Missing The Mark

 

Construction of The Mark at Eugene, in progress, October 17, 2026 (my photo).

The old PeaceHealth University District hospital buildings came down quickly, and The Mark at Eugene, a five-story student housing project by Landmark Properties of Athens, Georgia, is going up in their place nearly as fast. Now that its first-floor walls are framed, I can see that the building will offer little to the streets around it beyond bedrooms behind windows. I had hoped for something more ambitious.  

The Mark will be wood-framed from top to bottom, with no concrete podium (the base level that commonly holds parking and shops) beneath it.(1)  Landmark could have included shops or a café at street level without changing the construction type. The architects already list offices and gathering spaces in the code summary. It chose not to, and the project provides virtually no parking on site.(2)  Landmark does promise 5,785 square feet of ground-floor retail in its announcement, but it sits “within the [existing] parking deck located at 13th and Hilyard, which is included as part of the property acquisition,” and residents’ cars will go to the same garage. In effect, The Mark’s podium is across the street, already built. 

Along Hilyard Street, 13th Avenue, and Alder Street, the ground floor will be almost entirely apartments: 47 units containing 172 bedrooms.(3) These units will have plenty of windows, more than the code requires;(4) the trouble is that bedrooms will lie behind them. The floor sits close to sidewalk level, and Landmark plans only a narrow strip of planting between the building and passersby. There are none of the deeper landscaped setbacks, low garden walls, porches, or recessed entries that can help ground-floor apartments maintain privacy along busy streets. A city's street life depends in part on how buildings meet the sidewalk. Would I want one of these units if I were a student? No. I would keep the blinds closed for privacy, and the façade would become a row of drawn shades. 

Landmark asked the City to waive its articulation standards, which are meant to break up long, flat walls. The standards require at least two design features (such as windows, balconies, projections or recesses, entries, awnings, or a change of material) every 40 feet horizontally and 25 feet vertically. Projections or recesses must be at least two feet deep. The requirements are modest; windows and sufficiently deep balconies could provide the two features required at the prescribed intervals. The Mark’s vertical rows of balconies will be roughly 42 to 55 feet apart, wider than the prescribed 40-foot interval. 

Rendering of The Mark at Eugene, submitted as part of the adjustment review application by ESG Architecture & Design.

The applicant was candid about why: relief from the articulation standards “reduces design and construction costs by simplifying building design and permitting the use of more standardized detailing and construction materials. These cost savings can be passed on to reduce the sale or rental price per unit.” Note the verb: can be. As drawn, the exterior will have a dark brick base, fiber cement panels in two grays above it, and wood-look planks at the balconies. The architects caution on the elevations, however, that the materials “may change at the time of building permit submittal.” 

The City had no discretion to enforce the articulation standards. SB 1537, Oregon’s 2024 housing bill, requires local governments to exempt qualifying housing projects from certain design and development standards. The City’s December 2, 2025, approval is a four-page checklist confirming that The Mark qualified.(5) 

The building’s length was a different matter. Within 40 feet of a street, Eugene limits a building’s length to 150 feet; The Mark’s façades exceed that on all three streets, and the one facing 13th Avenue is 431 feet long. Under the code, the City may approve a longer building only if it will “create a vibrant street facade with visual detail” and “provide multiple entrances to building or yards.” On December 15, thirteen days after waiving the articulation standards, City planning staff found both criteria met. Their evidence of vibrancy included “extensive window openings,” balconies “that provide a projecting building element and contrasting exterior finish materials,” and ground-level masonry, which the drawings acknowledge may change.(6) The City had just waived the requirement that those features occur at 40-foot intervals. Now it counted the same features toward the building's vibrancy. As for multiple entrances, staff identified three, only one of which faces 13th Avenue. 

The obvious comparison is The Hayward, which opened in 2013 and 2014 as 13th & Olive (the notorious Capstone development), several blocks west on 13th. When local officials found the finished complex far plainer than its renderings, and the ground-floor retail its developer had loosely promised never appeared, the project became a cautionary example of what can go wrong when the built result falls short of expectations. The City later froze its Multi-Unit Property Tax Exemption program and eventually barred student housing from it. Both The Hayward and The Mark are large, wood-frame student housing blocks with little at street level besides apartments and, in The Hayward's case, parking garages.(7) 

Eugene did try to learn from 13th & Olive. In 2020, I participated in a focus group the City convened to shape new commercial setback standards, and 13th & Olive was the example we all cited of how not to meet a street. The City Council adopted the amendments in 2021, requiring buildings in commercial zones like this one to stand back from the sidewalk and fill that space with landscaping or “enhanced pedestrian spaces.”(8) 

The Hayward Student Living complex (aka 13th and Olive) as viewed along Willamette Street (Google Street view). Originally developed by Capstone Collegiate Communities and now owned by Timberline Real Estate Ventures, the roundly criticized development did not provide the initially promised street-level retail storefronts when completed in 2014. 

In approving The Mark’s length, staff referenced those very features: landscaping between the building and every street, and an “enhanced pedestrian area” along Alder. Yet as designed, its relationship to the sidewalk will be much like 13th & Olive’s. As I wrote at the time, “it is doubtful any tweaking of the setback requirements alone would have spared us from this blight upon downtown.” I see nothing in The Mark to make me think otherwise. 

I don’t fault staff for the articulation waiver. Their conclusion that The Mark’s façades will “create a vibrant street facade” is harder to accept, though I suspect the deeper fault lies with a criterion so loosely defined that almost any building with windows and balconies could meet it. I don’t fault ESG, the architects, either; they are a capable firm that worked within its client’s budget and the rules that remained. 

Housing advocates will say SB 1537 is doing its job: a thousand beds, built quickly and more cheaply, easing pressure on older rentals across town. Fair enough. But that goal never required bedrooms at the sidewalk with only a narrow strip of planting in between. Landmark could have given those apartments some distance from the street. Students will fill these sidewalks on their way to campus, but along flat panel walls, drawn blinds, and a 431-foot run of bedrooms, few will have reason to slow down. 

How many more student-targeted megaprojects can Eugene absorb? And how many before the blocks around campus become a monoculture? I have argued before for incremental growth, for cities that evolve through small, adaptive steps rather than monolithic interventions. Developers keep building these projects, though I wonder how sustainable the demand will be. University of Oregon enrollment has been essentially flat; the university projects undergraduate numbers to decline through 2031, and this fall it shuttered Barnhart Hall, one of its off-campus residence halls. None of those facts establishes that demand for student housing is falling. But if demand does soften, any owner could find a building laid out for student roommates, with bedrooms along every sidewalk, difficult to adapt for other uses. 

No one involved broke a rule, and that is the problem. Eugene is getting a thousand student beds facing three well-traveled streets. Landmark plans a second phase on the land just to the north. Perhaps the question now is whether Eugene will ask more of it. 

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(1)  According to the submitted application documents, the building will be Type III-A construction. Its code summary lists residential (R-2) as the main occupancy, with business (B), assembly (A-2, A-3), and storage (S-2) occupancies. The site is zoned C-2 Community Commercial with a Transit Oriented Development overlay. 

(2)  The site plan includes a single parking stall, an accessible one.

(3)  The project’s first phase will include 272 units and 1,004 bedrooms. Landmark says the two phases together will deliver 2,275 beds. 

(4)  Windows will cover 22 to 29 percent of the ground floor on each street façade, comfortably above Eugene’s 15 percent minimum. 

(5)  To qualify for an exemption, The Mark needed at least ten units per net acre; the first phase proposes 272 units on 2.62 acres, nearly 104 per acre. 

(6)  No one submitted public testimony during the application’s comment period.

(7)  The Hayward (13th & Olive) complex has 1,004 parking spaces in two large garages and about 1,300 bedrooms. Its fiber-cement siding panels have cracked and been patched with caulk.

(8)  The City Council adopted the amendments, which apply to the C-2 Community Commercial zone among others, as Ordinance No. 20657 on July 26, 2021. Our focus group also urged the City to encourage well-designed ground-floor residential units.