City Council, April 18th - Joint Work Session on Housing

Back in February, Eugene Weekly profiled an affordable middle housing project called the C Street Coop near downtown Springfield in the older, gridded close-in neighborhood.

Eugene Weekly, February 3rd

It's a sixplex with special sauce:

[The] home on C Street is a limited-equity cooperative (LEC), which means residents aren’t renters — they’re owners. Each of the six units has a private bedroom, a bathroom and a kitchenette, and each of its residents pays a set monthly fee to share ownership of the co-op and take on maintenance responsibilities.

Amid rising rents and an increasingly competitive housing market, the C Street Co-op offers an overlooked affordable housing model that could alter perceptions of what it means to be a homeowner. If implemented on a large scale, co-ops like C Street could provide a gateway to homeownership and wealth accumulation to people stuck at the bottom of the housing ladder, whose wages cannot keep up with rising rents.

McReynolds and the five other C Street residents share a backyard and have the freedom to landscape and renovate as they please, as long as they all agree on the details. After a $10,000 buy-in paid at move-in, each resident pays $788 a month. This covers all housing costs, including utilities, mortgage, insurance and maintenance. The six residents make up the co-op’s board and make collective decisions about everything from paying bills to security, landscaping and parking spaces.

C Street is the only affordable limited-equity co-op of its kind in the Eugene-Springfield area. But elsewhere in the country, LECs are a tried and true method for creating affordable homeownership opportunities in competitive housing markets.

The front fourplex (with duplex ADU in back)

Though it did not win an award, it was part of the recent AIA Oregon award submissions.

[T]he co-op creates six permanently affordable homeownership opportunities to folks earning just 60% of the area median income—an affordability threshold rarely achieved with ownership housing. Ownership is facilitated through a shared equity co-op, with stewardship by a community land trust which facilitates permanent affordability for the community.

The co-op is also Designed for Energy: built to a Net Zero energy standard with well-insulated 2x8 walls, triple-pane windows, and airtight construction. Add to this a ten-minute walk to downtown Springfield, and the stage has been set for a sustainable, low-carbon lifestyle.

The C Street Co-op was designed to be rigorously cost-efficient. The total project cost of $602,000 results in unit costs at less than half that of typical affordable rental housing. Further, the project required only about 10% of the subsidies of typical rental affordable housing.

On Monday, Council meets with Marion and Polk Counties, the Salem Area Mass Transit District, and the Salem-Keizer School District to talk about housing. 

Probably they'll talk about the MUHTIP, and the 990 Broadway project for which the School Board did not approved the exemption at first. The City needs to be better aligned with other taxing districts in order for the incentive to be most effective.

They'll also set the table for a "Housing Production Strategy," mandated by the Legislature and due in 2025.

Despite the eco-NIMBY urge to say that we need more greenspace, what we really have is a deficit of new housing, and our excess of greenhouse gas and driving means we can't make single-detached housing on large lots the default model for housing any more.

From the SKATS 2019 RTSP appendices
(comments in red added)

We are currently underbuilding homes
(Oregon Office of Economic Analysis)

Still nowhere near enough (Nov)

So hopefully the conversation will not just be siloed on subsidized housing for the unfortunate, but will embrace a wider sense of revision in our whole concept of housing for everybody. New and creative models like the C Street Coop deserve more consideration.