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, 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.

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".

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.