With many run-down apartment complexes and rental houses, livability issues in the West University neighborhood have raised concerns and some have speculated that this could be part of the reason for high crime rates and riotous activities in the area.
To help prevent future problems and brainstorm ideas to improve living, a task force of community members and University officials met Thursday to discuss strategies to improve the West University neighborhood.
ASUO Community Outreach Coordinator Jesse Harding said the task force made several suggestions for short-term and long-term goals for upgrading the area.
He said one short-term goal included having a community involvement day, where University students could clean the neighborhood and repair its parks.
Forming a database with names and addresses of the neighborhood’s permanent residents to form, perhaps, a neighborhood association was another short-term goal, Harding said.
“We just want to build more community involvement from everyone,” he said.
As for long-term goals, members of the group expressed concerns about the neighborhood’s lighting, especially on 14th Avenue, Associate Vice President for Institutional Affairs Jan Oliver said.
She said poor street lighting can increase crime such as theft and vandalism or cause riotous activities because darkness often leads people to think they’re anonymous.
The task force also talked about the need to upgrade housing standards in the neighborhood as a long-term goal. The task force suggested that if housing were improved, it would change the overall environment of the neighborhood and could help to reduce crime and riotous activities, Oliver said.
According to an apartment report done by the Eugene appraisal firm Duncan & Brown, the campus area currently has a vacancy rate of 2 percent. Last fall, the vacancy rate was about 0.78 percent.
The report found that property managers in Springfield and other Eugene neighborhoods have reported that the number of units rented to student tenants has increased. This is primarily true in the neighborhood near Autzen Stadium, which contains 1,450 units and is about 75 percent student-occupied.
“Clearly many students do not want to live (in the West University neighborhood), and something needs to be done,” Oliver said.
Harding, who said some students don’t want to live in the neighborhood because many places are dilapidated, compared the houses to sheds with slanted roofs.
“I think the vacancy rates in this area are because the places are so bad, run-down and the rent is so high that no one is willing to live there,” Harding said.
University senior Aarti Tanna, who has lived in the West University neighborhood for two years, said she thinks it’s hard for students to find nice housing close to campus. But Tanna said she does not see a correlation between improving housing standards, riotous activities and crime, because it’s not as if improving the area will chase out the people causing the problems.
“It’s mostly students who live there, and they will still be there,” she said.
Contact the reporter
at [email protected].