Item B: Neighborhood Livability Working Group Report

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Neighborhood Livability Working Group "Our historical home has no driveway or garage, so we are forced to park on the street. We are old, so it's becoming more difficult to walk distances with groceries and other packages. " 3. Zoning Violations a. Code Violations for Profit R-1 zoned areas in close proximity to the UO are being compromised by owners wanting to profit from additional units. Though Eugene Code allows for ADU's & SDU's only when the owner occupies one of the units on the lot, the Code is frequently flouted and not enforced with effective penalties. For example, some non-duplex lots have three or more buildings on the property rented separately. The R-1 areas are degraded with quasi-legal buildings which strain the current infrastructure and quality of R-1 (e.g., pricing out owner occupancy in favor of illegal infill, alley-ways not designed to handle day-to-day traffic, increased automobile traffic, increased density, decreased open-space between houses for gardening & usual R-1 spacing, solar set-back issues, incompatible design). "I have lived in the Amazon neighborhood since 1991 and have made substantial investments in the neighborhood as a landlord (who cares for and maintains properties). There are a multitude of instances of construction in our neighborhood that have in essence turned our neighborhood into R-2 zoning with some moves into R-3. Without effective enforcement, we will continue to have permitted and non-permitted non-compliance creating an uneven zoning in our neighborhood." "In the low-density residential, developers are building barn-sized houses clearly with the intent to circumvent the allowed maximum size of a dwelling unit, so they can rent these large structures out to six or more renters per single-family property. These buildings block out light and views for next-door properties and concentrate transient residents in a neighborhood built with infrastructure for single-family homes. The zoning code should better regulate building mass and scale; the city should assertively enforce its building code for number of unrelated people residing in a dwelling unit. In the high-density residential, developers are building apartment buildings that are larger than any existing buildings, that fill the entire lot within the property lines, and that extend skyward so close to each other that they wall off any view of the sky and the natural surroundings for residents on the other side of the street or for pedestrians. The city should amend the land use code to regulate building mass and scale so as to require stepped back upper floors (stepped back from the street), and to incentivize development that has upper stories that are not as wide as lower stories so as to allow glimpses of the sky behind the buildings." b. Need for transition between R-11 & Higher Density Zoning and design standards for new buildings in R- 11 Many neighbors are seeing the development of housing that is profitable for the investor but not for the long-term livability of the neighborhood. Neighboring houses are affected by shoddy construction and massive height differentials. like W. University (another lovely historic residential neighborhood that is now being ruined by the removal of single family houses in favor of out-of-scale multi- -family NOW. The homes on this street are an eyesore and nuisance to those who live near them. Multi-family here, but no further east, would provide a buffer to the R-1 nearby. 48 Page