6/23/2013: It’s an open question as to how necessary they were, but the city of Eugene has offered a variety of subsidies for large student-type apartment buildings, around campus and downtown. The 2400 student downtown Capstone project is the big example, but other, smaller projects have added at least as much capacity.
According to Zillow, (click to see their most excellent Eugene data) rents in Eugene are well below the levels in our competitor college towns such as Boulder, Seattle, Phoenix, and LA. In contrast to hose towns, the increase in the supply has kept rents level in Eugene, despite the increase in the number of students. The new construction coming on line this fall may well lead to rent decreases.
Because parents look at the total cost of attendance, this means that UO has plenty of room to continue tuition increases, while staying competitive in the market for out-of-state students.
Yeah, keep sticking it to the students!
The big developers are here because we finally showed up on the map by having significant and prolonged international enrollment. Eugene’s subsidy was not meaningful in the change, just a waste of city resources.
International enrollment may likely be more sensitive to AAU status. I wonder if Gottfredson and Thompson have accounted for that sensitivity in their implicit plan to abandon our AAU affiliation.
Your support of out of town developers coming in to make instant profits at the expense of local taxpayers and local landlords who have provided reliable housing opportunities for students for decades and now face lower values and lower income is disgusting and shows a total dismissive attitude toward the community. These companies don’t even hire local contractors or subcontractors and take their profits from our pockets back to their home towns.
Given the quality of the older units, you mean local slum lords.
What a crass generalization. And you’re trying to justify charging $600 per bedroom to students – raising the cost rather than lowering it for students. You know who is paying that – and they are not Oregonians. UO has no interest in keeping costs low enough for Oregonians to attend – in fact they aren’t wanted.
The mupte has also been very heavily used by local apartment developers, though each individual development was smaller than capstone. The newer places are dotted all around the univ area.The capstone apartments enter the market at the higher end of quality and rent, even relative to other new developments. The effects will be felt across the rental market to some extent, but the primary effect will be to offer new options at the high end, with less effect on the low end.
Take a stroll by Capstone I would hardly call that high end and the distance from campus relative to the location of the muptes is not that great either. I suppose if they get some kind of tie in it will be like a privatized Westmorland for the international students or something.