Why are Urban Reserves important now?

Housing supply and affordability are critically important issues for our community. We are coordinating our Urban Reserves planning with the work of our Growth Monitoring program so that Urban Reserves are in place before the UGB is re-examined. Without Urban Reserves in place, state law would likely limit future UGB expansions for housing to exception areas and non-resource lands. These include properties like the airport, LCC, and rural residential lands scattered around the City. The problem is, many of these areas are already developed to some degree and have a low likelihood of redevelopment if brought into the UGB. You may remember from the UGB process that our studies showed most of these lands are extremely expensive to serve and may not meet our community’s needs. This is a key point, because if we don’t have Urban Reserves in place when there is a need to expand our UGB, then our choices will be limited to only these areas. Urban Reserves gives us additional options for smart growth and for meeting the goals of Envision Eugene if and when there is a need to expand.

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1. What are Urban Reserves?
2. Why are we planning for Urban Reserves?
3. What is the urban growth boundary (UGB)?
9. What’s the timeline?
10. Why are Urban Reserves important now?
11. Will Urban Reserves change the current Urban Growth Boundary?
12. Will this process include planning for Rural Reserves?
13. How many people are we planning for?
14. So, how large will Urban Reserves be?
16. Return to Urban Reserves Web Page