Downtown Eugene

Orders of Magnitude

2011-03-05T10:55:00.001-08:00

The crowd gathered Friday, March 4 to celebrate the beginning of LCC's project to fill the Sear's pit on 10th avenue. It's all very positive: a local institution makes a concerted effort to bring its services to the heart of the city, along with housing, jobs, etc.

But at the ceremony nobody mentioned, and perhaps few people understood, that this project was only possible because the City was forced by the population to change its strategy towards downtown urban development.

No one mentioned that LCC's project could never have been born if the City of Eugene planners, with the backing of people who stood to profit enormously, had achieved their destructive goals 4 years ago. The City tried to slip nearly $200 million to commercial developers and slumlords. They would have destroyed dozens of downtown small businesses, and the commercial project would have suffered a financial collapse mid-demolition, leaving us with even more downtown pits, and no money to fix them.

The community stopped this all-too-typical boondoggle with a 2-to-1 approval of a ballot measure to defund Urban Renewal, and as a result the City, suitably chastised, now contributes to construction projects in the millions, rather than the hundreds of millions.

This is a huge change of scale. The Beam project is in the millions, the new DAC project is in the millions, and the City's participation in the LCC project is in the millions. This is two orders of magnitude closer to a human-scaled incremental development strategy for downtown. That's progress.

The Promenade

2011-02-18T09:33:00.000-08:00

In every old city there's a street which the population pours onto, each evening and holiday, dressed their best, with a wide range of social motivations. It's an important, delightful, community-building exercise.

In modern cities, the Promenade somehow spawned the Catwalk. There are local runways and transnational ones, and they all invariably draw crowds. The one on Ken Kesey square in downtown Eugene, on August 18, 2010, drew as many people as could possibly fit into the streets -- on a Wednesday! The garments varied considerably in quality, but the models were all normal people, making the show much more about community than fashion.

In Eugene, designers are often associated with one of the many unique second-hand garment shops, which have a somewhat ideological bent, promoting reuse as an ecological good. These vintage shops are at the center of organizing fashion events.

Hoping to turn last year's audience into more of a fashion movement, and perhaps inspired by the revolutions in the middle east, the organizers are expanding from a fashion day to a fashion week this year. Here are the details, just announced:

First Annual Eugene Fashion Week

Paris? New York? Portland? They all have a Fashion Week & now Eugene will too! Over the course of 2 weekends Deluxe, Redoux and Kitsch will produce 5 shows. These shows will be grouped by design style and each will include an opening act/performance, the fashion show, a meet-and-greet with designers & hair/makeup artists, and a DJ or other entertainment. At each event there will be limited vending for the designers of that show. The main vending event will be at Cosmic Pizza on May 1st. The shows and locations are as follows:

4/22/11 Friday
Green/Eco-Fashion Show (on Earth Day)
Agate Hall

4/23/11 Saturday
Ready To Wear Show
Location TBA

4/29/11 Friday
Club-wear Show
Cowfish

4/30/11 Saturday
Avante Garde/Costume Show
Oak Street Speakeasy

5/1/11 Sunday
Vending Event
All Ages Show/Childrenswear Show
Cosmic Pizza

As usual, we will have numerous meetings beforehand to discuss details. Please pass this information along to anyone wanting to participate.
The dates and locations are below:

2/22/11 Tuesday
First Designer Meeting
7 pm at Kitsch

2/29/11 Tuesday
Model Call
6-8 PM at Oak Street Speakeasy

2/29/11 Tuesday
Deadline for Participation
Paperwork must be turned in to Deluxe, Redoux Parlour,
or Kitsch

Downtown Music & Dance

2009-03-26T13:33:00.000-07:00

With the fading out of The Tango Center sometime this summer, there's been lots of talk about the past, present and future of social partner dancing, especially as it applies to downtown Eugene.

From 1900 to about 1960, between 10% and 50% of the city's population attended partner dances every weekend in downtown Eugene.

But there's a problem in the comparison ... partner dancing was not only the major form of social dance, it was the major point of live music at the time. Even rock-and-roll was originally played for partner dancing, and the styling solo moves you'd show your partner eventually became the solo-dancers-in-a-crowd system that took over the dance scene worldwide.

The problem now is obvious, often in the same facility. Like a dozen now defunct downtown venues, the WOW Hall, in its current building, held regular, never-preempted social dances. These would not conflict with live music, because live music was intended for dancers. But today, in the same venue, dancers can't have regular partner dances at the WOW Hall ... they get kicked out because they are a vast minority in the social and music scene.

In some sense, The Tango Center tries to overcome this problem, by nurturing live music for dancers. It tries to do this in an educational setting, so classes before the dances can act as social lubricant for the dance, and raise the level of people's dancing.

After the summer, how might partner dance look downtown? Well, a few venues will hold some dances now and then, but perhaps the dancers themselves may start to explore music that was not meant for dancing. A Mood Area 52 or a Taarka concert will have a few Tango-blues-fusion couples hanging around in the corners. I'd say they're getting the most out of the concert ... so maybe this will catch on. But some venues will have to give them space to do their own thing on a regular basis, so they have enough group coherence to take on these experiments.

The West End of Broadway

2009-03-19T02:23:00.000-07:00

Lord Leebrick Theatre just bought the building that houses The Tango Center. In a press conference, Lord Leebrick's artistic director said he was alerted to the existence of the buildings because the Tango Center went public with the troubled relationship with the landlords. Luckily, Lord Leebrick was able to buy the building for themselves: no landlord issues for them, ever again! Assuming the Tango Center can fit into some other space on West Broadway (although it's staying temporarily in the building) then this neighborhood will really start to become the thriving center of town it should be.

So, after revitalizing the block, and saving the affordable West Broadway arts neighborhood from destruction in 2007, The Tango Center has permanently saved the neighborhood. It may not get to stay there, but teaching 10,000 people to dance Argentine Tango, stopping Urban Renewal, saving a historic building, and providing a permanent home to DIVA and Lord Leebrick -- not bad for a six-year run!

Last Chance for Dance

2009-02-23T07:24:00.000-08:00

The Tango Center in downtown Eugene is a unique institution with a perhaps not so unique set of problems.

The owners of the building have not given the Tango Center a lease for four years. This, by itself, would have made it difficult enough to keep the operation going, since it is very hard to maintain and improve a place when you could be kicked out in 30 days, at any time.

The Tango Center might have been able to organize its large community to buy its building, if it hadn't needed to fight twice to keep the entire neighborhood from being leveled. This catastrophic plan was launched once by the owners of the building, and then again by the City of Eugene. The last time, we had to organize a ballot measure to take funding away from the City's Urban Renewal district. We won that election easily -- no one trusts the City government to spend money wisely. And they are quite correct not to -- downtown is littered with craters where buildings should be. If the City had received the Urban Renewal funding it wanted, four City blocks would have been leveled, 25 local businesses destroyed, and in this economy, where OPUS and WG, the developers for those plans, are abandoning projects around the country, the downtown would have been flattened, and become a giant crater where no construction would happen for a decade.

But, somehow, through all this, The Tango Center still managed to hold the most amazing, life-changing dances. We hold 25 events a week and bring 1,000 people downtown each week. 10,000 people have taken Argentine Tango lessons in a City of 150,000. Over 10% of the population has partaken of some kind of event at The Tango Center.

We have one last chance to save the place. We're asking the City Council to buy the building, so that we can continue to hold all-ages dances, and so we can then buy the building back from City. Come to the Council Public Forum today, February 23, 2009, by 7:15pm, at City Hall, and speak your mind for 3 minutes.

A Web Strategy for a City

2008-12-15T12:07:00.000-08:00

I'd like to suggest a city-wide initiative for Eugene, Oregon.

In these tough times, citizens and supporters can give our local economy a boost, through a deeper understanding of how the web works.

If we cooperate to reach our true potential, to contribute our lives and works to the global conversation on the world wide web, we will make Eugene an international heavyweight. If the following strategies are pursued by everyone, with very little individual effort, everyone will benefit.

All for one, and one for all

Web strategies always have an "act locally, think globally" quality. Typically a business, in one location, usually acting alone, tries to get the world's attention. But imagine the effect of all Eugeneans and their institutions acting together, providing better information to, and hosting more relevant online activity for a global audience. It pays to help the world, as we will see in a moment.

Let's start with the basics.

Local and Global Rank

An important measure of a website's success is its rank in Google search results for particular search terms.

As an example, take this blog. If you type downtown Eugene into Google, you get a third of a million results, but this blog is listed as result number two or three. That's pretty good ranking, but that's only a local search term.

Let's look at a local website doing well on an international scale. When you type Tango into Google, as of this writing, you get 47 million web pages. Number 41, out of 47 million, is The Tango Center in downtown Eugene. This high international ranking helps the Tango Center to survive, which in turn helps the local economy. Think of it like this: we're the 41st most common application of the word 'Tango', worldwide.

Our extreme visibility on the web helped locals and visitors to find us. It led artists, musicians, performers, organizers and instructors to collaborate with us ... people have moved to Eugene and attended the University of Oregon because our website gave them a lively and full impression of the local Tango community.

If every project in town had this kind of global presence, linking and referring to each other, the overall ranking of everything in Eugene would rise. I'll explain this momentarily.

Strategies to achieve rank are called "SEO" or Search Engine Optimization. Individuals, companies and institutions invest a great deal of time, money and energy to achieve a high rank, for certain search terms. This "drives traffic" to their sites ... in other words, more people visit, more often.

Not just metaphors

Google's engineers work continuously to automate the process of awarding rank to websites. A website's content must be relevant, and the site must be linked, in relevant ways, to many other well-ranked sites. I think of this as a "heft" given a site by other "heavy" sites, a bit like a spider's web re-shaped by dew-drops of various sizes ... or, if you've ever taken discrete mathematics: this is like a weighted graph. Google uses the metaphor of websites "voting" for each other with links, providing "winners" for certain content on the web.

So, a critically important web promotion strategy is to get other good websites to link to your website. For example, if the Register-Guard writes an article about your business, make sure they provide their readers a live link (not only text of the link, but something the user can click) to your business.

It's quite reasonable to cooperate with other websites in this way, for mutual support, linking to each other to form a kind of connected subset of websites. This cooperative group needs to represent real diversity of origin, and the references to each other need to make sense ... Google has analytical methods that can sense feigned diversity, and sense "link farms" and the mere "trading" of links between sites.

Act Now

So, citizens and supporters of Eugene, let's cooperate to improve our mutual ranking, our relevant contributions, and our international standing.

Follow these simple rules:

1. Get ALL of your good content onto the web.
2. Make sure all of your web pages always link to any relevant local content.

In other words, a community must put itself online, to be globally relevant. This means that everyone must get to know the strengths and diverse qualities of their community, write about them, and link to them as much as possible.

All members of the community must become more self-aware, and more generous with promotion of each other, online.

To effect our real-world economy, we'll all need to do our part.

Eugene has thousands of under-promoted world-class businesses, websites, stories, people, etc. To give us our due internationally, we only need to cooperate with each other.

Meeting Potential and Fixing Problems

Let's look at an example with much room for improvement: a page in the Register-Guard online version of Ticket:

(Register Guard Ticket for Nov. 28 - Dec. 2, 2008)

Every line in this calendar could have local links, which would help to increase the ranking of both the Register-Guard and each of the artists, groups, businesses, venues, non-profits, agencies and sponsors involved. Some are local, some are not, but that doesn't matter. Associating the name and link of a non-local group or organization with a local venue or organization will help raise everyone's profile ... and that's how page rank is supposed to work. When you type into Google something like "Tango eugene oregon", you should get both The Tango Center and the artists who've been there, whether international, like Cecilia Gonzalez or local, like Mood Area 52. By helping to connect others, we raise our own profile on the web.

So, everything we put on the web must be stuffed with relevant hyperlinks ...

The Long Tail

But we also need to get more of Eugene onto the web. The tactic of putting volumes of relatively historic or obscure material on the web, targeting smaller, niche audiences, is usually referred to as The Long Tail.

For example, it seems that none of Eugene's local papers or magazines are trying very hard to get their back issues onto the web. Recently, The Register Guard even reduced its online content significantly. This immediately lowered their ranking on Google, reducing successful traffic to their site, and reducing traffic to everything in Eugene they write about.

This is a fixable problem, however. With available labor, improvements in scanning software, and initiatives by Google to get more content online, we could have every issue of The Register Guard, The Eugene Weekly, The Oregon Daily Emerald, Eugene Magazine [update: Eugene Magazine now archived], all the TV and Radio stations, and all their predecessors, online, earning ad revenue and driving traffic to other Eugene businesses.

Let's look at the University of Oregon, a potential helper in this city-wide initiative. Improving the chances of an appearance in search results of any kind of research, would help our local economy. An example off the top of my head: the UO is a world-leader in developmental biology, due to the success of zebrafish studies. However, if I type developmental biology into Google, and look at the results page, "Oregon" is not visible. I see Guelph, Canada, Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, and Arizona ... dig a little deeper, and you can see that this is because those Universities spend a little effort, and no money to speak of, to collect some resources for the public and for their colleagues. The Internet is a place where being helpful makes you popular! As we do this, we will in turn make the UO, Eugene and Oregon, successful.

In this example, how would that be done?

Lengthening the Long Tail

Imagine many helpful pages on Developmental Biology at the UO, linked to pages by all the students and staff of the relevant departments, which would then link to all their local and non-local connections and interests. Imagine if local developmental biologists initiated more international online cooperative projects, such as open-source initiatives, social networks, and wikis for developmental biology. These are simple to initiate, and not hard to make successful, if we actually use our wide international influence to do so. All these nearly cost-free efforts would improve web content, while promoting Eugene and the University.

The same efforts could be made by every employee and student in the 4J, the entire staff of the City of Eugene and Lane County, and every organization ... we need to uncover everything ... and get the entire city, its interests, quirks, opinions, history, research, findings, stories, photos, videos and arts online, and cross-referenced.

Anyone promoting themselves would do this ... but if an entire city did it, its online businesses' sales would increase dramatically, its non-profits and institutions would receive more grants, its population would be retained more often for its technologically savvy and innovation, and it would be providing the world with better information services.

Remember, anything you do will help. You can start right now ... use the comments section of this blog to promote Eugene and downtown businesses, non-profits, and special people, to the world. If you have your own web content, scour it for potential links, as in the calendar example above. If you have no web content: why not? Eugene is full of people with something to say. Get a blog, get a website, start a Social Network (here's one of mine), or publish pages on MySpace, Flickr, Google Groups, Yahoo Groups, YouTube, Wikipedia etc. Create good web content, the best you can manage. Help your friends and neighbors to get online, show them what you've learned, think of new approaches, and, continually, link to each other. It's not only symbolic -- it will have a real-world effect!

The Weekday Market

2008-12-04T15:19:00.000-08:00

For the past few months, The Tango Center, at 194 West Broadway, has hosted a diverse market-dance-art-cafe event known as The Weekday Market. It's every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, from 10am - 4pm, with extended hours during the First Friday Artwalk and this Friday's Downtown Holiday Party.

The Weekday Market was inspired by the building it is in: the only building ever built as a farmer's market in Eugene. As such, we have a year-round local organic farmer's market inside, usually on Wednesday and Friday, in cooperation with Lane County Farmer's Market. At any moment you can find meetings, yoga classes, dance practice, art events, live music, DJ'd music, and the normal diversity of a university-town cafe ... professors, poets, students, downtown workers, artists etc. It has wifi, a performance sound system, one of the world's best social dance floors, and a cafe with constantly changing menu based on the farmers' local produce ... translated into an Ethiopian and Argentine menu. There's locally-roasted fair trade espresso, empanadas, mate, soups, artisan bread by Il Forno Pane, and a wide range of artists.

We soon start a capital campaign to buy the building, which we would like to restore to its former beauty. The year-round market would complement our successful evening activity, The Tango Center: a non-profit, all-ages, community dance-hall and exhibition space.

Thoughts about the next Eugene Celebration

2008-09-16T11:13:00.000-07:00

First thought: It's quite sad that the Eugene Celebration charges $12 for the public to participate. It should be an open event ... the vendors would earn more, and this would in turn pay for talent at the event. People voted with their feet ... the free Saturday Market was packed beyond belief, one block away from the sparsely attended Eugene Celebration.

Second thought: The vendors in the street have been organized in such a way, that the back of the booths face the actual storefronts in the footprint. This means that there are four paths through the closed off street:

Amusingly, the Eugene Celebration planners tried to block off the sidewalk traffic flow in front of the permanent stores ! ... but, quite rightly, the stores would have none of that, and removed the impediments to the sidewalk traffic.

The simple solution: the stores and the booths should face each other, creating two lanes of traffic instead of four:

Note the positive effect this will have on the celebration visitor:

User-generated downtown

2008-04-17T16:11:00.001-07:00

When we launched our non-profit public dance-hall, The Tango Center, one of our main incentives, was to provide places downtown where people could actually do something.

There's nothing wrong with going downtown to shop or drink, or take in a show or a movie -- but we wanted to see if we could successfully create a self-sustaining activity, by providing people an opportunity to learn from each other, and be creative with each other. Social dance, and Argentine Tango, seemed to fit the bill. But you could do it with almost anything.

There's another way to look at what we did. On the world wide web, the mantra for the last 10 years, or so, has been to encourage users to provide a website's content. "User-generated content" is populist, appropriately providing what the people want, because they actually did it themselves.

In the same way, a dance-hall provides people with the opportunity to create the evening they want. And each evening is, indeed, wonderful and different. There's a structure, but most great events need some structure: people can more easily express themselves in relation to something. Partner dances provide structure quite well.

So, an evening of dance is a "user-generated" event. At these events, everyione agrees, the most exciting stuff is on the dance floor, not on a stage or screen.

Maybe user-generated activity is the formula for a successful downtown. If organizers and entrepreneurs fill an area with opportunities for people to learn and be creative, then these activities will fill with people's energy, and get people out of the house, so they can test themselves, fulfill their own potential, and find their own meaning.

Citizens for Public Accountability has launched a series of meetings, called Downtown Together, intended to encourage new projects downtown. In order to try to bridge the gap bewteen a user-generated physical space, and a user-generated web space, the meetings are using software known as Urbanology, which is in the early stages of an attempt to create a networking and project community self-management tool, online.

The Past vs. The "Too Small" Argument

2008-01-12T17:04:00.000-08:00

When nurturing community, we generally try to:

1. preserve and enhance what we have
2. encourage community-based initiatives to solve community problems
3. recover the bits we've lost

Let's talk about #3 for a moment. There's a good standard argument, useful in launching this kind project.

When we launched the non-profit Tango Center, the criticism was made that Eugene was "too small" for a full-time partner dance venue.

At the time, we countered that, when Eugene was only a few thousand people, it had several crowded partner dance venues. At 150,000 people, it should be easy to develop a dance community of equivalent size. And it was.

Recently, during talk of a full-time, elected City Auditor position for Eugene, Portland's auditor interjected that "Eugene may be too small" to provide a pool of qualified candidates. However, he admitted, Portland has had an elected Auditor since it was smaller than Eugene. The past comes to the rescue again.

In a recent Eugene Weekly article about trams one City Councilor said "Our city is just at this point too small" for trams, to which another councilor "points out that Eugene had an extensive electric trolley system from 1907 to 1928 when the city was much smaller. 'Eugene had a very viable streetcar system when there were only 10,000 people here.'"

Plenty of people abuse the study of History at the "macro" level -- making specious arguments about leaders and movements etc. But the really useful history records the activities of everyday people in the past -- and these, if you can find them, provide a key, and excellent market research, for recovering the structures that support community.

In fact, there's nothing like a 100-year-old copy of the Yellow Pages, for inspiring new ideas.

A Peck of Park Patterns

2007-12-20T16:29:00.000-08:00

A park, 1/4 - 1/2 of a block in size, across from the library, is a capital idea. But I've heard worries about its becoming a "problem". This is code for "poor people" and "youth". Hardly problems. We just have to make sure that everyone mixes well.

The Library Park provides a great opportunity for local economic development. Here are a few ideas to make this a lively public space:

Extend the library hours

There's no reason the library can't be open until midnight. The City could do a $5 "cover charge" for 9pm - midnight, and provide a band, to pay for the library staff. People would pay it. The Library Evening could become quite a scene ... lectures, music, literary circles, vendors, etc.

Extend the bus hours

Keeping LTD active later, especially on weekends, could pay for itself. Local venues & pubs can get involved in raising ridership, bus awareness and making the system easier to use. And, it could lower incidents of drunk driving.

Extend the Atrium hours

The ground floor of the Atrium is a terrific evening venue. Any number of local entrepreneurs would rent this space, charge a cover, and hold events there.

Vendors in the park

An incubation program for vendors, in collaboration with LCC and Saturday Market, would make the park a place to eat, snack and shop late into the evening. All that's needed is some rain shelter, awnings, arcades etc.

Vendors in the surrounding buildings

Arcades and awnings provide shelter from the rain ... if they are high enough, they allow sun through. Small shops, vendors and food providers can line the two sides of the park, and extend down the alleyway. This is a permanent market presence.

Benches, tables, chairs, awnings, fountains and amenities

Loose tables and chairs for people to sit. Fountains for people to splash around. Trees for shade. Bicycle valet parking for those willing to brave the elements. Awnings and tents to protect people from the elements.

Infill housing

We've identified a number of places to put housing on top of the surrounding buildings. And, of course, an affordable housing complex on the West side of the park, perhaps with a local CDC like St. Vincent de Paul's, with ground floor shops and a close integration with the park, would be ideal.

1/4 block of apartments: Student housing and affordable housing

The collapse of the speculative housing market doesn't mean everyone has a place to live:

a) Affordable housing -- the local St. Vincent de Paul is committed to developing affordable housing, and the site is city-owned.

b) UO Student housing -- the University continues to expand its housing on and off campus, but why not place car-less students (graduates, undergraduates, and their families) downtown? It's across the street from the fastest bus to the University, and would help to connect students to downtown.

Use your resources: The Tango Center, New Zone, DIVA, Bradford's, The Farmer's Market, etc ...

The surrounding small businesses, co-ops and non-profits are over-flowing with ideas, but are underfunded. They would all certainly take responsibility for programming activity, to connect the park to the rest of the Eugene community.

Boondoggles vs. nothing?

2007-12-05T18:50:00.000-08:00

Portland's auditor recently issued a finding, that in Portland, areas with Urban Renewal funding have higher property values than areas without Urban Renewal funding. Even if that is your goal (Should it be? Why is expensive property a public good?), what kind of comparison is that? "Massive, wasteful spending" vs. "no spending at all"?

The problem is a lack of "political clout" among alternative revitalization approaches, to make a case for a comparison. For example, CDC's can efficiently create jobs with community-driven revitalization and incubation programs, but these are not compared with Urban Renewal. They should be. If you compared the economic benefit of government small business aid programs (all of which are gone now, like CITA from the 1970's) the efficiency of public benefit, as contrasted with Urban Renewal, would be extraordinary.

Having impoverished community-driven development in the past 20 years, Urban Renewal has eliminated the competition for tax money, freeing it for gentrification projects. Luckily, we can still refer all Urban Renewal spending to the ballot, but there must be organized opposition to do this. Most people aren't close enough to the City's schedule to know when it is possible ... but whenever you hear about "expansion of an Urban Renewal district" or "raising the spending ceiling on Urban Renewal", you can bet that someone is pushing to destroy some affordable neighborhood to benefit landlords and private development interests. If we all pay attention, and refer spending to the ballot, we can stop this horrific practice, in our respective Cities.

Decommissioning the Gravy Train

2007-11-27T16:48:00.000-08:00

The organized opposition to the City's urban renewal boondoggle, was certainly fighting Urban Renewal in general. UR is a corrupt mechanism, chock full of anti-democratic legal protections, awarding privileges to certain property owners, and awarding contracts to a City's elite. With it, a "Gravy Train" mentality develops, where the rich and powerful in a City expect the Government to fork over money, regularly, for private work, unrelated to community interests.

Urban Renewal isn't the only mechanism by which governments provide luxury to those who already have it, at the expense of those who can't afford it. But it's a codified corruption mechanism, legally cocooned, and hard to defeat once in place.

So, we must get rid of it. Even the local daily, The Eugene Register Guard, which was for expanding Urban Renewal, is rethinking the Gravy mentality:

Voters in all parts of the city found reasons to oppose Measure 20-134. Those reasons were probably as diverse as the politics of the voters who united to kill the proposal. But the strong and widespread resistance to the council’s redevelopment plans, which had already been approved by the council before rumblings of a referendum led to a referral, suggests that the city’s leaders need to take care as they consider what to do next downtown. Given the Nov. 6 vote, it seems likely that Eugene voters would support a measure to eliminate urban renewal districts altogether.

A healthy garden

2007-11-07T11:13:00.000-08:00

An Urban planner, without Urban Renewal funds, might very well ask: "Ok, the citizens rejected large-scale new development and redevelopment. Basically, it's too expensive, and the social cost is too high. But if that isn't the model for revitalization, what is?"

Essentially, a downtown is a garden. But, it isn't a garden meant to impress the neighbors. It is a garden meant to nurture a complete ecology. It enables life. It's a healthy garden, a part of nature.

What Urban planners do today, is bulldoze ecologies to create flashy new sterile gardens, with big expensive plants and no other life, at the public's expense. They do this for very unnatural reasons -- to support upward distribution of wealth.

In creating a healthy ecology, you don't dig up the plants and try to relocate them all the time ... you try to help the plants you have, and you preserve the healthy clusters and matrices of life that are part of their existence. You find the patches that need help, and you nuture them back to life. It is efficient to work in this way, building upon what you already have. The more work like this you do, the more life it attracts.

This is exactly analogous to a downtown. If you want to help bring something back to life, you start with the people who come downtown, and you provide more for them. You provide more for those who do not come. You don't disrupt anything: harm no existing buisiness, building, organization, event or demographic. In fact, do what you can to help them: help them do more of what they already do. Then the ecology you already have, will thrive.

People win one

2007-11-07T00:42:00.000-08:00

By about a 2-to-1 margin, the citizen of Eugene voted against funding the City of Eugene's Urban Renewal disaster. There is no faith in government spending, and there shouldn't be. This Urban Renewal project was a boondoggle, intended to make wealthy people wealthier, at the expense of taxpayers and the resident businesses and non-profits, in the affordable district on West Broadway.

Fashionable prisons

2007-10-30T18:37:00.000-07:00

This is a conceptual drawing from KWG, the developer that has offered to hire themselves to the City of Eugene, to destroy the West Broadway neighborhood, and, apparenty, to build posh incarceration facilities in the heart of downtown.

Urban Renewal is a wealth concentration mechanism -- governments condemn neighborhoods and destroy lives, to provide taxpayer sponsored development projects to the elite. It's never good for people, unless people force it to do good. Urban Renewal is famous for "the projects", ghetto apartment housing for poor blacks kicked out of neighborhoods wanted by the rich. Nowadays, Urban Renewal funds projects targeted at the wealthy consumer. But the buildings are the same. By destroying real neighborhoods, and creating superficial buildings in which community is impossible, the tenants get to live impoverished lives of "luxury". We have to stop this nonsense.

Urban Renewal: profit through bigotry

2007-10-10T13:53:00.000-07:00

Urban Renewal, an extremely regressive mechanism, built to provide high-profits to the wealthy at taxpayers' expense, has always made strong political use of bigotry: against the poor, against the young, against the homeless, against people who drink, against street musicians, against petty criminals, against street vendors, against struggling creative people, against street life, against small business, against people who party, and against the 'different' --

James Baldwin, 1963:

A boy last week, he was sixteen, in San Francisco, told me on television -- thank God we got him to talk -- maybe somebody thought to listen. He said, "I've got no country. I've got no flag." Now, he's only 16 years old, and I couldn't say, "you do." I don't have any evidence to prove that he does. They were tearing down his house, because San Francisco is engaging -- as most Northern cities now are engaged -- in something called "Urban Renewal", which means moving the Negroes out. It means Negro removal, that is what it means. The federal government is an accomplice to this fact.

Now, we are talking about human beings, there's not such a thing as a monlithic wall or some abstraction called the "Negro Problem", these are Negro boys and girls, who at 16 and 17 don't believe the country means anything that it says, and don't feel they have any place here, on the basis of the performance of the entire country.

Urban renewal has not changed. At the height of the dotcom boom in Palo Alto, I watched as the remains of an old black-hispanic neighborhood in East Palo Alto -- used heavily by its poor residents, servants to the wealthy in silicon valley -- was bulldozed with Urban Renewal and similar non-democratic financiang methods, to build a high-priced, megalithic office park, at public expense.

Supporters of Urban Renewal don't care what exists. They don't care that people live and work and have history in a neighborhood. They don't care if people's lives depend on that neighborhood. They only think of what they want to see ... not what is already there. They think of themselves as "better" than the people who are there, and they believe their fantasies are more important than other people's realities. And, of course, they have support in this bigotry, from all their wealthy friends who make huge profits on inflated fees for government-subsidized construction.

The results are almost invariably bad. New does not mean better, and Urban Renewal is infamous for its support for anti-human 'architectural experimentation'. Given Urban Renewal's true purpose, of course the results will not be good for people or communities.

Co-opting community

2007-10-03T22:42:00.000-07:00

Just came back from a nicely-run Town Hall forum by a local progressive radio station, KOPT.

Eugene's supposedly "progressive" and "sustainable" Mayor Kitty Piercy, boldy advocated a plan to spend better than $40 million to displace an affordable arts, non-profit & commercial district, that serves thousands of people a week, with an upscale mall.

However, she hid her intentions, and the actual legislation she has backed, by stealing rhetoric from the grassroots community development phrasebook. When pressed for time, she even amusingly threw in a "neighborhood ice cream parlor" to justify her supposed change-of-mind regarding a public park in the project.

She even ended the event on an outright lie: that the $40 million will not raise taxes. The City has provided her a study showing that it will. And it's common sense: where on earth is that $40 million, to subsidize the developer's bottom line, suppose to come from? Of course it raises taxes, both directly and indirectly.

It's pretty amusing that the "yes" blog on measure 20-134 is written by a former producer of "Star Trek". Perhaps he believes the $40 million will just materialize out of thin air? Certainly, Star Trek was always the epitome of the Sterile Utopian vision ... these are the kinds of "visionaries" who want to mold the concrete-and-glass prison-cities of the future.

However the mayor, and her courtier Greg McLauchlan, didn't mention the Urban Renewal disasters ... they mentioned those in the 60's & 70's of course, because these are safely distant. They claimed that Urban Renewal has "changed" ... just like US Foreign Policy has "changed" ... well, as someone who's neighborhood is about to be torn down with public money, cash that is sorely needed elsewhere, I can say categorically that Urban Renewal has not changed significantly.

Painfully, these two newspoke their way through their presentations. They painted a joyful utopian picture, using lovely things they have actually voted against: parks, historic buildings, community services, affordable housing, local businesses ... exactly like all propaganda, they use community as rhetoric, when they are hell-bent on destroying it, for the profit of their powerful friends. They've done it before, they'll do it again ...

... don't be fooled. The more money we give the City, the more damage they'll do, the more local businesses they'll destroy, the more historic buildings they will destroy, and the more community services they will drain of money. They have already passed ordinances to that effect.

Vote No on Measure 20-134. Stop City Hall.

Opportunity to speak your mind

2007-09-19T14:16:00.000-07:00

At the last minute, the Mayor scheduled a public forum for tonight:

"Community Forum on West Broadway Advisory Committee (WBAC) Recommendations"
Wednesday, September 19 - 5:30 p.m.
City Hall, 777 Pearl Street, Council Chamber

The result of the "WBAC" meetings, were milquetoast recommendations, which hold the developer to no public standard whatsoever. Their recommendations certainly don't save the Tango Center, or anything else along West Broadway. The relocation compensation will not save us, or our affordable commercial neighborhood.

This was all expected. The WBAC was formed for PR purposes, and stacked with Urban Renewal boosters. If the KWG Urban Renewal spending Measure passes this November, we're doomed.

The press will be at tonight's meeting, so you could go and make your opinion heard, if you're concerned about any of these things:

1. Deceptive PR exercises to give the impression that the City responds to citizen input.
2. $40 million in City subsidies to develop expensive, upscale shopping malls
3. The destruction of an affordable commercial district
4. The destruction of a downtown district that is revitalizing already
5. The destruction of historic buildings (The Public Market and Bristow buildings) continuing the wasteful legacy of Urban Renewal.
6. The huge negative impact Urban Renewal districts in Oregon have on funding for Schools and Social Services.
7. The lack of an empowered, democratic planning process.
8. The lack of clarity, transparency and democracy in City spending.

I personally have found the City planning staff, supported by the Council majority and City staff management, to be very disrespectful of, and deceptive towards, local small business and non-profit activity. The planners are very indoctrinated -- they believe that creating high-rent districts is the best way to spend public money. Do you disagree? Please tell them so, publicly, so Eugene's citizens begin to realize that Urban Renewal is NOT a public-interest activity.

Here are the very abstract "recommendations" of the WBAC:

http://www.eugene-or.gov/westbroadway

And here's the far more informative minority report, by one committee member:

http://downtowneugene.blogspot.com/2007/09/minority-report-from-wbac.html

Urban Renewal is a drain on all of us -- on our schools, our small businesses, our social services, and our wallets. Let's do what we can to stop this disaster!

Historicity

2007-09-17T13:04:00.000-07:00

Here are some excellent comments from Jon PIncus, advocate for historic preservation, regarding downtown Eugene:

... in order to even begin a discussion of the appropriate treatment of the historic properties at hand, we have to have an independent comprehensive study. That will lead us to the appropriate sections of the Secretary of Interior's Standards which have been developed over many decades in a collaborative effort between the Keeper of the National Register, The Secretary of the Interior and the National Trust for Historic Preservation using the nation's top experts in preservation, planning, architecture and history combined with the collected experience of thousands of communities as they have tried to deal with their historic properties throughout the entire 20th and early 21st cemtuies. The cavalier approach to historic resources and materials seemingly advocated by Mr. Wylie [in an article about superficial post-modern approaches to "making reference" to the past] is part and parcel of the legacy of the first Urban Renewal push in Eugene. This approach is illustrated in Otto Poticha's Aster building which incorporates three historic commercial buildings of dating approximately 1867-1890. Prior to construction of that building, these buildings were mostly intact including a virtually complete historic interior on one. They had false fronts on the Willamette Street side but were relatively intact on the Park St. side. In their incorporation into the Aster building Otto had everything demolished except the brick party walls, the alley exterior wall, one brick structure of one Park street facade minus the windows, most decorative elements and a few small bits and pieces. He added a few fake elements to "reflect" the historic material that would have been so easily restored and still incorporated into the larger building had he chosen to take that approach. The approach illustrated in the Aster Building is appropriate only when just traces of a building remains. When a complete building or large sections remain in a visible or obscured state this approach is a tragedy. We can't begin to have this discussion at all without the study occuring first. Mr. Wylie (he is still calling the bank an 1898 building) is wrong in saying that the debate has devolved to hardened positions on treatment. We may never even get the chance to have any discussion. The question now, is whether we will even get to know what historic resources we have.

Minority report from the WBAC

2007-09-16T22:32:00.000-07:00

The West Broadway Advisory Committee (WBAC) was created by the City Council in response to public pressure against their hell-bent plans to destroy West Broadway. The point, from the City's point of view, was to imprint the rapacious developer, and the horrors of Urban Renewal, with a kind of public-looking stamp of approval. In the middle of the WBAC deliberations, the public forced the City Council to put the funding for the disaster in front of the voting public. Here's the report of a dissenting member of the WBAC committee, Citizens for Public Accountability (CPA)'s Rob Handy:

What went wrong? One member’s view:

1) BEGIN AS WE MEAN TO GO ON

When CPA was asked to participate on the Committee by several decision-makers, CPA made it clear that our issues and interest reside in discussing and considering the balance of public investment with demonstrable public benefit---how will the public money be spent and for what.

We were assured that though the Council motion was silent on the topic, it was inherently obvious that the Committee needed to address the Five Elements in a climate of fiscal discipline, with a goal to prioritize the ultimate recommendations to Council. Given this, CPA agreed to participate.

Once the Committee began to meet, support for the CPA perspective vanished. Our hard-working Co-Chairs and one City Councilor unilaterally decided on a narrow interpretation of the Council motion.

2) CART BEFORE THE HORSE

Many communities have successful downtowns by first having public charrettes that identify design principles and a community vision, before asking for bids and specific design proposals from the development community.

City of Eugene chose to skip engaging the public as an important first step. Instead, by issuing a Request for Qualifications (RFQ) for West Broadway redevelopment, out of town developers essentially took the lead on designing our downtown.

Backfilling a public involvement process COULD have been successful, if the Committee had found balance in weighing the interest of the broader public with the interests of the developer.

Sadly, a majority of the Committee seemed content with one perspective voiced several times at different meetings:

“ Don’t upset the developer with ideas different than his.”
“ Don’t scare off the developer by including public input that varies from his plans.”
“ Keep our recommendations general, stay away from prescriptive specifics”

3) BUT, ISN’T THAT HOW OUR REPRESENTATIVE DEMOCRACY WORKS?

Successful majority rule involves compassion and understanding for different points of view and incorporating some of the views into the ruling framework. Ideally, diverse political and social groups coexist with respect. The result is good,balanced governance.

Disappointingly, many on the Committee failed to address the political realities before us: To gain the trust of the broader community for the Committee recommendations to Council, we needed to be inclusive, creative and very specific in our recommendations. The inability of Committee members to recognize the importance of public trust will most likely doom the success of the necessary funding measure on this November’s ballot.

The Committee majority’s indifference to broader community concerns makes Council’s job of finding a balance all that more difficult.

4) COMMITTEE RECOMMENDATIONS: I’LL TAKE MINE VANILLA

Overall, the Committee recommendations are broad, weak or so vague that they are open to multiple interpretations. The developers and City Council, for that matter, can interpret them in whatever way best supports their particular agenda.

The vague recommendations don’t provide much direction to the developers other than to encourage requests for more public subsidies. The Committee majority failed the community by remaining silent on providing a prioritization matrix for the recommendations to Council (save for a generic mix of uses). Many Committee members did not feel it was the charge from Council to make their recommendations in a context of fiscal discipline and prioritization.

With few specific recommendations and a lack of interest in setting priorities, the Committee has created a dilemma for the Council. They must be mindful of the public money funding any private development project. Therefore, it will be impossible for them to direct the developers to enact all of the recommendations. So how will the Council prioritize the recommendations when the Committee making them has provided no direction for doing so?

KWG”s guaranteed 13% return on investment is solidly set as backdrop in further negotiations with the City, while potential estimates for City expenditures of public dollars continue to climb.

5) MISSED OPPORTUNITIES

By doing the public process first, we would be championing that which many in the public want:

* A true downtown park like many great cities and a magnet for development interest.

* Preserving more of the remaining historic buildings that define a downtown.

* Valuing local downtown businesses and non-profits with affordable rents.

* Transit-oriented development across from our EmX hub.

* Priority for public investment given to housing, parks/public open space and ped/ transit infrastructure improvements, NOT for parking nor to guarantee a return on an investment of a private developer.

And most importantly: showing our community that we can spend taxpayer money responsibly, with genuine public value for public subsidies.

6) IN SUMMARY

Most Eugeneans share CPA’s excitement about downtown. We have varying perspectives about the value of an incremental approach that doesn’t displace successful businesses and non-profits, and the value of insuring little risk for the developer and significant risk for our community’s public dollars.

Some say: be careful with public money, accrue quantifiable public amenities as part of any public-private relationship. Some say: “just do something” downtown, let the developers design our downtown, and don’t do anything to scare them off.

Given the integrity and talent brought to the table, I believed the Committee could come to find balance with the specificity the public needs for a return on their tax dollars, and the flexibility a designer needs to mesh a myriad of values and design elements.

Sadly, our Committee collectively failed in this effort. We failed to address the concerns and values of the broader public, but instead adhered to the mantra “keep recommendations vague, don’t upset the developer”.

Incremental doesn't mean "consecutive"

2007-09-10T15:07:00.000-07:00

There's some confusion about stepwise improvements to an urban fabric -- I've heard it expressed like this "Do we want to do it all at once or incrementally?"

The basic principle of urban revitalization, is to preserve the good, improve things with potential, and bring new things where nothing exists. Very rarely do you tear things down -- that's Urban Renewal, a destructive, discredited form of cronyism disguised as public good.

But in making incremental improvements to a large urban area, there is no reason that small changes cannot be made in several places at once. In a living organism, sensitive positive changes happen simulataneously. But they must be aware of each other. Two people shouldn't open the same kind of shop without knowing about each other, just as a human embryo, doing many things at once, shouldn't grow two spleens.

In the case of downtown Eugene, a project at Center Court/Aster's hole, another in the Sear's lake and it's parking lot (whether housing, or a park), and another in the former Bon Marche/Symantec building, would pretty much be all that's required to complete West Broadway's revitalization -- assuming that nothing existing is damaged.

Of course, these non-consecutive incremental changes, are still incremental, based on complete knowledge of the ground. You wouldn't clearcut a forest to build a sustainable culture there, and similarly, you can't destroy a neighborhood and expect to create a new one from scratch. These failed, sterile, all-at-once urban renewal projects litter downtowns around the country, and the victims of such schemes are perfectly aware of the horrors that were perpetrated with their tax dollars.

Volunteer bureaucrats

2007-09-06T00:21:00.000-07:00

The chairs of the West Broadway Advisory Committee are of the volunteer breed of anti-democratic bureaucrat. They see public pressure as a nuisance in the face of their enlightened sense of "progress". They solicit public input all year 'round, and when the public IS interested, they become frightened of the rabble, and act as if they have some sort of lethal force at their disposal.

Only five people wanted to speak before the final committee meeting. A minimum of 10 minutes are usually allocated for this, and people have regularly been given 3 minutes to speak. The chair arbitrarily decided to make it 2 minutes each, and limit the total time to 8 minutes, and four speakers -- a procrustean assertion of their authority against the rabble. The public complained, and the massively corrupted City Staff issued disingenuous shrugs, claiming no influence over a process they normally controlled like an inanimate object. The speakers shared the time, but they'd lost all respect for the committee chairs -- who generally treat the public like crap, archiving input, but not looking beyond the research presented by City Staff -- and so some public speakers spoke the length they needed to, ignoring the weak cries of pseudo-authority from the chairs.

Sham public processes must be interrupted, whenever possible, so that the public-at-large takes a closer look at unaccountable government behaviour.

City admits: it cannot tell the truth

2007-09-05T11:33:00.000-07:00

The City of Eugene's thorough effort to lie to the public about every aspect of Urban Renewal, was amusingly revealed in court yesterday. I'll quote the article by the Register-Guard's Ed Russo:

Holland also asked Klein why his summary didn't explain how the change to the downtown urban renewal district would cause other local governments to forgo property tax revenue.

Klein's summary says the financing method, called tax increment financing, "reallocates" property tax dollars from other governments to the urban renewal district.

Klein responded that it is too difficult to provide a detailed explanation in 175 words or less, the allowed length of ballot summaries. "It's how much you can fit into 175 words," he said.

Urban Renewal Raises Taxes

2007-09-01T11:29:00.000-07:00

For 50 years, Urban Renewal has been called by city officials as "just a tool". Entire wealthy districts, the recipients of the most Public Subsidy (watch out for the weasel-phrase "public investment"), can, with the always-willing approval of governmnet, apply their taxes directly to their own purposes.

The City wants to raise the spending for Urban Renewal by $40 million, to give it to a Portland developer. This is money that can be used for schools, public health, public safety, roads ... anything else.

City officials say "It won't raise your taxes". Of course it will: imagine that citizens could apply all current taxes to their own properties, which is what a fully-enabled Urban Renewal district does. Where would money for public services come from? Taxes would rise. Every specific act of spending taxes on something new, raises taxes.

In normal speech, the direct consequence of an action, are included in descriptions of an action. Urban Renewal boosters and City Planners have become so removed from reality, that they insist taxes only rise if they pass a "raise taxes" act. And yet, somehow, these acts are rarely passed, and our taxes keep raising, and services decline.

City officials are not only disconnected from reality. They are not only lying. They have destroyed their own ability to think and speak.

Creepy Urban Renewal

2007-08-29T22:08:00.000-07:00

At a public meeting, I was pulled aside by, it turns out, a publicist for power-and-money. She pretended to be many things, in order to get me to "open up", and reveal, I suppose, some fatal flaw in our "campaign strategy" to stop the destruction of the neighborhood. Then, after a bit of argument, I realized ... she knew my personal history, thoroughly. Perhaps this was an attempt to gain my confidence? I ended our conversation.

Creepy, yes. Luckily, the conversation revealed the paper-thin arguments of her well-funded camp.

"Urban Renewal" she boldly asserted "is what all the great cities do." "There's no viable alternative" she said. I guess only big cities function. A big surprise to those of us who don't live in them.

She even painted a pretty picture of the removal of "neighborhood blight" and "the homeless" in New York, asserting it was a "win-win" for everyone. Destroy communities, defund social services, and then kill the vermin. A kind of "get-tough-on-the-poor" jingoism.

"West Broadway needs a new start" she said. "It's unsafe, and a low-rent district, and that's inappropriate for our downtown". So, affordable housing is ok, but affordable commercial districts are not?

And then, of course, she called me a "vested interest". I'm in the neghborhood slated for demolition, a volunteer coordinator of a popular community non-profit, dedicated to revitalizing downtown, who's fighting against a big-money apocalypse -- and I'm a "special interest"? She, as a representative of developers who want to get rich from public funds, is of course not a vested interest?

Tom Kemper's two conditions: $40 million + no community input

2007-08-23T08:35:00.000-07:00

KWG's Tom Kemper is very clear that he will only produce the mega-project, if he gets the $40 million in subsidies, and if he can do what he needs to, to make his project "work". He is quite clearly not interested in the public input, which the City Council has deceptively collected, with the intention of ignoring it.

To quote Kemper in the Register-Guard (July 14, 2007):

"It's bold. It's ambitious. It's really upscale," he said. "It's also a big change (for Eugene), and it's expensive."

He needs to destroy the existing neighborhood, and all the existing businesses and non-profits, in order to create his high-rent district. He need to create it his way, or it won't work for him financially.

Who wants that? 1% of the population? In this political campaign for November, we must make it clear what the mega-project will be, must be, according to the economics of such a project.

It IS a subsidy

2007-08-23T07:42:00.000-07:00

Incredibly, among the talking points of the pro-mega-development campaigners, is an assertive lie: 'this is not a subsidy, but a public investment.' Well, I'll quote wikipedia:

In economics, a subsidy is a kind of financial government assistance, such as a grant, tax break, or trade barrier, in order to encourage the production or purchase of a good. The term subsidy may also refer to assistance granted by others, such as individuals or non-government institutions, although this is more commonly described as charity.

KWG is asking for subsidies to produce the megaproject. Anyone who buys a chunk of the result, will be buying a 'house', if you will, constructed in part with public money, and which would have not been built without it. Any commercial entity, say 'The Gap', which rents in the mall, will be renting a space, indeed an entire neighborhood, created for their use, with public money. Their landlord, whatever corporate entity is created to do this, will have new property created for them with part public money.

Luckily, the voters will understand that $40 million of their tax money, is $40 million, no matter how you spin it. They will not give it to a developer of a downtown mall, just as they would not give it to the developer of a surburban mall.

Don't Trust City Hall. Cut its funding.

2007-08-20T12:47:00.000-07:00

In Today's Register-Guard, an editorial excoriated the Eugene City Council's willingness to change the substance of the referendum on the Gas Tax.

But the wildly anti-democratic nature, of the Eugene City Staff and current council majority, runs far deeper. At its core, the City is not driven by the surveyed needs of the citizens. It's driven by the agendas of the most powerful businesses and institutions in town. These agendas are of course unrelated to Public Benefit. They tend towards projects that are massive, wasteful, anti-life, and enriching of the wealthy class.

How do we approach the reform of a fundamentally corrupted City Hall? Well, the right steps are already being taken: cut their funding. This is the subject of both referenda in November, and the message is clear: we don't trust you. The Gas Tax referendum is explicit -- people don't trust the City to spend a nickel, literally.

If we cut their funding enough, they won't even be able to spin the illusion that they are doing something for us. They will then start to work differently, in small, transparent increments, so the public can judge how effective their actions are.

Board Games vs. Life

2007-08-19T12:35:00.000-07:00

Eugene's chief downtown planner, Mike Sullivan, once said to me "You know the Taekwondo business near Cafe Perugino? I think the Tango Center would be a much better fit there. We should try to do something about that." I couldn't believe my ears ... he was thinking of "swapping" two businesses from their locations, as if we were some kind of monopoly pieces? Does he have any idea of the pain associated with the "simple thought" he was considering forcing upon others?

"Easy for you to say" I said.

If he could descend from this sterile, rarified cognitive state, and begin to understand people's reality, there are ways he could present such suggestions, at the appropriate stage. If he's interested in influencing the location of things, he should form an incubator and support resources for new businesses downtown, and make such suggestions before people have created a functioning business in a particular physical/social context.

The planner's God-like Board Game mentality is the norm, not the exception. It stretches to politicians of course. Alan Zalenka, complaining that we were trying to stop his expensive, destructive, anti-democratic megaproject, whined: "I don't see what the fuss is about. The rents on West Broadway are too low. I don't think we want this neighborhood to be a low rent district." The fact that artificially raising the rents would destroy 25 businesses and non-profits, and one of the City's major civic spaces, not to mention the waste of City funds desperately needed for real problems, has no effect upon his thinking.

On the advisory committee there are two openly technocratic members, Mike Coughlin and Jean Tate, who are very happy to play the Board Game with people's lives. At a recent meeting Tate said that reparations for the destructive relocation of a non-profit were too high, even though it was a federally mandated amount. "$20,000 is a lot of money for moving a non-profit" she said -- even after she'd just heard that $1 million in sweat equity had gone into one. Coughlin wanted to disqualify as many of the threatened businesses as possible, to save money. Even though the federal law, as described to him already, said explicitly that everyone active on the date of the City's HUD application was eligible, period.

But even commmittee members with human-rights backgrounds can be entranced by the typical, technocratic, architect/planner mindset. It made Pastor Dan Bryant of the historic First Christian Church downtown, come out against Historic Preservation, and against Human Rights. Because the City presented a mock "report" to the committee, dismissing the historic value of Eugene's first brick building and it's Public Market building (which houses the Tango Center), he concluded the buildings should be torn down, and wrote:

I would also recommend that we follow Jessica's suggestion that the design of the new building "make reference to the old bank by differentiating the base from the upper stories and the use of a prominent corner design feature." Lastly, I would recommend that interpretive displays with photos of the original buildings be included in the new structures.

So, we should destroy the businesses, and the buildings they are in, and then create a memorial to the destruction? The only way a human-rights advocate could make this statement, is after he has been placed on a powerless planning committee, whose members have been hypnotized into thinking they have the power of life-and-death over others.

Now, the entire City council is focussed upon the destruction they want to see happen. They are purposefully blinding themselves to the value of people and places, that don't need their help, and focussing upon expensive mega-developments that the citizens have not asked for. And they are therefore expending energy better spent upon improving the city, and helping its citizens, not tearing it down.

All this inexcusable government-bullying in the liberal university town of Eugene. We must conclude, I believe, that even small governments naturally tend towards inhumanity. That means we must all work harder to push back, if we are to survive.

Disguised Partisanship in City Government

2007-08-19T12:18:00.001-07:00

On Wednesday, August 22, from 6pm - 9pm, the City and its West Broadway advisory group will hold a Second public forum on West Broadway.

I hope the attendance is high, and diverse. However, the City picks the speakers at these meetings, framing the debate in an extremely partisan fashion. They have picked the facilitators and consultants for the advisory group from the beginning. They are trying very carefully to remove from the debate any criticism of the process itself. And, of course, it's the process itself that is the main problem. The City is spending rare public money on a parade of high-partisanship and disinformation, disguised as helpful non-partisan civic meetings.

Only massive participation by citizens will change the nature of this debate. And a "No" vote on money for destroying West Broadway in November, will stop the worst of the damage. That money is specifically intended for the anti-community, neighborhood-levelling developer from Portland, Tom Kemper. A "no" vote will prevent him from imposing his expensive, profit-driven apocalyse upon downtown Eugene.

"Urban Renewal": 0 ; Democracy: 1

2007-08-15T15:40:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, a bunch of businesses, who don't want to see $40 million of City money wasted on a mega-project by an infamous Portland mega-developer, filed a petition to challenge the City's unchecked spending on this project. It was the last chance we had to insert real democracy into the process. Urban Renewal spending is generally protected from public "interference", and the City was hell-bent on leveling the West Broadway neighborhood, and paying to make it an expensive district, catering to maybe 10% of the population.

Today, the City council got the message !

They voted to put it on the November ballot !!!

The City has not helped a single business or non-profit, in the threatened West Broadway district. They haven't given us a dime. And yet they want to pay Portland's Thomas Kemper, who has said that community input "is a problem", $40 million in City money for his project. This is the same City money that would otherwise be spent in small increments for social projects ... including nearly $10 million in HUD money, which normally goes to childcare, at-risk youth, women's shelters, homeless bootstrap programs, opportunity centers, pollution clean-up, vocational training, rehabilitation programs etc. It's insane that the City thought they could get away with this. But now, everyone can vote on it.

Of course, the Tango Center is one of dozens of organizations slated to be destroyed by this money, in one fell swoop. No reparations were in the works, despite rhetoric to the contrary. Let your friends know that the City's plan for "revitalization" is simply to bulldoze, waste money, and raise rents. Let them know that denying the large sum of money, will make the process more community-oriented. Slower spending will make real revitalization, for people, possible.

You'll hear this all on the news after 5pm. KEZI may even use some footage of Tango, at the TC, if you'd like to watch.

Contacting community

2007-08-06T00:19:00.000-07:00

When a business or non-profit is under threat from government aggression, it's important for them to contact their supporters.

The Bijou, Eugene's Art Cinema, is threatened by a random proposal in the City's development plan, calling for an Art cinema. So they handed out pamphlets, contacted their e-mail list, and plan to show slides before films, encouraging people to defend local business, and prevent the City from subsidizing their competition.

I sent something similar to Eugene's Tango Community, asking people to attend the City's "token democracy" events, and make the most of them:

If you want to take a short break from Friday@Five, August 3, wander down to the City Tent at the intersection of Willamette & Broadway, where you have a chance to give the City a piece of your mind, about:

1. The City paying millions for a guaranteed net profit to Portland developers.
2. The poverty of the ideas presented by those developers
3. The lack of local understanding demonstrated by those developers.
4. The suggestions by those developers that the city subsidize imported competitors to the Bijou and the Kiva.
5. The destruction of an entire nightlife district that serves a wide range of the Eugene population.
6. The construction of a sterile new neighborhood, at City expense, that is intended to serve the wealthiest 10% of the population.
7. The lack of guarantees of full reparations (despite claims to the contrary) to businesses and non-profits slated for destruction.
8. The destruction of perfectly sound buildings, in order to create more expensive buildings: subsidized gentrification.
9. The destruction of historic buildings, currently hiding behind the modern facades of DIVA, the Tango Center, and Taco Time.
10. The lack of a participatory public process for improving downtown.
11. The totally abstract, non-local, uninformed and speculative nature of the destructive redevelopment plan.
12. The use of HUD money, intended to help low-income people, to pay for a developer's bottom line.
13. The use of 10's of millions of dollars of public money, for an inefficient, wasteful, unimaginative project, when the neighborhood is already revitalizing without help.
14. Spending millions of City money on subsidies, when the most important public problems of our day are not addressed.
15. Importing businesses at public expense, instead of incubating new local businesses.

Anyway, take your pick: poor quality, wanton destruction, gentrification, unfair subsidization, anti-sustainability, anti-local-interest, human rights abuses (that's us!), anti-democratic civic process, massively wasteful spending ... etc.

The City staff will be listening to the public from 5:30pm - 8pm at a tent on the corner of Willamette and Broadway.

The City Advisory Committee will take public comment August 4, Saturday morning from 9am to noon in the Atrium, 10th and Olive.

Please give them an earful. Tell them to stop threatening us, to stop bombing our neighborhood -- we're surrounded by their failed projects -- to stop making plans for us, and help us to fix things those things we know how to fix! Help us fill the empty spaces with community-based projects and businesses, or create useable open spaces. Help us with investment to fill our own spaces with daytime activity to complement our nighttime successes. Build housing in the empty land where there are parking lots, not where there are buildings with tenants! Help us create space for the community to live, for people to learn, and gather -- not just more places to go shopping.

We can absolutely stop this disaster. All it takes -- is for us to all speak up!

Real costs

2007-07-27T13:44:00.000-07:00

The nightmare project the City staff continues to push for West Broadway, is so lavishly disjoint from reality, that Staff can make expensive promises, that they do not intend to keep, just to keep the project "on track".

The most recent example was during the vote to use HUD money for buying both unoccupied and occupied buildings on West Broadway. The buildings, in fine condition, have been labeled "blighted", and the proposed nightmare "will create hundreds of low-income jobs".

This empty prose, intended to fulfill fig-leaf rhetorical requirements of our insanely corrupt federal government, was questioned by several city councilors. One question was "how about jobs lost through the destruction of businesses and non-profits? are those accounted for in these job-creation figures?"

Denny Braud, Staff point-man for the nightmare, began to make promises, essentially by referring to law he was subject to, that "ummm ... no, I think no jobs will be lost" during the cataclysm of dislocation, destruction, etc. of dozens of businesses and non-profits. Of course, he is not accountable for his words, and knows that. He also knows, as an administer of urban redevelopment loans, that the definition of "jobs" can be dodged in any way he sees fit.

Well, the West Broadway tenants certainly don't want to be dislocated. But if the City is going to seriously consider this crazy and destructive project, they should put the weight of law behind Braud's promises. Maybe then they'll begin to see how expensive, inefficient, insensitive, and ultimately ineffective this project is.

I wrote to the two most sensible members of the City Coucil:

Betty, Bonny,

At last night's meeting, Denny Braud emphatically guaranteed that no businesses, non-profits nor jobs would be lost in the staff's West Broadway neighborhood demolition plan. Of course, with the council majority behind him, he is perfectly aware that he is not accountable for his statements, freeing him to rely upon a list of existing statutes which, hypothetically, would take care of the tenants.

If he is so confident, perhaps the majority of the council could confidently pass a bill, which, in this given footprint, in the event any action under the current West Broadway initiative is taken, guarantees the recovery-of-investment, full-relocation and return-to-sustainability-and-mission, of every business and non-profit in the footprint, as of today. This means tenants, lease-holders, sub-lessees and anyone else dependent upon these organizations or their facilities. We have been under threat by the City for too long, and want these guarantees, which have now been explicitly promised. The advisory committee has been charged to do this, but without the resources to do so -- a situation that makes the chances of relocation funding seem even more remote.

If you could kindly introduce a bill to that effect, it would be most helpful to all of us.

With many thanks!

Taking from the poor, giving to the rich

2007-07-24T15:29:00.000-07:00

US Federal HUD (Housing and Urban Development) grants are intended to create jobs and housing for low-income people.

The city is using this money to do more than finance the projects of developers. It is using that money to guarantee profit of wealthy developers. A 13% profit, on a project which could grow to be as large as $100 million.

All this, to destroy a downtown that is revitalizing itself, and rebuild it, speculatively, for the wealthy. Who don't exist in Eugene in large numbers.

Perhaps we need an initiative petition, with a very basic message -- public money cannot be spent to guarantee profits.

Amused staff

2007-07-17T02:14:00.000-07:00

There's a very common behavior, among bureaucrats disdainful of the public (you can fill in your own opinion regarding the percentage). When no citizens reply to their obscure required public legal notices and announcements, they smirk. As if to say "there's nothing wrong with what we're doing: no one complained." Or perhaps to say "people are so dumb and lazy, they don't even want to be heard". In anycase, there's no good reason for the grin. It is in fact the exact grin of a criminal who's just pulled a fast one.

I don't know why they call these people "public servants". Well, actually, I do. It is intended to mislead. Like the "Department of Defense", which is obviously focussed entirely upon aggression. Not unlike most public servants.

The West Broadway Citizens' Advisory Committee Process

2007-07-11T15:01:00.000-07:00

A letter to Rob Handy, CPA representative on the committee

The whole process is, of course, framed to create "standard development projects" more than to actually add vitality to West Broadway.

For example, the developers want a guaranteed profit, to produce something ("a nightlife") which is completely speculative. The actual tenants on West Broadway, on the other hand, have created the best nightlife in Eugene, already, and the city hasn't given us a penny -- nothing to even help us break-even, let alone profit.

The positive thing that should be emphasized is efficiency in public expenditure, and a genuine track record in the neighborhood. In that case, the existing tenants have already done a far better job than the developers propose to do in the future -- by several orders of magnitude! Compare their vague predictions and projections with our actual numbers -- which can be observed after 8pm, any day.

Also, the notion that West Broadway is moribund is massively overstated. Compare it, even during the day, with 90% of downtown, and it will be found to have more people.

In any case, since the existing tenants are the most efficient at revitalization, they should be given a chance to buy their own buildings. The primary reason for the appearance of desertion on West Broadway, because of unrented space, is the existence of powerful landowners (the City, in the case of the Sears building, and Conner & Woolley in the rest of the cases) who have little incentive to improve their property. Give West Broadway businesses and non-profits an opportunity to buy their buildings from these owners, and you can be certain that they will be filled to the brim with activity. Small owners are far more likely, and more efficient, at making the incremental green changes people would like to see in any buildings. We want to buy our building, for example, restore the original facade, improve the passive heating and cooling throughout the building, incorporate more community projects, etc. No out-of-town developer could possibly do this efficiently.

I worry about the fact that no one, on the committee, actually is resident on the threatened footprint of West Broadway. People may make suggestions like "the farmer's market building should become a farmer's market again", without understanding that this entire process has been hurting the existing lane county farmer's market -- which is a very fragile, unsupported organization, with storage in my building and important street offices, that the city wants to tear down! That's just one example. If the developers need an advisory committee, then the advisory committee needs one of their own. Perhaps this could be proposed?

Of course I'm very worried by the proposal of "charettes", which have been used as PR cover to destroy neighborhoods in the last two decades or so. I was told by a City Planner, for example, that I should be relocated because "the downtown plan calls for it". As if the community members on that committee would have said "yes, let's destroy community projects in order to build community".

This "destroy the village to save it" mentality is everywhere in Urban Renewal, and modern urban planning -- just an extension of the profit-taking colonization this country is built on. The best parts of cities around the world are destroyed every day by this sort of process.

And, of course, we don't want to be relocated. Actually, it would simply destroy us. And anyone else who is "relocated". It is a human rights violation, a small-scale version of the relocation of native americans from their lands. We've done a very good job of revitalizing our place, and don't want to be destroyed. Thousands have been part of our work, and $1 million in sweat equity has been poured into the place. Any form of good-intentioned relocation, if that was possible, would be very expensive for the city -- of course, if we are just ignored, and kicked out, we will sue, which will also be expensive for them. We've already been put in an impossibly precarious situation just because of the City's "purchase options" -- our leases aren't being renewed!

I believe if money is allowed to enter into the Advisory Committee discussion, the destructive part of the process will be derailed. There is nothing efficient about buying an occupied building, relocating businesses, tearing it all down, and building new, with guaranteed profit, and high rents. If the City waives its hands around and says "oh, let's just do what the people want. Don't worry about the money." -- reply with "we don't want to waste our time. We'd like to come up with a plan that doesn't cost much, and achieves a great deal, so that it has a hope of being accepted by the entire community." Consensus is key -- the small projects (filling the holes, not tearing down buildings, arranging financing to sell to tenants) are quite efficient, and will have no dissent. Anyone who wants more, at the cost of sacrificing such agreement, is simply not being cooperative. The entire City staff can be accused of this, as they keep pushing for maximum destruction, when their record for efficiency is non-existent.

Power fantasy vs. helpful reality

2007-07-06T13:56:00.000-07:00

The reason power corrupts is simple: when your actions are amplified, it's very easy to think that your opinions are more important than other people's lives -- because, in effect, they are. The fundamental problem, is the existence of systems that allow such amplification -- it's obviously immoral, promoting destruction and murder as a matter of policy.

Since every fantasy is destructive, they must be eliminated from government.

Instead, government should simply help things that already exist -- things that people have invested their labor in.

But this must be done in an equitable fashion. Powerful people should not have more access to government than any other person. Only in this way, will government be transformed from a power-wielding monstrosity, to something collective, which genuinely nurtures the world it is part of.

Press release: CPA Meeting July 9

2007-06-29T12:24:00.000-07:00

Citizens for Public Accountability – Monday, July 9 at EWEB, 7:00 PM

PUBLIC BENEFIT vs. PUBLIC SUBSIDIES

*Where is the money coming from?

The planned West Broadway Development Project could cost the taxpayers up to $40 million in public subsidies. Didn't the City just pass a gas tax and a bunch of other fees because they did not have the money to maintain our streets?

The City of Eugene says the money is coming from URA/BEDI/HUD. Say what? Exactly. What on earth do those acronyms mean? Come to this CPA meeting and find out how the City finds money when it wants to.

*What will the citizens get for their money?

CPA's own Rob Handy is on the 11 member Citizens Advisory Committee that the Mayor has named to advise the City Council about this development. At this meeting, Rob will explain what the newly formed committee has done so far, and how they intend to involve the public as the design process moves forward.

Learn how you can get involved and be prepared for both the related public hearing and the Committee's public input session coming up soon...

You may have recently received a seemingly innocuous postcard/hearing notice from the City of Eugene about them...Important decisions will be made about the future of your downtown, come find out all about it!

If you were one of the 150 to 200 citizens who went on CPA's recent "PIT to PIT Walk," come see what you can do next. If you missed the Walk, come learn what's happening!

www.lanecpa/cpa

No dilemma

2007-06-15T14:30:00.000-07:00

Essentially, the City has tried to hypnotize the public, into thinking that we should "tear down West Broadway to save it." but they've made an additional argument: ""tear down West Broadway to save our town"!

In order to "achieve density goals", they would tear down small businesses and community centers. This is analogous to building Nuclear Power plants in order to stop Global Warming! Why would you choose to approach a problem with a solution that immediately causes problems? Because some "professional" tells you to?

Where did this "shock treatment" mentality come from? How did we become so susceptible to false dilemmas? In psychological tests, most people refuse to directly answer questions like "would you kill this person to save these two people". The reason we resist? Because it's never true! Only if we're impossibly under-trained for the real world, or over-trained for "leadership", would we think we could ever be faced with such a dilemma. To treat people like "eggs" that need to be "broken" in order to "make omlettes", is to immediately sacrifice your humanity, because it fails the universal moral standards test : it is something you would never want applied to you and your family.

West Broadway Specifics

2007-05-29T11:28:00.000-07:00

Dear Mayor and Council,

West Broadway is increasingly healthy !

Please don't hurt it.

It is the heart of Eugene's nightlife !

People from all walks of life, from professors to mechanics, teachers to roofers, find their way to West Broadway for a social drink -- because of the stunning diversity of local establishments there!! Since it's a pedestrian-friendly area, they can socialize, eat, entertain themselves, and sober up, without driving. And there are popular all-ages activities too, where high-schoolers mingle with retirees.

Mike Clark says "I think it is fundamentally broken in this area." This is dangerously imprecise talk from a public official, extremely negative, and a direct threat to all of us, who have actually rolled up our sleeves, and made West Broadway the most lively district in town.

So let's get to specifics. What's a problem, and what is not?

Problem: Mad street people. Mike has trouble with one street person. We all know him.
Solution: This person should be offered help & psychiatric care.

Problem: North Side at-risk-youth. These kids are just bored, so they hang together, in the space Symantec abandoned. Sometimes they beg for money. More rarely, they get in trouble.
Solution: An opportunity center and school, in this space. There are several non-profits with fascinating, community-participatory ideas for a school there. It works -- the at-risk youth in front of Network Charter School do not beg for money.

Problem: Holes in the ground, caused by the City, and developers.
Solution: Build "housing in the holes". And ONLY in the holes. Please leave the rest of our buildings alone!

Problem: Center Court building
Solution: Let it rent. It was full, until recently, and then emptied on purpose. A non-profit wanted to buy it, but local elitists prevented this. It's a perfectly viable building, as it is.

Problem: Day-time activity
Solution: Most of the businesses and schools on West Broadway would love to be busier during the day. Some investment from the City would make that possible, at a far lower cost than KWG's "guaranteed profit" demand.

Because it is so disjoint from reality, the current, dangerously vague planning process, also addresses non-problems.

Not a problem: KWG wants to turn West Broadway into an "entertainment district".
Reason: West Broadway already is this!! Market forces, and committed people, did this work already. Why would you destroy it?

Not a problem: Lack of shopping
Reason: Does every place need to be a shopping district?! There are lots of local shopping areas already, and there are dead streets all over downtown ... why would you destroy the heart of Eugene's nightlife, to create a daytime shopping district? That's extremely wasteful. Does no one care about efficiency anymore?

Not a problem: Lack of housing.
Reason: First, we must see if "housing in the holes" is viable. Also, please keep in mind, that if you want a lively nightlife district, you don't want much housing. All around the world, the most dense nightlife is separated from housing. West Broadway never had much housing, and doesn't "need" it. And why would you remove buildings, full of businesses, to do it? Why is the housing "better" than the businesses? Why would you want to unnecessarily make that judgement, and destroy people's work? Why not build housing, instead, on surface parking lots, a block away?

Not a problem: The Washburne building
Reason: It's 90% full !! The City should step back from it. Similarly, why is the Tango Center building threatened by the council? It is 83% occupied, and draws 500 sober people downtown every week. It should be protected by the council.

Not a problem: Drinking
Reason: This is legal activity, and safest in a pedestrian-friendly place like West Broadway, where food, dancing and music are also available.

Not a problem: The poor and disenfranchised
Reason: They have the right to gather in the heart of Eugene, too. If you want to help them, then help them -- but don't try to kick them out, just because you don't want to see them.

Please, please consider passing a resolution not to destroy businesses and non-profits on West Broadway. Even if you think "something" is wrong with West Broadway -- then, like a doctor, you must "first do no harm". Threatening us, with this planning process, has already been harmful.

The Rise of Anti-drink-establishment-arianism

2007-05-28T02:25:00.000-07:00

West Broadway is improving, by itself, very rapidly. Another local restaurant/bar opened up, and is already very popular.

And yet the calls for "tearing down West Broadway" and cries of "something is broken there" are getting louder. This is destructive and anti-business, and yet people trying to stop the destruction, are labeled "anti-business" ... presumably because we are against developers who want to destroy our lives.

But there is a strong undercurrent here ... a teetotaler's agenda. West Broadway is now "the bar district". You can walk among 10 bars here at night, all within sight of each other. It's a pretty nice scene, tempered by food booths, dancing and art projects.

There are just some people who don't like to see the poor hanging out. They don't like kids "hanging around". And they don't like to see people drunk. But, they have the legal right to do these things. So the underlying "morals" cannot be articulated. Instead, generalities like "we want something more upscale" or "it's just scary down there" are spoken in hushed tones. The fact that adults talk this way, hiding their intolerance with euphenism, is just another sign of the elite dysfunction in the body politic.

Multi-purpose community centers

2007-05-25T12:57:00.000-07:00

A very easy solution to filling empty spaces on West Broadway:

Multi-purpose community centers.

These mixed, public/private/ngo partnerships, with music, internet, food, retail, services etc., are in high-demand. And they are very easy to start. Just hold regular meetings of people who want to initiate projects and businesses. They will find each other.

West Broadway broken? Compared to what?

2007-05-25T12:43:00.000-07:00

Here's the Jacob gallery, a "high-end", and high-concrete, "pedestrian street", which lacks any sign of pedestrian life, in the middle of the day. No one says that this, or the "gallery district", or many other "clean", and sterile, parts of downtown, are "broken".

And yet West Broadway, which always has actvity -- is considered "broken"? It's because the kids and homeless people are not "people"? They are, in fact, citizens. looking for something to do. And so are the 2,000 people a week who come to the Bars on West Broadway. Do they not have the legal right to drink and dance?

Except for the Bus stop, West Broadway is the most successful part of downtown. It could be more successful, but the City is threatening to tear it down to "make it work". Destroying the village to save it.

West Broadway has only four small problems

2007-05-18T10:32:00.000-07:00

West Broadway has only four problems. They are simple problems, with simple solutions, much less expensive than proposals on the table to destroy existing businesses and schools on the street.

1. Center Court: This building is completely empty. Beam has made a proposal to fill it, in cooperation with KWG. That makes sense. (Note that including the full Washburne building in this project makes NO sense).

2. Aster Hole: Beam also has a proposal to build something on this lot, and fill it. Sounds good.

3. Sear's lake: KWG has proposed to build housing here, and on some of the adjacent parking lot. That makes sense. Tearing down buildings that are mostly full, makes NO sense.

4. The Northside Vacuum (former Symantec-occupied storefronts): If the City offered subsidies to move in here, probably as little as a year's rent, people would jump all over the opportunity.

That's it. Note that, in the current process, if these small problems were solved, West Broadway would be revived. But if there is more ambition, including the destruction of other people's work, and insane judgments about what is "good business" vs. "undesirable business", more subsidies, more initiatives, more rancor, more lawsuits ... nothing at all will happen! At worst, there will be destruction AND nothing will result.

Stick to the small stuff. Make the little projects work, and don't try to fix the parts that ain't broken.

The principle of continuity

2007-03-26T17:50:00.000-07:00

City staff members visit with tenants on West Broadway, trying to convince them that they "don't belong there", because the district is "not dense enough" or "not valuable enough" or other such nonsense. People shouldn't be forced to abandon their neighborhood even during high demand, but here, we have low demand, and half-empty space, and they want to build more densely?

More insulting, is when the City suggests to tenants that they "move and come back", or "find a place in the new development". A suggestion which makes us "groundlings" roll our eyes -- how can you expect a business to survive such a move? Hypothetically, if lots of money was provided, it might be possible to compensate -- but it's terribly risky to take something that works, something that has adapted to a specific location, and move it. After all, 99% of all business ventures fail.

The principle of continuity is rarely understood by anyone who hasn't felt it in their bones -- the day-to-day struggle to keep your ship afloat. City officials are so indoctrinated by, and enamored with, futurist visions of destructive urban renewal, that they don't realize they've become a tsunami, wiping out everything in front of them.

Redevelopment: closed to the public

2007-03-26T17:30:00.000-07:00

Purposely, there is no process for public participation in the City staff's plan to redevelop West Broadway.

First the City staff, without even the direction of elected officials, accumulated purchase options on occupied buildings -- obviously not something the tenants want. This forced the City council to initiate an RFQ process. The only people likely to respond to such a process, were developers in favor of demolishing the neighborhood and its businesses at public expense. The exception was my proposal, which was not just making a statement -- it was holding the door open for the democratic process it advocated. When the commitee decided to recommend two private developers, when the City staff recommended one (so they could shut out the public completely), and when the council finally decided on two private developers, they ensured that the only way to do anything -- either a suggestion or an actual proposal -- would be through private channels. The public would be accused of "circumventing the process" if it made suggestions directly to council.

City staff are very well trained to pronounce their undemocratic process "democratic", and the people at large, defending their money and rights, as "undemocratic". People in power fight against democracy at every turn, but use its rhetoric every day, and have done so for millennia.

Subsidized gentrification

2007-03-22T19:09:00.000-07:00

When part of a city has been abandoned, and the Bohemians and working people move in, they often create a wonderful neighborhood. The demand for the neighborhood increases, values increase, the wealthy outbid the poor, and slowly the neighborhood, as it was, disappears. This can generally be stopped, but it's very hard work. In Eugene, 5th Street Market is an example: started by hippies, taken over by millionaire investors. Greenwich Village in Manhattan is a more famous example, but I think one of the best examples, is Venice, Italy ... built gradually for more than a thousand years, the Venetians themselves are now priced out by expensive hotels, and billionaires looking to display their art collections.

It's hard to stop. But a different trend, is when such gentrification is subsidized speculatively, by government. Subsidized Gentrification is the Eugene City staff's brilliant plan for West Broadway in downtown Eugene: take solid buildings, half-full with Bohemians, and before the process has run its course, before there is demand, kick out all the poor people, destroy the businesses that serve them, and roll-the-dice on a high-end mall.

There's a downtown group that's partisan to this kind of development, and its director recently wrote me:

"The real estate is too valuable for it to stay in the current condition"

I wrote back:

"If the cost of locating to the buildings is too high, as it obviously is, then the real estate is less valuable than expectation. When the demand increases, so does the value. That's very basic economics. When the demand is low, redevelopment can only happen with grossly wasteful public subsidy. This happens all over the country, and it's criminally undemocratic."

Flash: murmurs of subconscious guilt

2007-03-12T19:22:00.000-07:00

Most of the council, mayor and staff of the City of Eugene is so indoctrinated, that they can barely imagine development for downtown Eugene involving the people already there. The clear exception is Betty Taylor, who is keenly aware of reality. But she only has one vote.

The local tenants were mentioned enough recently, however, that I heard murmurs, inspired by a mild sense of guilt, bubbling up from the subconscious of some councilors. Even Chris Pryor quietly mentioned "integrating with local business", by which, I believe, he really meant "preserving local business". But he didn't vote for the resolution Alan Zelenka made, which included a request from the (eventually two) selected developers, for their plans for existing businesses. Along with a long list of other details. This makes the staff work harder, which gives us time to protest, to modify the worst aspects of the City's initiative.

Andrea Ortiz made a statement about these plans for downtown, and how they explicitly excluded the poor, rather than simply tryng to create a more inclusive and civil community on West Broadway. This made people think, but only for a moment ... it didn't translate into anything concrete.

It's very hard to inject ideas into the process of government. The only apparent approach is to be a wealthy developer.

A Plethora of Possibilities

2007-03-12T13:06:00.000-07:00

The next time I submit a proposal to a government, I'm going to include more than one possibility.

The first thing that happens, when making a case for community-based solutions, is the combing of the proposal for something that will cause rejection. Modern governments just work that way. The spirit of the proposal is actually not important: the red herrings are.

So I made a community-based proposal that described a preference for putting some buildings into a trust. I wouldn't have even talked about the buildings, but the RFQ required some statement on the purchase options. The committee didn't want a trust solution, so they reject the proposal out of hand -- all principles were ignored: 1) the sufficiency of existing structures, 2) the lack of necessity to increase density, 3) the simplicity of filling the empty space, 4) the precious people whose work now fills half of the existing spaces.

I needed to list all the possibilities ...

A. The City could issue a policy statement, that existing tenants will not be kicked out, so that their work can continue, without constant threat of Urban Renewal.

B. The City could make loans available to large groups of guarantors of tenants, so they can buy their buildings and make improvements to them. Currently, City loans, like those of most banks, must have no more than 4 guarantors reponsible for the loan. This makes it impossible for a group of 1000 poor people, for example, to buy a $1 million building, because no 4 of them can afford to take on an additional $250,000 mortgage each. The system is skewed towards the wealthy, making community-based solutions extremely difficult.

C. Initiate a small grant program to groups proposing to move downtown.

D. Create a reward / recognition grant program to help existing groups to expand their activity.

These are simple, open-ended policies, which are easy to test, and are non-destructive. They would lay the groundwork for endless fascinating business and community projects in downtown Eugene.

What works?

2007-03-07T22:28:00.000-08:00

The conditions are right. This is a very good time for a community-oriented plan for downtown Eugene's West Broadway. There are no viable alternatives for the long stretches of unleased space.

The City keeps asking for large-scale development, ignoring the tenants, who have worked very hard to survive downtown, and obviously don't want to move. Because the city keeps pushing this, the area stays vacant -- who would invest in something the city might arrange to tear down? The fear instilled in the tenants keeps most of the businesses and non-profits from being as successful as they could be, and prevents new people from filling the empty spaces.

The City rejected the local option, in the City-framed RFQ process. But, of course, this isn't the only approach to making positive things happen ... in some ways, it was the least likely approach. Because the RFQ process was launched by a broken system. And RFP's and RFQ's exist to decrease public participation in government, not increase it.

Probably nothing will happen in this current round development speculation. But since the process itself is negative, the tenants and those interested in a local solution to downtown need to do something about it.

We'll be circulating a petition to the City council, stating that development planning for properties occupied by tenants is harmful to downtown, violates tenants' rights to pursue their business in peace, without government interference, and is unsustainable because it wastes buildings, businesses, non-profits and public energy by planning to destroy existing downtown, for speculative fantasy. We will ask that the council stop such planning for occupied space, and provide funds to incubate local proposals for filling in the empty space.

Civic priorities

2007-03-02T19:21:00.000-08:00

The City Council is even reluctant to ask voters, in a survey, whether or not to spend $100 million on a new City Hall. "They won't have enough information," the councillors protest. As if they needed any. No money should be spent on a new City Hall. No money should be spent on any new construction. There are other pressing matters.

Much smaller amounts of money, $1 million, could revitalize West Broadway. But that doesn't go far enough. The way West Broadway needs to be revitalized, the way the spaces need to be filled, must directly address all the civic priorities.

More or less, here are the real citizen priorities:

1) quality of life
2) accessible healthcare
3) jobs, and meaningful work
4) crime prevention
5) freedom & human rights
6) honesty in government
7) responsible businesses and citizens
8) education
9) sustainable, stable, peaceful society
10) ecological sensitivity

West Broadway, I've said before, is not so far from being a kind of "street university". It can go all the way in this direction, with just a little bit of help from the City.

The first things that needs to be created are incubators of actvity, to enable the citizens to gather and work together to work on civic priorities, and thereby draw community interest to the partly empty area downtown.

2) a active community clinic and healthcare action organizing center
3 & 8) street-level showcase-workshop-schools in many different fields
4) social service action teams
5 & 6) independent community media
7) mutual support resources
9) conflict resolution center
9 & 10) ecologically-oriented centers (appropriate technology, reusable products centers, nature awareness centers, etc.)

All of which improve quality of life. Just a fraction of the material implied here would fill West Broadway with self-sustaining activity. It would be essentially a service-center for community life --- well-placed, in the heart of town, in downtown Eugene.

West Broadway, 1927

2007-03-01T13:16:00.000-08:00

What was on West Broadway, 80 years ago? It might give us a glimpse into the actvities of a downtown that serves its citizens. Also -- just reading this little list makes one think of ideas for West Broadway.

On the Intersection of Willamette & Broadway:

Western Union Telegraph
JC Penny
Hoffman Hotel
Hargreaves & Lindsay (contractors)

Then, heading West:

Borroughs Adding Machine Company 68 W
Mathison Barber Supply 39 W
National Cash Register 43 W
Dunbar T N Co 82 W (tires)
Valley Printing Co 76 W
Ludford's Paint Store 55 W
Caswell's Variety Store 56 W (notions)
Oregon fire relief assn 37 W (insurance)
Emery Insurance Agency 37 W
Art Needlecraft Shop 45 W ("hemstitching business")
SOS Implement & Hdw Co 73 W (hardware store)

Pretty much ending with a large Auto Service complex on Broadway & Olive:

Bettis & Wyatt Super Service Station
Brakel & White Factory Service Station
Auto Lite Authorized Service Station
Bosch Authorized Service Station
Delco Authorized Distributor
Noth East Service Station
Remy Authorized Distributor
Exide Battery Service

Across the street from a General Store:

Haskell Market 904 Olive
"Groceries, Flour, Feed, Hay, Grain, Field and Garden Seeds, Stock & Poultry supplies, Fertilizers of all Kinds"

Data from the 1927 Eugene Telephone directory.

Unsustainable urban planning

2007-03-01T12:18:00.000-08:00

A former Eugene City Councilor wrote me:

... our city administration's involvement precludes a real solution to the downtown's problem. Whether wittingly or unwittingly, they are committed to the big developer approach to "renewing" downtown ... our bureaucracy is not motivated by an interest in reviving the downtown.

The City is pro-construction and anti-people. This is true for City Staff, who try to convince downtown tenants that they do not belong there, and for most City Councilors, who don't like to discuss the 20 or so local businesses they are willing to displace downtown. When they were talking about pressuring landlords to fill the space downtown, to quote one in today's paper:

"Lord knows, the tenants might be worse than the empty buildings," said Councilor Chris Pryor.

I'm sure the tenants would appreciate that. It's the same kind of off-handed prejudice that makes the City Council dislike the bars that light up West Broadway at night, and dismiss busy arts-related projects as being economically unimportant, even though they have vast community support in comparison with a "Gap" or "Bed, Bath & Beyond". Any tenant is better than emptiness. If there's a problem, it can be dealt with, but the sheer desert-like quality of West Broadway during the day is the most important problem to deal with.

Unfortunately, they are still focussed on tearing down buildings, making the place even more of a desert.

New construction is pointless when the spaces are mostly vacant. New construction is supposed to meet demand, and there is none. It's very much the same irrelevant approach the City took towards opening and closing the street ... these things make no difference. What matters are the activities and the people in the area, not the amenities, the buildings, or the streets. Sure these could be improved, but the most important thing is relevant activity, people, organizations, businesses and events, forming a continuous fabric of life in a neighborhood.

I submitted a video to the city on this subject, as a response to an RFQ, so that they had to see it. But they focussed on the parts of the proposal they didn't like (buying and managing buildings, which is optional), and not on the fundamental points (1) no new construction is necessary (except in the vacant lots) and (2) there are actual people and projects in these places (3) if you want to revitalize downtown, support these and other community members to expand activty there.

Nothing is a greater sign that the city is insanely construction-focussed, than the unnecessary New City Hall, which should be stopped in its tracks by petition-initiative before it goes any further. A new City Hall is not a priority to the citizens of Eugene. Healthcare, jobs, education, quality of life -- these are important. It's possible to take take the money planned for City Hall, and fund new activity to completely address these needs, both downtown and throughout Eugene. Instead, they want to throw it away on unnecessary buildings ...

Responses to the RFQ

2007-02-15T19:35:00.000-08:00

Responses to the RFQ for West Broadway can be found here.

Essentially, the Downtown Eugene Community proposal, which I presented in video form, is more of a human rights statement. Given the other proposals, it needed to be made.

Out of the standard development proposals, the Beam proposal is the most context-sensitive, except for the suggestion to tear down the north side of Broadway ... possibly the most active nightlife area in Eugene.

Essentially, Beam looks like they could rennovate the already-heavily-rennovated Centre Court building, and the empty lot next to it. It would be more efficient not to rennovate, however, if this is done solely with City money. If the City has to pay for it, then rennovation should be avoided, and the Downtown Eugene Community process would be a more efficient expenditure.

The other proposals are unrelated to the context, even KWG's. But KWG should probably still develop their original idea on the half-block between the Tango Center and the Library. If they pay for it.

The other proposals are too insensitive to mention. And terribly unrealistic, given the market here.

Film of Downtown Eugene Proposal

2007-02-11T02:02:00.000-08:00

The February 9, 2007 deadline for responses to the Downtown Eugene Oregon West Broadway RFQ has passed. There were five responses -- four of the normal kind, urban renewal "tear down and rebuild" proposals. And one that advocates preserving the living activities downtown, enhancing them, and filling in the empty spaces with local business and community activities.

THE FILM IS HERE

First, do no harm

2007-01-03T17:42:00.000-08:00

Many modern professional services have, buried, deep within their doctrine, the notion that they are doing good. That they fix things. That they are like doctors.

But, for the most part, they do not take the hippocratic oath:

"I will prescribe regimens for the good of my patients according to my ability and my judgment, and never do harm to anyone."

Let's look at architects, financiers, developers and urban planners.

Certainly the first three groups are available for hire or partnerships. Some try harder to do good than others, of course.

But Urban Planners, and related City staffers, are dedicated to public service, and paid by the public. Certainly they must have a hippocratic oath?

No. If that was true, the vast human destruction of Urban Renewal could not have taken place.

In fact Public Servants are often required to take rather the opposite of the hippocratic oath. They are sworn to duty. To obey. To serve ... those in power. Not people. They can do any harm that their civic leaders, whether elected or otherwise powerful, instruct them to.

Priorities inside the bubble

2007-01-01T10:56:00.000-08:00

A government, even at the local level, is an empire, holding onto territory.

Government officials don't believe that, of course. If they did, the citizens would know it, and there would be a revolution. So, as a matter of natural selection, governments survive when they're perceived, and perceive themselves, as professionals, providing service. This makes the citizenry relax.

Unfortunately, in reality, this perception disconnects government from its citizens. It puts officials in a professional, corporate bubble.

Most importantly, the priorities within the bubble become unrelated to the priorities in people's lives.

The current project for a new City Hall, in downtown Eugene, is a very good example. The project is high on the list if inside-the-bubble priorities, because the offices aren't as nice as the government would like. But the project is at the bottom of the list of people's priorities.

Eugene suffers from high unemployement. It has a large population of poor and marginalized citizens, many highly educated, with no access to healthcare or housing. There's a shortage of public money for education, childcare, local economic development, at-risk-youth etc.

And yet the City has spent $2 million so far planning a new City Hall, even when they're pretty certain that the citizens will not allocate the money to actually build it (between $30 - $100 million). They perceive this problem as lack of understanding on the citizens' part. "We need a new City Hall" officials cry, even though the current one works fine. For $2 million, they could have completely freshened up the existing building. Instead, they bought a plan to tear down this CIty Hall, buy other existing buildings and buinesses, tear them down, dislocate the employees etc.

While it's extremely wasteful to meet the priorities within the bubble, it tends to be quite efficient to spend money on priorities outside of it. Every dollar spent on education, healthcare, local small business and non-profits, directly helps someone, and creates a greater sense of community.

The process is backwards. It would be easy to fix, if officials would simply accept the priorities of the majority as valid. Instead, they seem to think of citizens as somehow under-educated.

Organic increase in density

2006-12-05T13:33:00.000-08:00

Many City planners possess a strong desire for increased density. I resist it, not because density is bad, but because the push for it, from the top, is enormously destructive. In Eugene's situation, it's wasteful to tear down empty buildings, when people are homeless, and activities cannot find space; and it's especially wasteful to tear down occupied buildings just because they don't meet some ideal. When there are hundreds of thousands of empty square feet, and massive craters in the ground, it's immoral to consider polishing the morphology of space that currently provides real benefit to real people.

That said -- because it is the most important thing -- this is how a humane, organic approach leads to an increase in density:

1. Let's start with the people and organizations already downtown.
2. Let's give them the security to continue their operations downtown.
3. Let's encourage them to expand their offerings and improve their operations downtown.
4. Let's encourage them to build upon their existing alliances, draw more activity downtown, and initiate more cooperative relationships, with the largest possible number of citizens, so that the largest number of people have an interest in making downtown more alive.
5. Let's offer them founding membership in a Downtown Collective of Tenants, charged with filling the remaining space downtown.
6. As the empty space is 'programmed' with people, events, businesses and organizations, the new tenants are also offered membership in the collective.
7. The collective's success is monitored by the City Council. Measurement and evaluation of participation, visits, and self-sufficiency are important.
8. The collective manages properties downtown bought by the City, placed into a trust for this self-management process.
9. The collective is given financial assistance to increase life downtown.
10. The collective is charged with concentrating on the biggest problems first: they must determine these priorities, and address them. For example, the empty storefronts and the holes in the ground are among the top spatial priorities. But solutions to these problems should also address the most pressing needs of people, including the social and environmental issues of our time.
11. When the spaces are filled, and the energy is high, such that growth is accelerating, the collective will have the power to incrementally make density increases in the buildings downtown. But, it's very important, for organic growth, that the life, the energy, drives the increase in density through new construction. Creating the density first, as a top-down plan, will result in dead, purposeless space.

Urban Renewal vs. the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

2006-12-05T10:20:00.000-08:00

Urban Renewal, the scourge of living neighborhoods in Post-WW II US, is alive and well. While planners are becoming more sensitive to the scale of the abuses of 30 years ago, planning & development methodology has not changed significantly.

City governments across the country compete for large business to invade from outside, instead of supporting and incubating local business and citizenry. They spend public money on private profit for the wealthy, rather than on public service for everyone. The same approach is used to attract outside developers, and finance development. The level of suffering a City government is willing to inflict upon its constituency, knows few bounds.

In fact, City governments regularly violate their constituents' human rights, as expressed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, an extraordinary but much-ignored document, adopted by the UN in 1948.

Article 1.
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

When actors within a government interfere with the working operations of some members of the community, for the benefit of other members of the community, the government is violating basic principles of cooperation and human dignity. The government is not treating people equally. The government is not engaging people that will be effected by its processes. And, when they engage them one-on-one, they are not allowing them to assemble:

Article 20.
(1) Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association.

Political manipulation through closed, un-announced, one-on-one meetings, and through announced but heavily framed discussions of political possibility, violates the freedom implied Article 20. This article isn't just about allowing people to talk with each other -- that's only the worst case. It is a reference to a democratic approach to governing, and a true, open, free flow of ideas, as described hopefully in article 19:

Article 19.
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

Article 17.
(1) Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others.
(2) No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property.

The insecurity of an Urban Renewal process that plans for tenant removal, is clearly an act aimed at depriving tenants of their property and livelihood. Tenants have property ... they have invested in the spaces they are in. And, lest the government complain that Urban Renewal is not "arbitrary", imagine any government's seizure of property, and the laws that have propped up that seizure. The arbitrariness is in the disdain for human dignity. Not the letter of the law. That's the main point of this document.

Article 21.
(1) Everyone has the right to take part in the government of his country, directly or through freely chosen representatives.
(2) Everyone has the right of equal access to public service in his country.

Of course, when "professionals" are given rights unavailable to victims of Urban Renewal, they are clearly getting preferential, unequal access to public service.

Article 22.
Everyone, as a member of society, has the right to social security and is entitled to realization, through national effort and international co-operation and in accordance with the organization and resources of each State, of the economic, social and cultural rights indispensable for his dignity and the free development of his personality.

Social security, at the very least, means not worrying that your society is going to remove your small business, your neighborhood, your non-profit public service, in a mostly closed process, available only to elites.

Meeting with the planners

2006-12-04T20:10:00.000-08:00

In discussions today, some Eugene planners wrestled with these assertions:

1. Planning for Urban Renewal, for destroying places where people live and work, usually violates human rights.

2. This is an indigenous rights issue -- the same procedures which allow planners to destroy neighborhoods, and call it "renewal", are used to destroy larger cultures, and call it "progress".

3. You can't use the phrase "the community wants something different than the tenants" unless the community has actually been asked. Asking the tenants, one by one, is divide-and-conquer ... people do not feel free or empowered, in one-on-one discussions with powerful institutions like the City.

4. "Community vision" discussions are framed to exclude reality, through media presentations of architectural fantasies, discussions of space without discussions of real people and their organizations, etc.

5. Whenever someone says "wouldn't it makes more sense for X to be relocated from A to B instead?", one needs to bring to the foreground the reasons someone is already in A. This rarely happens.

6. While tenants and organizations may decide to move, they should not be pressured to do so. They should not be moved.

7. Yes, there is a growth model here: (1) support the existing tenants (2) support their organizations (3) help them maintain their space (4) give them collective decision-making power over their space (abuses are corrected by City Council oversight) (5) empower them to program the space, incubate new tenants, and determine whether their actions are positive and contribute to the whole. When they find the need to grow, they will improve and expand a space, incrementally. So, their organizational success naturally leads to building expansion. This is the way life works, and the way naturally vibrant cities emerge. Planning from the top down, by contrast, kills life, and the potential for it.

8. Participatory planning is not grassroots empowerment. Participatory development is. A downtown collective of tenants must be able to make small experiments to see what works, in reality. By contrast, a plan implemented by professionals, designed in a focus group, has no chance to succeed, and will only cause destruction.

9. This is not to say that there is no role for professionals. But they should be employed by empowered tenants. The tenants should not need to fight for their right to exist, in competition with professionals who "know what's best".

Planning is a human rights issue

2006-11-28T10:54:00.000-08:00

The City Council / Planning Commission work session last night offered interesting contrasts.

The meeting opened with a recap on a number of Human Rights issues, including the work of city officials to deal with these issues in a sensitive manner. People were definately first, in this discussion.

When the Planning session began, human rights were thrown out the window. Not a single threatened downtown tenant or organization was mentioned in the meeting (except a furniture chain store). Most of the threatened tenants are non-profits or collectives, built with a the community sweat equity of thousands of people.

For some reason, architects, planners and officials have a tendency to treat neighborhoods as if they were play-dough, without any interest in their contents. They may have some fantasies about contents, but the actual existing tenants are inconsequential, not mentioned, with a subtext of bigoted denigration (the hidden "we want a better class of people downtown").

In any case, the existing buildings, can be fully rented, to exciting, active and public organizations -- filling the empty spaces should be the goal for downtown, not new construction. This is just common sense.

RFQ development approved

2006-11-27T19:24:00.000-08:00

The City just approved the development of an RFQ (Request for Qualifications) for a development team for the properties on West Broadway. This will be released in the Spring of 2007, and responses will be received until 60-days after that.

Many of the points brought up in the meeting, and reflected in the RFQ, are very flexible, an uncontroversial. A process that's incremental, yet committed, positive, and which makes downtown a destination and living space, a great street etc.

The issuing of a general RFQ, in 2007, several seasons after the RFQ for the Sears building, is unfortunate, because their goals overlap. Hopefully nothing bad will happen to existing tenants in the meantime.

This is probably the biggest misperception in urban development: that existing organizations should be relocated in oprder to increase density. While that's true when density os beating down the door, it makes no sense when buildings stand empty despite reasonable prices. Creating more square feet of rentable space is obviously not the problem.

Even empty buildings shouldn't be abandoned so quickly. The "Center Court" building has been a successful multi-purpose structure for many years, and an out-of-town architect has suggested putting a theatre there? Millions of dollars would be wasted because of inattention to current resources.

But filled buildings, and the activity within them, should be treated like gold. Under threat are DIVA, The Tango Center, John Henry's, the Jazz Station, MECCA, and a number of other projects people have poured their hearts into. The empty spaces around them cannot be blamed on their hard work, but rather on the inattention of the current landlords, who cannot profit from further investment.

Protect the existing organizations. They are more important than density.

The Downtown Collective

2006-11-26T18:25:00.000-08:00

The City of Eugene purchased options on a number of buildings downtown. Normally these would be used to negotiate a large development package ... but this approach is both unlikely to succeed (having failed in 10 years to build a single private building downtown) and undesirable (since the result is unlikely to reflect the city's character).

Among the buildings now available for purchase by the city, are the properties that have most usually been considered "locked up", because the owners, the Conner & Woolley families, do not find it feasible to invest in improving the facilities, in coalition with existing or potential local tenants.

This drives me to conclude that the Conner/Woolley portion of the options should thus be bought by the City.

Under city ownership, I propose the buildings be managed by the tenants of the buildings, in a community tenant Downtown Collective. The property would be installed in a City-owned private trust, to allow the Downtown Collective the greatest flexibility, for example to use volunteer or student labor to make improvements and develop activity. The Downtown Collective would also have an advisory non-tenant membership body, and the tenant mangement body would act in mutual benefit with these other downtown groups. The Downtown Collective would officially fall under the final control of Eugene's City Council. It would have city financial tools available to it, under City discretion, to manage and incubate the space, in the most efficient way possible, as measured by regular monthly analysis.

The Downtown Collective would broaden to include any new tenants in the trust. They thus become self-perpetuating, as tenants work hard to make their individual projects succeed through a continuous fabric of activity that attracts and satisfies the public.

Given the above criteria, the following organizations would become the Downtown Collective: Saturday Market, Lane County Farmer's market, DIVA, The Tango Center, The Jazz Station, The New Zone Gallery, Downtown Events Management, Inc., Quan's Restaurant, ShawMed and Pivot Architecture. Participation is of course optional. Note that protecting, and enhancing, the current tenant's activity is a paramount for the coalition.

Note that among the tenant members, the non-profits and co-ops in this list are already coalitions of many other local Eugene groups. These are automatically invited to be part of the tenant group.

The purchase of these buildings, and the formation of a political body to manage them, will itself bring immediate and intense interest to downto Eugene.

For more information, join the Downtown Collective page at DowntownEugene.org.

Searching for answers

2006-11-22T14:50:00.000-08:00

According to city staff, the process of looking for developers to invest in downtown is in high gear. They have six months to secure projects, to exercise the options they've taken out on property downtown. However, with the unlikelyhood of subsidies, and the high option price, it is not clear that there is any room for profit, in any standard redevelopment prospect in the footprint.

While the city staff pursues this as yet unfruitful approach (dozens of private projects announced for downtown have never materialized), let's consider a public alternative. $25 million sits in the general fund, and other money is available, if the citizens of Eugene are organized to take back their downtown. The entire district could be programmed for the public benefit, in a uniquely Eugene fashion. If not, that general fund money will likely be spent on projects no one is much interested in -- a monolithic Police headquarters, and a monolithic new city hall. We can do better.

First, the story

2006-11-01T15:51:00.000-08:00

The Register-Guard doesn't always preserve the news stories on its site, and since this story impacts dozens of organizations, and thousands of people, here is the fair use exceprt:

City deals resurrect downtown dreams
By Edward Russo
The Register-Guard
Published: Friday, October 27, 2006

After months of negotiations, the city of Eugene has secured the right to buy 12 Broadway properties, reigniting the chance for redevelopment in the heart of downtown.

The potential sellers control most of the properties on West Broadway between Willamette and Charnelton streets, said Mike Sullivan, Eugene's community development division manager.

They include Eugene landlords Tom Connor and Don Woolley; Lazar Makyadeth, owner of Lazar's Bazar; and Rohn and Jack Roberts, who own the building on the northwest corner of Willamette and Broadway. The owner of the adjacent Scan Design building on Willamette Street also has agreed to sell, Sullivan said.

The city got the right to buy the properties for specific prices within six months to a year in order to assemble a "critical mass" of land in case it wants to restart efforts at redeveloping the area, City Manager Dennis Taylor said.

In April, plans for a $165 million retail, housing and office complex by Connor and Woolley and their development partner, Opus Northwest, fell through because they were unable to acquire neighboring properties.
Since then, city officials and their real estate consultant, John Brown, have been negotiating with the same property owners in hopes of reaching the option agreements.

"The Connor-Woolley-Opus project excited everybody, including the property owners along the streets," Taylor said. "That's why we were willing to work to keep the conversation going about what would it take for the property owners to be willing sellers."

Copies of the option agreements weren't available Thursday, but some of the prices provided by city officials show the properties won't go cheaply.

Prices for some of the smaller Broadway area buildings, for example, ranged from $625,000 to $1.45 million, Sullivan said. Options for the larger buildings ranged from $1.2 million to $3.15 million, he said.

The options give the city's urban renewal agency the ability to buy the properties for specific prices and by certain dates.
The city also could assign the options to another party, which could buy the property for the same price.

With the agreements in hand, the city could seek a developer to acquire and redevelop some or all of the properties, Sullivan said.

The city also could let the agreements lapse without buying the properties.

City officials don't have a developer in mind, Taylor said. He will discuss various ideas with the City Council in the next several weeks before deciding on the next step.

Taylor on Thursday signed the option agreements with Connor and Woolley. Negotiations continue with three other property owners, Sullivan said. "We have every reason to believe those options will be finalized," he said.

Connor and Woolley own most of the property in the two-block stretch of Broadway, including the four-story Centre Court building at Broadway and Willamette and the adjoining excavated pit on Willamette Street.

Woolley on Thursday declined to say whether he and Connor would be interested in putting together a development proposal for the city.

If the purchase prices named by the property owners prove too high for a developer, Sullivan said, the city has incentives that could help make the deal more acceptable, including property tax breaks for housing, a loan program and other assistance.
And the city doesn't have to acquire all of the properties to spur redevelopment, he said.

"Another possibility is for the city to look at buying select properties within the mix of properties that we have signed," Sullivan said.

Eugene is following a strategy employed by Springfield, which wants to redevelop riverfront property in Glenwood.

Springfield has obtained purchase options for 37 acres that officials hope to transform with new businesses and housing. On Oct. 9, city officials picked a Portland-based investment group to lead the redevelopment.

On Oct. 16, the Eugene City Council selected Thomas Kemper and Ronald Skov of Portland to redevelop the nearly half block at West 10th Avenue and Charnelton Street. The developers want to build 106 condominiums on the southwest corner of the block, site of the former Sears store and next to Connor and Woolley's properties along Broadway.

With Connor and Woolley's properties for sale, Taylor said, that raises various possibilities, including the chance that Kemper and Skov might become interested in redeveloping the neighboring property, too.

With the options, "we have a different climate today than we had last week," he said.

Downtown organizations at risk

2006-11-01T15:48:00.000-08:00

Here's a list of the businesses, non-profits, and cooperatives at risk, from a new City development initiative that does not involve them:

Starting at Charnelton and Broadway, working towards Willamette

Shaw-Med : locally-owned medical supply store
The Tango Center: non-profit community social dance center
New Zone Collective: alternative art gallery
Eugene Celebration office (Downtown Eugene Management, Inc.)
Saturday Market office
Farmer's Market office
Downtown Initiative for the Visual Arts
The Jazz Station
Mecca
Network Charter School
John Henry'sA Eugene Institution

Well that didn't work

2006-03-20T12:18:00.000-08:00

Despite the largest showing at a hearing for years, the city council passed the bill to fund the parking garage, a subsidy to Whole Foods to enter the Eugene market. As the developers and land-owners hoped, property in downtown's extreme east end immediately became hotter.

I went to the meeting with one long-time resident who felt that the speeches by Eugene's activists were not very good. I told her that this is not the problem. The problem is, they were just activists, and in a tough battle, what they say doesn't matter, unless they marshall the forces of the general population.

This is a common misconception. In 1995, I created the clearest proposal for a public-benefit development project in Eugene's history. It was so compelling, that the City Council needed to dedicate a meeting to it, even though this was supposed to be a committee's decision. But it didn't matter. Money and local power won the day, and my proposal was pushed aside for an unclear proposal, made by friends of the powerful.

So, being eloquent and correct isn't enough. You really need to make the population rise up. One of the most effective tools for this is the local initiative. It's very underused.

Keep it Local

2006-03-04T16:13:00.000-08:00

We're trying to fight a public subsidy for Whole Foods ... an unnecessary $9 million public parking structure next door to a proposed Whole Foods development. There are far better ways to spend that money ...

And we hope that Whole Foods will pull out. In the face of corporate agribusiness and its massive distribution system, Eugeneans have built a local food web of great quality, perhaps the best in the US. An organic-farm revolving fund, ARABLE, operated for years to launch small organic farms in this area. The Organically-Grown Co-op, Starflower Distributors, Down-to-earth gardening store, Oregon Tilth, local CSA's, the Grower's Market, The Saturday Market, the Farmer's Market, the Hoedads, and the kitchen foods businesses ... Surata Tofu, Genesis Juice, bakers, spread-makers, tea makers, essential oil makers, natural food stores ... the list of Eugene's commitment towards real whole foods is unprecedented.

And it was done with almost no help from the government. Which should be spending tax money on things like healthy food, but doesn't. Because it needs to spend it on parking structures for money-extracting national chain stores. No.

Keep it local

Come to the rallies.

Alternatives

2006-02-16T14:25:00.000-08:00

Public expenditure, as proposed by city staff, never addresses public issues. This is true until the public reacts. The public is not reacting these days, which makes city staff pretty happy.

Look at the proposed expenditures: parking garages, consolidation of property by the wealthy, new highways & overpasses, handouts to a private hospital, building a new city hall, building a new police station, handouts to a private national food chain, the building of another sports stadium, etc.

Ask anyone, and they'll give you a list of the real problems in their lives. And the above list addresses none of them:

1. Work; meaningful work; work that makes them feel free and fulfilled; work that ties you to, and benefits, your local community.

2. Health: affordibility of regular & emergency care. A better integration of healthcare into everyday life. A respect and regular evaluation of many different approaches to health.

3. Food & water: good quality local foods, produced by local small farmers, in direct connection to the community, which does not damage the ecology, which doesn't involve the use of chemicals, and which respects the land and the people involved.

4. Shelter: affordable, ownable, beautiful, sensible housing which helps us in pursuing our dreams, by providing workspace, integrating well with nature, and being part of a walkable neighborhood with character and amenities.

5. Happiness & community: a range of different activities, available everywhere, which bring people in touch with each other, for conversation, activity, shared creation, and mutual support. A community that moves away from fear, and towards goodwill.

6. A government that works towards providing these for everyone.

These are restated basic human rights, not far from Artcle 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, one of the most important, and most ignored, documents of the UN, adopted in 1948. It is ignored by the United States, on a national & international scale, and within the United States, by most local governments.

Anyone reading of these rights, can begin to think of how they can be implemented, on a local level. It's not that hard.

1. Promote the coming together of local expertise in a variety of areas, with the goal of creating work from within, resolving local problems in a natural, incremental manner. Create centers and organizations around ...

2. ... healthcare -- locally-built clinics & hospitals, production of herbal and western medicines, broadening participation and availability and affordability of healthcare.

3. ... food & water -- support local small organic farms, promote them, subsidize their distribution systems, etc.

4. ... shelter -- centers for plumbing, carpentry, metalwork, and the building of homes, civic amenities, parks & gardens & farms, mixed-use environments, financing, etc.

5. ... community -- places where people can go in an evening and take pleasure in working and creating with new people.

To those of us who've been involved in initiating projects like this, the solutions seems quite straightforward. But we don't seem to be able to maintain the attention of City Staff in terms of funding such publicly-minded projects. And we won't, unless the public is more fully involved. To resolve this problem, we need to:

1. Create an inspiring repository of "alternatives" that work. The books A Pattern Language and the Encyclopedia of Social Inventions, and the magazines Rain and the Whole Earth Review, among many others, were attempts to create such repositories, to act as catalysts for making the world a better place. This is the vision: the alternative to the current power-led approach to spending public capital.

2. Initiate a movement within the population, to take control of the pocketbook, and make democratic decisions to build and fund wonderful projects that address fundamental issues.

Fixing the private welfare system

2006-01-07T17:32:00.000-08:00

Usually, big development projects shut out the general public -- when the general public does nothing. Politicians and their staff, lacking the constituency to do better, are completely at the mercy of 0.1% of the population: those with the most money & property. Whenever possible, the wealthy try to improve their position at the public expense.

This happens in neighborhoods across the world, back to the dawn of man. The transactions generally don't go too far beyond the level of abuse that is publically acceptable -- if the public actually sees what's going on.

Even a broadly published account of the abuse-to-come tends to go unread by the public, who, as good-natured people, often assume that things will get better, and that 'public leaders' and 'captains of industry' will act in their best interest. This despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

The current plan for downtown Eugene provides one private developer/landholder with a virtual monopoly of West downtown, accomplished through a gigantic public subsidy, and city-enforced seizure of land. How boldly the powerful announce their plans, and assume that 'lesser people' will just go along.

At this point, battered activists are tired of fighting this sort of thing. It is necessary to create a democratic mechanism which pushes against heavy-handed initiatives, to improve them, and to make them serve the public good.

Money

2005-12-08T21:20:00.000-08:00

There have been several major public building projects in downtown Eugene recently: a new bus station, a new library, opened pedestrian streets, a new federal courthouse. Several are planned: a new city hall, a new police station ...

Let's take the new city hall. Since this isn't a dictatorship, it seems like a $30 million city hall isn't necessary to impress the masses, or guard civic leaders from them.

Instead, how about using that money to fund 500 community projects to the tune of $60,000 each? It cost that much to start the Tango Center, or the Center for Approrpiate Transport, or Saturday Market ... all these institutions cost very little to get going.

And many of them have lasted as long as a building ... creating a community economy is as substantial an investment as creating a building. Especially since buildings these days seem to have increasingly short lifespans.

Opera in context

2005-08-23T19:51:00.000-07:00

I'm listening to Mozart's Don Giovanni on the radio ... I've posted this before: we see these performances today in a form completely unlike their original one. they were written for halls where people were meeting for lunch & cards & drinking, and so the writer was really struggling to get the audience's attention. If opera seems repetitive and drawn-out today, it's not because people's tastes have changed ... but because the performance context is so different.

Look at the popular revival of some of Shakespeare's original context, from London to Ashland, and you can see that in the right setting, these shows can be massively popular again.

So, imagine, today, an opera house in the 18th-century style. It doesn't need to particularly look 18th-century, but it needs to have balconies and siderooms and interesting twisting passages for all kinds of social activities, from cards to weight-lifting to sex. I think you wouldn't be able to keep people out of the place.

I'm guilty of starting a Tango Center that's somewhat out of its original context -- no drinking. "Either kids or drinks" is the choice we have in the US today. It seemed like an all-ages dancehall was needed more than a drinking-hole for dancing. But we've still created a place where you go to do something, not just sit and watch performers. That's what's missing from most performance space today.

Memory loss

2005-07-18T21:59:00.000-07:00

Maybe the worst thing that can happen to a town is memory loss. Weak analysis, publicly published, is one thing, but when weak anaylsis becomes history, it must be answered.

Certainly, the problem is much more serious at a national and international level, especially today, when Americans are just starting to realize that the US government has abused their trust for decades, and is the biggest sponsor of terrorism in the world. But the small distortions that sneak into local history, while less important perhaps, are very similar in nature.

An example in today's Register-Guard:

July 17, 2005

Building Blocks Of A Renaissance: The seeds of downtown's rebirth were sowed 20 years ago
By Joe Mosley
The Register-Guard

Former Mayor Ruth Bascom was a city councilwoman and new mayoral candidate in 1992, when she used three props - a hard hat, a rented jackhammer and a block of concrete - to offer what now seems a prophetic suggestion for the future of downtown Eugene.

The pedestrian mall built in 1969 had been a complete failure, driving retailers away and draining vitality from the city's core. An abstract concrete fountain - which Bascom referred to as a "tank trap" - stood at Willamette Street and Broadway, downtown's heart.

The mall did not drive away retailers. It was built by retailers, using city urban redevlopment money, and by developers, using the same money to tear down beautiful old buildings and apartments. The retailers were driven away by the suburban shopping malls on the outside of town. The downtown mall was a direct, explicit answer to Valley River Center, the first major shopping center outside of the city core.

Pretty basic error for a story lead, in the city's major paper. The only way to counter such misunderstandings are to write back.

A new approach to "museums" -- Part II

2005-02-14T14:52:00.000-08:00

Ideally, an exhibit should have all the benefits of a website -- a museum exhibit has the advantage of reality ... more tangible demonstrations, deeper interactivity, human interaction, workshops, demonstrations etc. But it should also be a place where you can sit down and delve into the subject more deeply, take notes, bookmark and annotate ideas, save them, buy something that relates, etc.

The easiest way to do this is to cluster exhibits into issues & subjects, and have staff there to rent & sell items, orient research, make demonstrations, answer questions etc. And then to have computers there, with access to the web, that let you investigate further, make notes, comment, act, etc.

A new approach to "museums" -- Part I

2005-02-14T14:35:00.000-08:00

For centuries, it was at Art Museums that the best artists gathered to teach the best potential artists. So, for example, a Geology museum should be the place where new geologists are born. A historical museum should be where the best historians gather ... etc. Others can gather their too ... a historical museum should also be a place where engineers and artisans learn how to make things at least as well as their predecessors, for example.

Unfortunately this isn't the case. Let's find some reasons.

1. No economy -- if the best also could make a living at the museum, they would spend all their time there.

2. No community, no communication -- if the museum only works one way, to tell people what they should know, rather than to engage them in a conversation to improve the presentation, then people will go, and leave. They'll be back in a few years, at best.

3. No progress -- if a museum is changed, it should change using a very simple rule: keep what works, and fix what doesn't. It should not gut itself at once, in order to please a major donor, or it's new director, or the newest trend in museums.

4. No warmth -- somehow, even though museum workers tend to be very committed people, they manage rarely to be good at sparking enthusiasm in others. They are not activists, they are experts. But this doesn't serve the community, and it doesn't ultimately support them either. They must create a phsyical & social environment that invites people to join in an intimate understanding of the subject at hand. Itstead, one way or another, museums tend to present an intimidating presentation of established dogma.

5. Too commercial -- this is a new problem for Art museums, but an old one for, say, Science museums, which often had nuclear power exibits sponsored by General Electric. The community must come first, and the higher goals of a community, to empower and inspire individuals to do things for each other, to find their potential, to find independent and cooperative relationships with others, and to give their passion to something of their choosing.

What will work

2005-01-27T17:13:00.000-08:00

When Eugene's population was only 3,000, downtown Eugene was a busier place than it is today. And Eugene's population is now 130,000. On a busy night, there may be 3,000 people downtown. Everyone else needs to come and see what's happening, and get away from the TV, the multiplex and the malls.

With 130,000 in a city, anything is possible. We started a Tango Center in downtown Eugene, Oregon. It works. Other odd things downtown: a lovely tea shop, two independent playhouses, dozens of unique concert venues, cafes, bars, clubs, and restaurants. There are a dozen galleries, two independent grocery stores, five independent bookstores, two independent music stores, etc.

But the place is still relatively empty. This is because of a number of looming buildings that used to house major department stores. Even if they were still running, the downtown wouldn't be very exciting. The department store district of Seattle is the least interesting part of the city. In contrast to this, we want downtown to truly become the heart of the city.

Even though the franchises are gone, most of the activity downtown is still based upon consumption of imported goods. The major exception is the Saturday Market/Farmer's market, where the people selling are required to also make what they sell. This is by far the most dense actvity in downtown Eugene.

This success indicates that new actvity downtown needs to revolve around small-scale production & sales of local goods. These can be combined with education -- drop in classes, public lectures & demonstrations, interactive learning centers, and appreticeship programs. Already, there is a small herbal apothecary downtown which takes this approach, and the Tango Center does too. So does the bicycle center (CAT), two textile shops and a jewelry/bead shop. Teaching & specializing works ... and it makes the town a more vital, self-reliant place.

In the Tango Center we'll be starting two new programs ... a Bistro/cooking school, and a shoe-making & costume center. A printmaking shop will let us promote downtown activities in a fully expressive manner, and a recording studio will be part of our international Tango Musician's network activities.

One bookstore downtown is considering offering bookbinding/restoration classes. We'd like to find ways of getting all the bookstores to stay open late, creating a late-night bookworm scene, like Powell's in Portland. One way to do this would be to have writer's workshops downtown. These could also be playwright workshops -- we have so many playhouses. And screenwriting, lyric-writing, poetry ... tying book sales to the creative act brings us back to the origin of bookstores. Combine them with hostels, so people can camp out with others who share their obsessions.

There is a reasonable base to create a non-profit film/video school & center, along the lines of DCTV in Manhattan. This would also have a film library for rent, arrange film festivals, show local work, and host the local Cable Television network. Films letting out can feed a number of late-night activities & shops with customers.

But people need to build things. Ceramics, metalwork, woodwork ... around specialties. The bike center (CAT) teaches metalwork, but it is a bike-building center, not a "metal shop". This gives it focus and purpose.

One purpose is "practical public art", which the Art Noveau movement advocated a centurry ago, resulting in works like Guimard's Metro stations in Paris. A shop could be dedicated to creating beautiful amenities throughout the city. It would be an easy thing to get people downtown with such purpose, all hours of the night.

If a hundred important projects had storefronts, then people could simply vote with their feet, and get involved, with the issue they feel is most pressing. This could lead a civic approach to resolving problems of inequality, poverty, healthcare, and the creation of meaningful work.

Speaking of which -- everyone wants to see a tram system in Eugene. There used to be one, and it shaped the town. Also, we'd like to see better bikeways. Both of these things usually delegated to city government, which begs for money (back) from the feds, so they can buy expensive trams. But it is possible for a community to make its own trams ... in fact Portland did this with some historic reconstructions still in use today. Imagine the economic consequences of the revival of that small-scale industry locally! We could restart the running of passenger trains all over the northwest. No more cramped cars, late Amtraks or old Greyhounds ...