With subsidized housing, people who don’t have as much economic mobility can choose where they want to live.
Presenter: In 2025, Eugene city planners suggested removing the term residential character from city code, saying it’s from ‘a different era.’ But a longtime advocate for subsidized housing says Eugene shouldn’t follow Robert Moses in destroying communities of place. Instead, he says, vibrant cities are actually doing the opposite, and nurturing the diversity of their neighborhoods. Jefferson Westside neighbor Paul Conte:
Paul Conte: Every planning director that we worked with in the late ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s knew that neighborhoods were the key to making downtown not collapse, that our close-in neighborhoods were—I won’t say they revered neighborhoods—but they valued the neighborhoods and they wanted to make the neighborhood strong, because there was a lot of decline.
Neighborhoods are a community of place. There are other types of communities. There are work communities, there are cultural communities, there are communities of interest. One term you hear is action communities, fighting for environmental justice or whatever…