Eugene Mayor Kaarin Knudson reflects on protests, housing and other city challenges

When Kaarin Knudson became mayor of Eugene in January 2025, her biggest problems were building more housing, making roads safer and closing the city’s $11.5-million budget gap. Her office has since balanced the city’s budget, built hundreds of new housing units and zeroed in on the most pressing transportation safety issues.

But aggressive immigration enforcement and uncertainty at the federal level have been a growing concern for her constituents. That came to a head most recently on Friday, after protests against the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown escalated in downtown Eugene, leading city police to declare a riot. Federal agents deployed tear gas on protesters that evening.

Mayor Knudson joined OPB’s “Think Out Loud” to talk about the recent protests in Eugene and reflect on her first year in office. The following are highlights from the conversation, edited for brevity and clarity.

The mayor defended Eugene police’s response to the protest on Friday

“It was a really fantastic, beautiful, powerful, peaceful protest in our city center. We had a lot of businesses in Eugene and Springfield and adjacent communities closing or dedicating their revenues that day in a show of solidarity, and you know it’s very clear that there is no place in our community for reckless federal agencies, and that ICE needs to get out.

“But what happened on Friday night was that essentially some windows were broken on the ground floor of our federal building. … Eugene police needed to step in [and] form a barrier essentially between that crowd and the federal agents who were inside that building. … The declaration of a riot occurred in that moment.

“Unfortunately, stepping across that line and the breaking of those windows really changed that circumstance. And we have to be focused on protecting people and de-escalating circumstances even when we have others engaged who are not seeking de-escalation.”

Eugene has built more housing, but affordability remains an obstacle

“We have about 4,600 people in Lane County within our dashboard and data for people who are experiencing homelessness. We know that that experience is created by there being not enough housing that is affordable to people and not nearly enough vacancies within the existing housing market.

“We permitted 413 units of new affordable housing last year, and almost 300 of those had support from our city’s Affordable Housing Trust Fund. The city council has invested about $7.5 million in a new affordable housing building that will be about 75 units and is immediately adjacent to City Hall in our downtown riverfront redevelopment area. … We opened another 130 units of market-rate housing right across another street from City Hall. … We have another almost 400 units of riverfront housing that are essentially in the queue. … We have to actually continue to even push harder on this. [The] federal context has not made that easy. Nothing has gotten better with costs of input to housing. Nothing has gotten better with interest rates or certainty in the economy.”

The mayor is prioritizing two areas to boost transportation safety

“There are two areas where in this coming year we really need to direct our energy in a new spirit of collaboration. One is in West Eugene in our Bethel neighborhood and Highway 99. [Highway 99] really needs to be a much safer multimodal connection through the community. It connects a lot of important locations and hubs within West Eugene, so that area has to be a focus.

“The other area of work that has been heavy on my mind, especially in this past week and a half, is the interface between the University of Oregon, our main campus here in Eugene, and the gateway to our city along Franklin Boulevard and the entirety of that area. … A week and a half ago, [we] had an absolute tragedy occur where a University of Oregon PhD student, wonderful beloved member of our community, was killed while riding his bike. And that should not happen. It’s a tragedy, and it weighs heavily on me, and I think on everyone in our community who is looking at a transportation system that’s been built over 100 years and realizing that we have a lot to retrofit to make it safer and more relevant to the 21st century.”

Eugene balanced its budget, but the next years will be tough

“We were able to essentially restructure some things with our stormwater fees and our parks funding that allowed for a very small increment of increase to our local stormwater fee, which is something that was already in place, and then we made about 50% of the cuts on top of the other reductions that we’d made.

“For anyone who’s paying attention, the next couple of years are harder. We already knew that the revenue projections two years out were not as positive as the difficult ones we were looking at just last year and the year before.

“We know that our state now is in a completely different circumstance, much of that the responsibility of the disinvestment from this federal government and this administration. … There will be a lot of responsibility on public officials and community leaders to communicate broadly about the challenges and the trade-offs that we’re facing.”

Eugene Mayor Kaarin Knudson spoke to “Think Out Loud” host Dave Miller. Click play to listen to the full conversation:

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. When Kaarin Knudson became the mayor of Oregon’s third largest city last year, her plan was to revitalize downtown Eugene, build more housing and shrink the city’s roughly $11 million shortfall for its two-year budget. Those goalposts remain. But the year has been overshadowed, to some extent, by the federal government’s actions, especially the militarized surge in immigration enforcement.

Kaarin Knudson joins us now to talk about her first year as mayor and the road ahead. It’s good to have you back on the show.

Kaarin Knudson: Hi, Dave. It’s great to be with you. Thanks.

Miller: How would you describe your learning curve going from academia and the private sector to running city government in Eugene?

Knudson: Oh wow, some students at the University of Oregon were just asking me about this last night and this morning. I would say that my path into public service is absolutely informed by my work in the private sector and the public sector, and also in education. It’s a time, I would say, right now when it’s really important for our mayors to come with a lot of relevant skills to the work of city building, community building and education. Like, just being able to create the space for learning. And these are all things that I’m passionate about.

So it’s a huge pleasure and responsibility to be the mayor of Eugene. While I could not have imagined that my professional path was going to lead me to this place, I am really grateful for the opportunity to serve, especially right now.

Miller: What do you wish you had known a year ago when you started?

Knudson: Things I wish I would have known. Well, I think all cities across this country – and I sometimes have a chance to remind people, 80% of Americans live in our cities – I think a lot of cities were quite concerned about the trajectory that our country looked to be headed on a year ago. Certainly we saw that there was a playbook that our federal government, our Executive Branch, had for the work ahead. I’m very driven by evidence. I love connection with people and I’m a very heart-led person, but I love data and evidence, and I try to pay attention in the world.

I think a lot of people did not believe some of what was thought to be the possible worst of what might happen with this administration. And unfortunately, we are living through some of those really present consequences in our local communities every day. There’s a lot that goes into this work. It is a round-the-clock responsibility, and I’m grateful to have a really amazing team and a really incredible community in Eugene. But there are ways that it would have been hard to imagine the circumstances that we all find ourselves in today in most American cities.

Miller: I want to come back to these huge federal questions, but there are a ton of local, regional and statewide issues that you’re dealing with as a mayor. So let’s start there. When you took office, the city was facing an $11.5 million gap for the upcoming biennium, the two-year budget cycle that you’re now in. Where does the budget stand right now?

Knudson: Well, our budget, we balanced it. That process, which was waiting for me to tackle as I stepped into the office, was one of those things you wish you didn’t have to start with. But I think all mayors also know, in the state of Oregon, that local government doesn’t have the resources and the funding that we need in order to meet our community’s needs. This is an ongoing challenge in our state.

What we were able to do in Eugene was really recommit to our value of partnership and collaboration with our community. So what we were able to do last spring was essentially go through a really difficult process of balancing our budget, but maintaining access to the core community services that people here really let us know very clearly were a part of the extraordinary life that we have and the quality of life we have in Eugene.

I think also what was important in that process was our business community’s willingness, leaders within that community, their willingness, to step forward and commit to partnership. What we were able to do this last six months was essentially have a committee of technical advisors dive deep into our city’s budget and finances, and the structure of public budgets and city work, and help us to see where there might be opportunities, but also how we could bring renewed energy to economic development efforts in our community.

That, to me, was a great showing of the best of Eugene in the sense that we have a very skilled public sector and expertise that’s willing to just open the spreadsheets, open the books and have an open conversation. Also, we have members of our business community who are willing to dedicate the time and attention that’s required to really do something with that information because it takes a lot to understand the city’s work.

So we balanced our budget last year. We were able to essentially restructure some things with our stormwater fees and our parks funding that allowed for a very small increment of increase to our local stormwater fee, which is something that was already in place. Then we made about 50% of the cuts on top of the other reductions that we’d made and then also planned for this engagement that’s going to give us stability into the future.

Miller: Do you see more cuts though, likely in the next year and a half?

Knudson: I’ve been saying one of the reasons I was so committed to our engagement work in this past year is that, for anyone who’s paying attention, the next couple of years are harder. We already knew that the revenue projections two years out were not as positive as the difficult ones we were looking at just last year and the year before. We know that our state now is in a completely different circumstance, much of that the responsibility of the disinvestment from this federal government and this administration.

So cities are the places where the rubber meets the road. We are the touchpoint for individuals and households. We want to be the places where people get to build their dreams and imagine for their futures and for their children’s futures. We’re going to need a lot of people working towards innovative solutions, creative solutions and new partnerships to just be able to keep our ship stable.

But what I’m really encouraged by and what I see across the community of Eugene is that that’s actually a strength of ours. We have a lot of people here who are very creative, very given to collaboration, and wanting to work a problem and find solutions. We’re just going to lean on that strength in this work, but I have zero expectation that it will be easy. There will be a lot of responsibility on public officials and community leaders to communicate broadly about the challenges and the tradeoffs that we’re facing.

Miller: I want to turn to housing, one of your big priorities. We talked last year, soon after you took office. I want to play a short excerpt from that interview. This is part of what you said when I asked for just a sense of the overall housing picture in Eugene:

Knudson [recording]: It’s pretty tough. I mean, we have a circumstance where about 45% of our community is cost burdened by their housing and struggling to make ends meet as a result of that. And we also have the unfortunate distinction of still being at the top of the list of per capita rates of homelessness in the nation. We’re the center of a county that is right up with the other top four counties in terms of our overall rate of homelessness. And that puts particular pressure on the City of Eugene as our population center, to make sure that people have the shelter and the long-term housing solutions that they need to build a life here.

Miller: How much of what you said a year ago is still the case?

Knudson: A lot of that is still absolutely the case. We still have a condition where far too many of our community members are struggling with affordability, broadly. And we have a circumstance where far too many people are cost burdened by their housing. A significant number of our renters, as is the case in many cities, are cost burdened by their housing. We know that the high instance of homelessness that exists citywide, and in the City of Eugene and the City of Portland, same challenges.

We have about 4,600 people in Lane County within our dashboard and data for people who are experiencing homelessness. We know that that experience is created by there being not enough housing that is affordable to people and not nearly enough vacancies within the existing housing market. That’s driven out of data and research and I try to stay very focused on the fact that those are the two inputs that we can directly control, related to housing.

Now, we need a lot more support related to behavioral health, our mental health system, certainly opportunities for social mobility, economic development and wage increases. Those are all absolutely true. But the experience of being homeless is largely driven out of the fact that there is very little give in our local housing market. And much of the housing that is available also is not accessible to average incomes. So the average cost of a unit of housing [is] way out of alignment with average incomes.

This last year, I’m really proud of the way that we have continued to work all around the clock on housing supply needs and affordability in our community. We permitted 413 units of new affordable housing last year, and almost 300 of those had support from our city’s Affordable Housing Trust Fund. The city council has invested about $7.5 million in a new affordable housing building that will be about 75 units, and is immediately adjacent to City Hall in our Downtown Riverfront Redevelopment area. That’s an important partnership with our county housing authority, Homes for Good. We opened another 130 units of market rate housing right across another street from City Hall. I love the vitality that has come to this neighborhood from just having more neighbors. That’s the second new residential project completed as a part of Eugene’s Downtown Riverfront Redevelopment. Then, we have another almost 400 units of riverfront housing that are essentially in the queue, other projects that our city council and urban renewal agency have supported.

So we’re doing the work on the housing production front and we’re supporting new moderate income housing in downtown with a couple of key projects. One that will be our first multi-unit property tax exemption project with a workforce housing requirement. That will be built immediately adjacent to our downtown transit center. So a great opportunity for people to really have an affordable quality of life between the combination of transit and bicycle infrastructure, and also affordable housing, housing that’s affordable to median wages.

And then the ongoing work of just stitching new units of housing into our really beautiful, wonderful neighborhoods. So missing middle housing, small cottage clusters, really innovative work through our nonprofit partners who do essentially community land trust housing and housing for people transitioning out of homelessness, or trying to avoid the experience of homelessness. We’ve got a lot of different forces acting on this problem and I’m grateful for every one of those efforts. But we have to actually continue to even push harder on this.

Federal context has not made that easy. Nothing has gotten better with costs of input to housing. Nothing has gotten better with interest rates or certainty in the economy. Those are enormous headwinds for anyone who’s trying to build housing, but we just have to keep working on it and leaning into this challenge because it’s a focus of what our community needs. As a mayor, I am very focused on continuing to make progress and serve our local community’s needs even as we’re dealing with this maelstrom of chaos from the federal level.

Miller: You spent a good chunk of your recent State of the City speech talking about transportation. What are your goals for the coming year for transportation in Eugene?

Knudson: My goals for this coming year are that we continue to lean on the heritage in this community that sees the benefit of multimodal transportation systems. I talk with people within our business community and our manufacturing community, and they speak directly to the fact that the culture of this place and the infrastructure that has been invested in over generations is a part of why they are building here. It’s a part of why they are manufacturing locally in our community in bicycle and outdoor recreation industries. So we’re going to keep focused on that culture and see that demonstrated in the physical environment.

This past year, one of the highlights of my first year as mayor was an all-ages bike parade that took us down our city’s new High Street Bicycle Cycle Track facility. It took a long time to get that facility built. But It connects our continuous riverfront paths, which are with our Ridgeline Trail, and an enormous number of amenities, schools and cultural institutions along that corridor. We rode the entire length of that new corridor and then ended at the new Downtown Riverfront Park and playground. That type of investment in infrastructure creates the opportunity for more people to choose to bike and walk, or bike and take the bus. We have an incredible frequent transit system in our community with Lane Transit and EmX as well, so we have to stay focused on that work.

There are two areas where, in this coming year, we really need to direct our energy in a new spirit of collaboration. One is in West Eugene in our Bethel neighborhood and Highway 99, which is still what we call it. Until we stop calling it a highway, I think we’re going to be stuck in how we imagine the possibilities of that corridor. But it really needs to be a much safer multimodal connection through community. It connects a lot of important locations and hubs within West Eugene. So that area has to be a focus, that community has to be a focus. And I’m looking forward to working with our stakeholders, transportation advocacy groups, city and partners to make that happen.

The other area of work that has been heavy on my mind, especially in this past week-and-a-half, is the interface between the University of Oregon – our main campus here in Eugene – and the gateway to our city along Franklin Boulevard and the entirety of that area. Because our campus is a huge population hub within our community. It’s a lot of people biking, walking and using transit.

In the areas around it, just a week-and-a-half ago, we had an absolute tragedy occur where a University of Oregon PhD student, [a] wonderful beloved member of our community, was killed while riding his bike – and that should not happen. Shouldn’t happen, shouldn’t have happened. It’s a tragedy. And it weighs heavily on me and on everyone in our community who is looking at a transportation system that’s been built over 100 years and realizing that we have a lot to retrofit to make it safer and more relevant to the 21st century. But we have to also focus on some of these areas that need intervention sooner rather than later.

So that university area, what I hope can be a lot of people partnering and highly engaged around the safety measures and improvements that we need in that area, both infrastructure changes and accountability; changes in how we are holding people accountable for speeding and reckless driving, not obeying basic traffic laws. We’ve got to stop that as individuals, but there’s other work that we can do.

Miller: We only have a few minutes left. I want to turn now to protests at the ICE building. What led Eugene police to declare a riot on Friday evening?

Knudson: On Friday, we had several hours from the afternoon into near sundown and even right after … It’s a really fantastic, beautiful, powerful, peaceful protest in our city center. We had a lot of businesses in Eugene, Springfield and adjacent communities closing or dedicating their revenues that day in a show of solidarity. It’s very clear that there is no place in our community for reckless federal agencies and that ICE needs to get out. We don’t need any of that kind of energy in our community. What they’re doing in our community has nothing to do with immigration enforcement and pursuing legal paths. We all know that background.

But what happened here on Friday night is that we were put, I think, into a pretty difficult position by a relatively small group of protesters who had stayed and were engaging directly with the federal building; Beating on the glass, at the windows. This is an administration that has shown us that they are not interested in restraining the use of force against American citizens, members of our communities. They seem very focused on intimidation and retaliation. I want for everyone to believe them when they show us who they are. We need to be much more strategic and responsive to that condition.

But what happened on Friday night was that, essentially, some windows were broken on the ground floor of our federal building. In the moment that that happened, that circumstance changed. It went from most of the day being a peaceful protest with hundreds of people, a lot of young people, families and elders, to a circumstance with fewer people but still enough people that it wasn’t a safe circumstance. And Eugene police needed to step in, form a barrier essentially between that crowd and the federal agents who were inside that building on the ground floor. And that was the moment, Eugene police stepping in, the declaration of a riot occurred in that moment.

Most of Friday here was a peaceful protest, an expression of constitutional rights that people in our community have. Unfortunately, stepping across that line and the breaking of those windows really changed that circumstance. We have to be focused on protecting people and de-escalating circumstances, even when we have others engaged who are not seeking de-escalation.

Miller: Mayor Knudson, thanks very much.

Knudson: Thanks so much, Dave. Take care.

Miller: You too. That’s Kaarin Knudson. She is the mayor of Eugene, now in her second year of her term.