Taking Downtown Seriously as a Place to Live

Students and reviewers gather around the downtown Eugene context model in Lawrence Hall, Friday, June 5, 2026 (my photo).

On Friday, June 5, I took part in the final review for University of Oregon professor Clay Neal’s Arch 486/586 terminal design studio, Downtown Housing. The students’ task was direct and ambitious: to design aspirationally dense urban housing on one of nine downtown Eugene sites, each ranging from a quarter‑acre to nearly two acres and located within a sixteen‑block study area centered on the intersection of Broadway and Willamette Street. 

The final review stood out for the consistently high quality of the students’ presentations—polished, thoughtful, and well‑defended. Equally impressive was the diversity of the reviewers: emeritus and current faculty, active practitioners, contractors, developers, city officials, downtown property owners, and a retired architect (me!). This mix brought a rich range of perspectives to the table as we discussed how these projects could genuinely contribute to a more lived‑in downtown. 

Only after establishing the concrete design problem did Clay frame the review with broader questions: How do the projects encourage positive social interaction? How do they address energy conservation and climate change? What do they contribute to a vibrant public realm? And how do they make living downtown healthy, desirable, and fun? The projects themselves were speculative but grounded, imagining a more active downtown through roughly a thousand new dwellings and a mix of supporting uses. 

The student work was impressive, as it was uniformly careful, inventive, and attuned to the constraints of real development. But it was not any single project that stayed with me—it was the density math. Among the studio materials prepared by Clay was a concise summary of existing housing conditions downtown, and the numbers are difficult to ignore. The entire Downtown Plan Area presently contains 2,511 housing units across 306 acres, or 8.2 units per acre. The sixteen‑block study area at the center of downtown has only 140 units across 59 acres, or 2.4 units per acre. That last figure is the one that stops you: 2.4 units per acre in the heart of downtown Eugene. 

The design studio's nine sites are the parcels highlighted in red.

For comparison, the studio also provided densities for three R‑1 neighborhoods in Eugene: Bethel at 3.6 units per acre, Friendly at 3.8, and River Road at 2.9. The paradox is obvious. Eugene’s downtown core is less housing-dense than its single‑family neighborhoods. Friendly, often thought of as a leafy, low‑rise district, is more than fifty percent denser than the center of the city. This is not a criticism of downtown; it is simply a description of its current condition. Decades of surface parking, single‑use commercial buildings, and benign neglect have left the core residentially sparse. In a city like Eugene, where the downtown should carry significant symbolic weight, adding housing is one of the most reliable ways to generate the everyday activity people associate with a healthy urban center. 

To put Eugene’s numbers in context, it helps to look at typical units‑per‑acre ranges in some major North American downtowns. Vancouver’s downtown peninsula commonly reaches 80 to 200 units per acre. Manhattan’s residential blocks range from 100 to 300. Chicago’s Loop and Near North Side fall between 40 and 150. Philadelphia’s Center City ranges from 20 to 120. Closer to home and scale, Boise’s downtown has achieved densities around 42 units per acre. Against that backdrop, Eugene’s downtown sits at 2.4 units per acre in the core and 8.2 across the broader plan area. Even the lowest densities in these examples exceed Eugene’s core by a large margin. The comparison is not meant to be aspirational—Eugene is not Manhattan, or even Boise—but it does reveal how much latent capacity sits in the center of the city. 

A simple table makes the contrast clear: 

(Density ranges for cities as reported in municipal planning documents and census data.)

The City of Eugene is not unaware of this opportunity. The Downtown Core Housing Initiative (DCHI) is an attempt to lower the barriers to building downtown through an accelerated MUPTE process, fee assistance using urban renewal funds, and strategic property acquisition and disposition by the Urban Renewal Agency. These tools are meant to address the same challenge the students confronted: how to make a downtown project pencil out in a market where construction costs are high and rents are comparatively low. 

A concrete real-world example is the North Butterfly Lot, where the Urban Renewal Agency has selected Paradigm Properties to develop a mixed‑use housing project on the half‑acre site north of the Farmers Market Pavilion. The proposal calls for a minimum of eighty new units, along with an active ground floor that strengthens the connection between the downtown core, the Market District, and the riverfront. It is a modest but meaningful step toward the kind of density the students were exploring. 

What I appreciated most about the studio was its clarity. By placing fifteen projects on nine sites, the students inadvertently produced a kind of density atlas for downtown Eugene. They showed how much housing could fit on sites we barely notice now, how mixed‑use programming could enliven the public realm, how massing, daylight, and circulation can be handled pragmatically, and how the city’s own incentives might bridge the gap between aspiration and feasibility. The work was speculative, but the underlying message was not: downtown Eugene has the capacity to house far more people than it currently does. 

Rendering of a project by Holly Needham for the site located on Broadway at Pearl Street (the current parking lot east of Ambrosia Restaurant & Bar).

It is the familiar arithmetic of development: land cost, construction cost, financing, rents, and the thin margins that make or break a project. The students’ proposals made the opportunity visible, and the City’s current initiatives—DCHI, the North Butterfly Lot, and the broader urban renewal strategy—suggest that the policy environment is beginning to align with that opportunity. 

I left the review encouraged. Not because the students solved downtown Eugene, but because they revealed its potential with unusual clarity. Their work made the low density of the core impossible to ignore, and it made the case, implicitly but persuasively, that a more lived‑in downtown is both desirable and achievable. The sites are there. The policies are taking shape. And the students have shown what’s possible when we take downtown seriously as a place to live, not just a place to pass through.