Pumping life into the heart of a city

After decades of decline, Eugene is
trying to revive its downtown area

Story by Nat Levy
Photos by Vanessa Van Voorhis

Vanessa Van Voorhis / Photographer

A bronze statue depicting author and Merry Prankster Ken Kesey and his three grandkids sits at the corner of Broadway and Willamette Street in the heart of downtown Eugene, an area central to the proposed redevelopment plans. The statue shows Kesey reading “Sometimes a Great Notion,” a novel about Oregon logging, which was later made into a film starring Paul Newman and Henry Fonda.

A young couple ducks inside Lazar’s Bazar on a warm, muggy day. They are overdressed for the May heat, with long-sleeve shirts and pants. They grab two cans of Coke from the cooler, lay them on the counter and then realize they don’t have enough money.

Lazar Makyadath owns the store that’s been a fixture in downtown Eugene for 33 years, and tells them it’s OK to just pay him the rest of the money next time they come in.

Over the next half-hour, a customer buys a soda and tells Makyadath to keep the change from the $10 bill and turns down another customer’s request to borrow $25. He then jokes with a group of downtown regulars about his newly shaved head, saying he’s still "a sexy beast."

It’s all part of another day for Makyadath, a native of India who has sold everything from sneakers to tapestries, changing with the times and his customer’s desires. Early on, he even changed the name from Anain, which means "elephant included" in Hindi, to Lazar’s Bazar after a customer said he thought the store was "bizarre."

"We take time listening to the customers," Makyadath said. "We order the product they want.

The ability to mirror his products and customer service to Eugene’s quirky nature has also given Makyadath a special insight into the dramatic changes that have taken place in downtown Eugene over nearly four decades. He is one of the few remaining business owners who were around when downtown Eugene was a thriving hub of commercial activity.

"They’re all dead and gone, and I’m still here," Makyadath said.

He’s seen downtown slowly deteriorate, first after the opening of the Valley River Center mall, then with the creation of a pedestrian mall along Broadway, where his store is located. Over the years, the city has made repeated, but unsuccessful, efforts to inject new life into downtown.

Today, Makyadath is witnessing another attempt to revitalize downtown Eugene. The Eugene City Council recently passed a motion choosing two developers to rebuild several blocks of downtown. The effort is a key anchor of Mayor Kitty Piercy’s overall vision for creating a sustainable city.

The $210 million redevelopment would rely heavily on the use of "green" or sustainable building products and techniques, include condos or apartments to encourage people to live closer to downtown and reduce sprawl and cut gasoline consumption by creating a vibrant shopping and after-hours entertainment center in the heart of the city.

"Working on sustainability is ongoing and never ending," said Piercy, who has staked much of her political legacy on the issue. "Downtown is just one piece in the big picture."

Eugene’s City Council, after months of wrestling with the merits of separate proposals from KWG Developers and Beam Developers, decided on a plan that combines the best of each company’s ideas.

KWG’s proposal, estimated to cost $191 million, would rebuild more than three blocks of downtown facing West Broadway. It would include a diverse mix of uses: resident-owned housing, affordable housing for lowincome residents, retail stores, a grocery store, a movie theater complex, underground parking and a hotel.

The project asks for $24.8 million in city funds, with $15.9 million of that to be used to finance a new parking garage. The city’s contribution would make up approximately 13 percent of the total price tag.

The Beam Development option is much smaller and would primarily renovate the nearby Centre Court and Washburn buildings near Willamette Street and Broadway. At $18.1 million, it asks for only $1.6 million in city funds, or 9 percent of the total cost.

In February, the City Council also approved a plan to develop the former Sears building at 10th Avenue and Charnelton Street. TK Partners, in collaboration with KWG Principal Tom Kemper and business partner Ron Skov, plans to build 106 condominiums on the vacant site.

All of the developers say their projects are important to creating a sustainable Eugene. They say they plan to use sustainable building techniques and materials, use biofuels during construction, and employ techniques to reduce or eliminate storm water runoff from buildings.

KWG Development’s plan for high-density residences would limit sprawl and reduce the need to expand the city’s urban growth boundary, said Kazem Oveissi of Oveissi & Co., an Oriental rug merchant on Broadway. Beth Little, general manager of the Saturday Market in Eugene, agrees.

"If you are against sprawl, then you have to understand that you have to have a dense urban area," Little said.

The mixture of retail, housing, office space and entertainment will make downtown the anchor of the city, said Denny Braud, Eugene’s planning and development manager.

Vanessa Van Voorhis / Photographer

The Slocum Center for Orthopedics & Sports Medicine received Eugene Mayor Kitty Piercy’s first Sustainability Award, which honors businesses that have chosen to follow sustainable practices. The $20 million construction project is scheduled for completion in 2007.

The Beam proposal also asserts it will be sustainable, largely because it will remodel existing buildings rather than construct new ones, thereby reducing the amount of materials needed. In contrast, the KWG portion will require demolition of several properties.

There is little data or evidence to show whether the projects will be economically sustainable.

Councilors Bonny Bettman and Betty Taylor voted against the combined KWG/Beam option. Bettman thinks the smaller Beam proposal is more feasible, while the KWG option is so big that it may never get done.

"The comprehensive project will put us a year down the road," she said. "And what if it doesn’t work?"

The idea to combine the two developments came after Piercy and Councilor Alan Zelenka made a trip to Portland to view projects completed by both KWG and Beam.

"After speaking with both developers, I see that they both have important specialties that we should take advantage of," Piercy said.

The next step in the process is for the developers, specifically KWG, to survey the area and discover what developments will be possible.

The current debate about downtown is just one chapter in the city’s effort to recreate a vibrant central core area. Downtown was the commercial center of the city prior to the 1970s, with Sears, J.C. Penny, Montgomery Ward and other major stores anchoring city blocks. The city’s daily newspaper, The Register-Guard, was located there, along with at least two movie theaters.

All of that is gone now, victims of the same mall and stripmall development that has taken place in most other American cities during the late 1960s and 1970s. Even the newspaper moved to the suburbs, but not until the 1990s. Valley River Center’s construction in the late 1960s started the exodus, primarily of the big department stores.

"It sucked a lot of the retail life out of downtown," said Abe Farkas, a former Eugene and Portland city development official who now works for ECONorthwest, a Eugene-based economics consulting firm.

Farkas said consumers’ access to diverse, ground-level shops is necessary for creating a sustainable downtown.

"You need first and foremost to pay attention to the pedestrian level," he said.

As people started avoiding downtown in favor of the mall and other newer outlying commercial areas, city leaders eliminated cars from Broadway and some cross streets, creating a pedestrian-only mall. That idea had been suggested as early as 1956, but didn’t take place until 1972 to combat the flight of shoppers to the suburban shopping mall.

By most accounts, the pedestrian mall failed to revitalize downtown. Opinions about why it didn’t work vary, but Makyadath says prohibiting traffic on key streets was a big reason.

"The streets were closed, but the businesses were open," Makyadath said.

In the late 1970s, Makyadath testified before the City Council. He used an analogy to describe the difficulty of running a successful business in an inaccessible area.

"I am a door to door salesman," he said. "If people opened the door, I could get a sale. When it was closed I could not." During this period the door to downtown was closed.

Farkas blames a weak market and shifting ideology for the loss of downtown’s vitality.

"Folks stopped thinking of downtown as the place to go," he said. During his 1985-1997 tenure as Eugene’s planning director, the city attempted to reintroduce housing into downtown. Farkas also pushed a joint public/private venture to build a high-rise downtown that included a bank, city library, retail shops, offices and housing. The public voted it down. Today, the eightstory U.S. Bank building is on the site at the corner of Eighth Avenue and Willamette Street, with limited retail space on the ground level.

"Voters couldn’t understand the desirability of mixed use," he said. "There just wasn’t a market for it in Eugene."

Vanessa Van Voorhis / Photographer

Lazar Makyadath, owner of Lazar’s Bazar, located at 57 W. Broadway, Eugene, Ore., says he will retire if the city decides to allow redevelopment of property where his shop sits. Makyadath and his wife, Rosy, opened the eclectic shop in 1974 after immigrating to Eugene from Southern India.

Nevertheless, there have been some enduring success stories in downtown Eugene, many of which fit the counter-culture or alternative business image of the city.

The prime example is Saturday Market, the popular open-air street fair, which opened in 1970.

In addition, The Hult Center for the Performing Arts, which opened in 1982 and the city library, built in 2004, have become permanent fixtures of downtown life.

City officials view downtown’s development potential as a way to catch up with other cities’ sustainability and economic revitalization initiatives. Downtowns in both Salem and Portland, for example, are full of people, shops, offices and nightlife.

Salem’s downtown survived because, until recently, the city used zoning laws to prevent a big "regional mall" from being built. Merchants stayed downtown and built new developments because there wasn’t a better place to locate, Farkas said.

"It’s a well designed downtown area," Farkas said.

Portland is the prime model for sustainable downtown development in the state of Oregon, Farkas said. Efforts date back to creation of the Portland Development Commission in 1958, which established an agenda for developing the core area using the same kind of public-private partnerships that Eugene rejected in the late 1980s with the bank-library building. The Portland City Council also rejected plans in the early 1970s to build a freeway along the Willamette River, allowing for development of the popular riverfront park and nearby housing, hotels and retail developments.

In Portland, "from the beginning, there was a major push for housing in the core of downtown," Farkas said.

Portland is among the top cities in the nation as far as meeting Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design standards for green building. Portland’s City Council mandates that all developers must meet LEED silver standards, which is the second lowest of the four standards. The standards’ order is, from lowest to highest, certified, silver, gold and platinum.

Farkas said that Eugene is beginning to catch up to Portland in its sustainability practices, but it still has a long way to go. Building a sustainable downtown is a big step, he said.

Even after the City Council chose both developers to revitalize downtown, the issue has not been resolved. Some in the community think it will take longer than originally planned to begin development.

There’s also opposition to some of the plans from businesses and other entities that occupy the buildings that would be razed or remodeled.

The Network Charter School, which serves seventhto 12th-grade students at Broadway and Willamette Street, would be required to move out of its current location under KWG’s proposal, Financial Director Andy Peara said.

"We like to give students a more hands on education," Peara said. "It is convenient to be near the bus stop and the library."

Peara also said the city has not done a good enough job of analyzing the financial impacts of the project.

"The city showed its true colors there," he said. "I think they didn’t disclose some of the financial risks of the big projects."

Councilor Mike Clark is weary of all the bickering. He is fearful that the polarization will prevent anything from happening.

"This is a rehash of what we’ve been doing for 20 years," Clark said.

Farkas said developers get discouraged too, when the people are not behind them.

"The public has to understand the risks of development," he added.

Rug merchant Oveissi, who also co-owns the building at 1 W. Broadway, is ready for action but fears that nothing will get done.

"We’ve been working on this project for 15 years," he said, adding that rising construction costs caused by delays may doom the latest effort.

"Now the developers might be wanting $200 million; soon they want $300 million and the project dies," he said.

Makyadath agrees. "It may go 20 to 30 years without anything getting done," he said. "Nobody wants that." He also emphasized the importance of a strong downtown for a sustainable city and a vibrant community.

"It’s the heart of the city," he said.

"But downtown Eugene has no heart."

Mayor Kitty Piercy's Sustainability Platform

Vanessa Van Voorhis / Photographer

Mayor Kitty Piercy says she would like to see another hotel downtown and supports development plans that include affordable housing. Piercy’s vision of the city focuses on sustainability and emphasizes a triple bottom line of people, planet and profits.

They told her not to run on a sustainability platform. They told her it would ruin her political career. Turns out, they were wrong.

Mayor Kitty Piercy, a former state legislator who was sworn into office January 2005, has staked much of her political legacy on promoting sustainability.

“You couldn’t be for protecting the environment and building a strong economy,” Piercy recalled being told by her political advisers when she decided to make sustainability a prime focus of her campaign. “I wanted to change that.”

The primary measuring stick for sustainability in Eugene comes from what Piercy calls the “triple bottom line” of environmental, social and economic sustainability. Having an environmentally sustainable city requires developers and business owners to think about limiting emissions and using sustainable business practices.

“When a new building goes up, people have to be thinking about sustainable practices,” Piercy said.

Piercy also pushes the idea of “social equity,” which calls for equal and fair access to education, social services, housing and family-wage jobs. One of her biggest fears is that Oregonians do not have access to higher education because state budget cuts have pushed up tuition to a level that is not affordable for many Oregonians.

Piercy has spent much of her time in office focusing on the economic part of her “triple bottom line” sustainability initiative, largely because as a self-described liberal, more conservative business leaders were wary of her agenda when she ran for mayor and even after she took office two years ago. She set out to prove that she meant more than just protecting the environment.

“Building an economy that made sense for Eugene has been a goal for me,” she said. Soon after her election, Piercy got to work implementing her ideas on sustainability. Just five months after taking office, she drafted the Sustainable Business Initiative. The goal of the initiative “is to identify, support, and propose deliberate steps that, by 2020, can make Eugene one of the nation’s most sustainable mid-size communities.”

The first person to approach Piercy about forming a task force was Rusty Rexius, co-owner of Rexius Forest Products. Piercy did not expect him to cooperate with her agenda, given the vast difference in their political ideology. She soon realized the galvanizing potential of sustainability. Rexius now is a key business leader in promoting sustainability.

“No matter where people were on the political spectrum they still want to help the livability,” Piercy said.

Rexius, along with Dave Funk, creative director and co-owner of Funk/Levis Associates, co-chaired the task force. Other members included Deborah Noble of West Wind Forest Products and Jack Roberts of Lane Metro Partnership.

Establishing an Office of Sustainability was one of the key recommendations to come out of the Sustainable Business Task Force.

One area where Piercy struggles is her own “carbon footprint.” She has challenged all citizens to take her “sustainability challenge,” which advocates ways people can reduce the creation of greenhouse gases that cause global warming.

Driving less, buying local products and taking other simple actions can reduce these emissions. But Piercy, who flies often as part of her mayoral duties, admits she’s had a hard time offsetting those jet flight emissions.

“I’m not a sterling example of reduced carbon emissions,” she said. “But I’m trying to lead by example.”