Back on our walking tour, Randy Gudeika points out one of his favorite parts of the Fifth Street Market.
Gudeika: This is a monument that depicts Skinner's first plat of our fair city. I'm glad they put this here. It's a wonderful thing to have, to see where we've come from 1850 all the way to now. This goes as far as High Street.
Ziegler: It’s one of several designs in the former poultry processing plant turned market that honors the area’s history. Another example: the chicken statue on the fountain in the center of one of the market’s gathering areas.
It’s one of several designs in the former poultry processing plant turned market that honors the area’s history. Another example: the chicken statue on the fountain in the center of one of the market’s gathering areas.
Remembering the history while creating something that fits today’s Eugene.
When designing the project, the city and the developer worked to include what was on this land before EWEB was an entity. They spanned back to Eugene’s early days and even further back to before Europeans made it to the area.
Gudeika: Come around and take a look at this when you can.
Ziegler: The Walking Historian, Randy Gudeika. He’s mentioning some of the new street names in the Riverfront District: Annie Mims Lane and Wiley Griffon Way.
Gudeika: They were named for Black pioneers.
Ziegler: Reading from a 2019 editorial in the Register-Guard, Gudeika says people like Mims and Griffon were no less pioneers than anyone else who settled in Oregon.
Gudeika: In many ways, they exhibited even more strength and courage than white settlers. When white people came to Oregon, the worst they usually had to contend with was the wilderness. Early Black residents of Oregon and Eugene faced the far more pernicious and insidious human edifices erected to prevent them from succeeding. Nature is indifferent. Humans target their cruelty.
Ziegler: Eugene was a sundown town early in its history. Exceptions were made for Griffon, who was known as the driver of Eugene’s earliest streetcar in the 1890s, and Mims, who ran a safe-haven for Black travelers through the 1950s and 60s.
Before the evening arrived, most Black people would cross the Willamette River and head home.
Gudeika: They built their houses of odds and ends with plywood, tarps, that kind of thing. Some of them quite nice, because we had skilled carpenters among them, and they had a chapel.
Ziegler: Gudeika says one of the community’s most famous visitors in that era was renowned singer and activist Paul Robeson.
Paul Robeson: (singing) Old man river, that old man river. He must know something but don’t say nothing. He just keeps rolling, keeps on rolling along.
Ziegler: Eugene’s early Black pioneers aren’t the only ones referenced in the Riverfront District. The area’s Native American culture also gets a nod…this time, in the playground, where the splash pad also serves as an art installation.
Emily Proudfoot is the principal landscape architect in the Parks Planning Office at the City of Eugene.
Emily Proudfoot: There are granite tiles that are engraved with patterns from nature, from local species, and those are labeled in some of the tiles, but around the outside edge of it, we've done some hard work with our local indigenous partners to use Kalapuya language and then have those translated into English.
Ziegler: The phrase that’s translated, water is life. There’s also the name of one of the streets, Nak-Nak, which is Kalapuya for duck.
Proudfoot: Our Willamette River, we've turned our back from it for so long, and this is just another great reason to come down and experience the natural beauty of our river and our riverfront in Eugene, it's what makes Eugene special.
Ziegler: Developer Brian Obie says integrating history into a project can help keep people interested in an area. He took similar steps just west of the riverfront in his Fifth Street District, like the early map of Eugene that dons a wall or the chicken atop the fountain in what was once a poultry processing plant.
Obie: Part of the development is attaching people to the story, people understanding where they're at, what they're in, what the background is, and having that history, I think, is helpful. It's a piece of it.
Ziegler: But, Proudfoot says, the goal was ultimately to go beyond remembering that history. It also needed to show an evolution from it.
Proudfood: The goal of these types of installations are really to help folks feel welcome here and that they belong here, regardless of their culture, their nationality, their language, whatever.
Ziegler: While the area has incorporated a wide variety of people into its design, the area’s current population may not feel as inclusive. That fact doesn’t escape Randy Gudeika as he recounts a 2006 article in the Eugene Weekly.
Gudeika: City Councilor Betty Taylor, she was 80 when she said this, ‘When people talk about going back to the river, it should be for everybody to see, not for just people that have the money.’ These aren't exactly affordable housing units.
Ziegler: Eugene’s median individual income is around $40,000 a year, and most sources say someone is rent-burdened if they spend more than 30% of their income on housing.
So, for a median earner to not be rent-burdened in Eugene, they can’t spend more than about $1,000 a month.
As of this fall, the cheapest available units the two newly opened apartment buildings in the Riverfront District are almost $500 above that. Most units in the Portal and the Heartwood are more than double what would be affordable for a median salary.
This housing is considered market-rate, and the housing market is expensive right now.
Riverfront District Developer Jim Atkins says most of what will be built here is market-rate housing because that’s what is needed to support construction.
Atkins: To make it a value proposition for our customers, we have to make it very nice, just because the building itself, we know will be expensive, just because of where construction costs and inflation have taken us.
Ziegler: The Riverfront won’t be entirely market-rate housing though. Of the 500-700 units planned in the area, somewhere around 10-15 percent will be designed with lower to median income renters in mind.
Atkins: We've partnered with Lane County's homes for good. Lane County's affordable housing provider, to develop and deliver a 75 unit project, similar in all aspects on the exterior to the work that we did at Portal across the street. We've submitted that application now to the state, and we hope to begin construction of that next year.
Ziegler: And the other homes are going through the planning process, from zoning to the city’s Multi-Unit Property Tax Exemption.
Atkins: We've successfully been through the MUPT application process and design review, and we've received approval on those really, it's a matter of just the financing markets, getting Portal fully leased up, and being able to then pivot to one of the next projects.
Ziegler: And, while the plans for the area don’t include nearly as many stores and restaurants as the nearby Fifth Street District, there will be some.
Atkins: We have three retail properties that we're actively marketing and looking for a retail partner to come and develop and operate with us.
Ziegler: But, on the south end of the Riverfront Development is a spot that has been left untouched, a dilapidated Steam Plant that was built in 1931.
Our historian, Randy Gudeika summed up what many of the people KLCC talked to for this series had to say about the building.
Gudeika: I'm not going to talk about that now, other than to say there were plans to redo it, but that was a while ago. And Miksis Development, they haven't done anything yet. Don't know when they will.
Ziegler: A presentation from 2021 showed plans to build office space, a restaurant and an “indie hotel” inside the nearly hundred-year-old walls.
Eugene Planning and Development Executive Director Denny Braud didn’t have much to say beyond it being a unique building.
Braud: It's a tremendous opportunity, because you will never build that close to the river, probably ever again.
Ziegler: In 2022, Developers Mark Miksis and Mark Frohnmayer bought the building from the city for $1.
Miksis did not agree to an interview for this story, but did say there could be upcoming developments in the months ahead.
While standing under the Ferry Street Bridge atop the former mill race that at one point powered the industry near the Willamette River, Randy Gudeika starts to think about the future of this area, particularly if that mill race might ever come back as a scenic waterway.
Gudeika: Well, up until this new River District was built, I would have said they were full of horse apples. But these people, over time, I think they'll be a powerful motivator. Not during my lifetime, but in years from now, maybe they will take this down like they took down the Embarcadero freeway in San Francisco, and maybe they will restore the mill race, something that maybe your children will see, or maybe your grandchildren.
Ziegler: I mean, the project has taken a few decades already. What’s the harm in thinking about what it might look like in a few decades more?
That was Down by the River, a series of stories on Eugene’s Riverfront District. You can find pictures and more on our website, KLCC.org. This has been Oregon Rainmakers from KLCC.
