The Eugene City Council Wednesday approved a deal with a developer for a mixed-use housing project at 1059 Willamette. The former Lane Community College downtown campus has been vacant for nearly 10 years.
The developer deChsase Miksis and Edlen & Company has proposed a mixed-use mixed-income building called the Montgomery. It would have 129 housing units, 66 of them for incomes of 80 percent area median income.
Councilor Alan Zelenka expressed concern that the only way to get affordable housing in Eugene is with subsidies from the city.
“I wonder if the council’s okay with, we’re not going to get more affordable housing units on the marketplace,” Zelenka said during Wednesday’s City Council work session. “It’s all going to be subsidized housing projects like this. I don’t think that’s what we should be doing. But that’s a different conversation.”
The city is giving the property to the developer. And it will provide $1.1 million to support the project. Part of that comes from urban renewal money and the rest from its Multi-Unit Property Tax Exemption or MUPTE fee.
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