The city of Eugene has received several noise complaints from students living near the University of Oregon campus due to ongoing construction projects near East 13th Avenue and Alder Street.
Three new apartment complexes are being constructed near East 13th and Alder, just off UO’s campus. Student housing building, The Mark at Eugene, is set to replace the former PeaceHealth Hospital, along with Chapter Alder and The Ellis, which are currently under construction. These complexes join pre-existing student housing buildings in the neighborhood, and some students have found the construction noise frustrating.
Kayley Olund, a sophomore at the University of Oregon and a resident of the Westgate Apartment, said the construction on East 13th is a major disturbance. When she applied to rent at Westgate, she was looking forward to the convenience of being near campus. When signing her lease, she said she was unaware of how inconvenient the construction would become.
“At first it was annoying, but at the start of spring term it was every day nonstop, and my roommate and I would wake up to the noise if we left our windows open,” Olund said.
Olund said her building sometimes “rattles” from the nearby construction, and that she and other residents see a “dusty haze in the air” from the crumbling cement of the PeaceHealth demolition. She said she has wondered if breathing in the dust is safe for her lung health.
“It’s just frustrating to walk to class; I’ve been delayed because of equipment in the way,” Olund said. “I’m kind of wishing (my roommate and I had) decided to leave.”
Olund said the construction noise starts between 7 a.m. and 8 a.m. daily and doesn’t end until 6 p.m. “It’s actually the worst getting woken up to it; it’s not peaceful.”
One of Westgate’s amenities is a balcony in every apartment. Olund said she has tried to go on her balcony to do homework or hang out, but the construction is too loud to enjoy. Additionally, as the weather gets warmer, there is no AC in the apartment, and Olund is left choosing between opening the windows or dealing with the heat.
According to Lindsay Selser, the communications and engagement manager for the city of Eugene Planning and Development, 11 complaints have been filed regarding the construction in the East 13th and Alder area.
When complaints are filed and their legitimacy is verified, the city’s code compliance team — which enforces rules pertaining to construction noise — reaches out to the general contractors of the responsible project to check in and educate them on the code. If uncorrected, the team may issue an Order to Correct and fines to the offending contractor, Selser said.
When the city of Eugene Planning and Development team approves construction projects, each project application comes in individually. Applications can take time to review for appeal to ensure it meets all city requirements, and there is not a strict timeline of when a project must start construction once a permit is issued.
Of the two residential housing developments currently under construction, The Ellis will be 12 stories high and located next to the Eugene Chapter apartment complex. Chapter’s second location, Chapter Alder, will be 15 stories high and located behind Dave’s Hot Chicken.
Chapter Alder was issued its construction permit in December 2025 and immediately began construction. The Ellis received its permit in June 2024 but didn’t start construction until October 2025, leading to both projects being worked on simultaneously, so close together.
“Development and more housing are very, very important for our community,” Selser said. “We know we need more housing.”
The two new high-rise apartments will bring a total of 1,071 new bedrooms to the East 13th Avenue and Alder Street area and are both projected to be completed by fall 2027.
Emma Waters • Jun 30, 2026 at 10:37 pm
Wish we had received notice from someone that the hospital project had a permit for OVERNIGHT demolition noise.
Greg Bryant • Jun 21, 2026 at 3:07 pm
I hope people understand how deeply horrible this is. The government of the City of Eugene doesn’t care about its residents. They care about development companies, and corporate landlords, backed by Wall Street. Those monsters are perfectly happy to create giant assets in neighborhoods, bulldozing houses, hospitals, and local commercial districts to build market-rate rental housing that RAISE rents in Eugene. That happens because they have oligopolized housing. They collude through systems like RealPage (the subject of countless lawsuits about price-and-vacancy-fixing, but it is apparently unstoppable) to continually push up rents, so they can borrow against the building’s asset values to build more unaffordable housing. This is not a supply-and-demand market. This is an attempt to capture the entire market, so they can do as they please and extract everything from everyone. There are 14,000 market-rate rental towers in Eugene that use RealPage, and 1,000 of those units are kept empty on purpose to maintain scarcity, so they can continue to raise rents. Developers can’t even get the loans to build unless rents are swinging upwards, so don’t expect affordability from them (unless local demand gets destroyed, which happened when the tech sector pulled out of Austin, and could happen here if the U of O goes bankrupt from their irresponsible executive profiteering). All the city codes about nature, safety, affordability, accessibility, noise, light, heat islands and sponge cities, etc. are thrown out the window when a developer with big bucks wants to ‘invest’ in your town. Any outside ‘investor’ (and many inside investors too), always spend money to build wealth-extraction machines from your community. According to RealPage’s figures, just the investment-grade units in their system are extracting $20 million a month from Eugene’s economy — which goes to Wall Street and the oligarchs. This increases local inequality, hurting the poor and the vulnerable first. Construction of this kind of expensive, deregulated housing causes homelessness, because inequality is the root cause of the housing crisis: developers either build for the rich or they build for maximum extraction, and the homeless aren’t part of their equation. And it was, of course, the deregulation of neoliberal capitalism that cause these crazy levels of inequality in the first place, constantly increasing under demands of compound growth. We need to stop the extraction and the destruction of people’s quality of life. We need to force the City and the UO need to start acting in the interests of the people.
Charlie • Jun 21, 2026 at 12:45 pm
Student enrollment is falling, but Eugene bureaucrats shilling fir developers and investors say new housing is needed. UOwe is closing two student housing complexes, but building new ones that require far higher rents?.
Why is anyone going into debt to attend this boondoggle uni??