Kaarin Knudson, AIA, brings housing and sustainability focus to new mayoral role

On January 6, 2025, Kaarin Knudson, AIA, was sworn in as the 40th mayor of Eugene, Oregon, a culmination of her 20-year career as an architect, educator, and housing advocate in the Willamette Valley. 

In addition to her architectural practice and community advocacy through organizations like Better Housing Together, which she founded in 2017, Knudson is co-author of The Sustainable Urban Design Handbook, published by Routledge in 2023. She has also taught at the University of Oregon, her alma mater. 

We chatted with Knudson about her background, her hopes for her mayoral term, and her advice to other architects who may be thinking of seeking public office. 

It’s so exciting that you’ll be serving in this role. What initially interested you in architecture? I saw that your undergraduate degree was in journalism. 

My undergraduate degrees were in journalism and creative nonfiction. When I was an undergraduate, I couldn’t have known all the connections that would exist between how I understand the world of architecture and the way in which we do our work in community, tell the story about who we are. That feels like a direct connection to my early education and training. 

Journalism, interestingly, is also one of the only degree programs that has a significant component of ethics education with its work. That, also, is an area that I think is incredibly valuable just to have as a background, as a person practicing and obviously very committed to the public, the common good, and the improvement of our communities. 

Architecture was always something I was interested in as a young person. I also grew up in a family that really valued liberal arts education. I think that it’s been a strength for me, to have had the opportunity to pursue that early education and early career work, and then come back to architecture with my master’s degree and with a commitment that I wanted to be a place-based practitioner. That was a big part of my decision to come back to the Pacific Northwest and back to Eugene and to the Willamette Valley because I really love this place, and I think it’s important that we have architects who really love the places that they’re working in. As I continued my early career, both in Portland, Ore., and in the Bay Area, I hung on to the possibility that I would return to architecture if that interest remained. And it just so happened that it did. 

I was working in the Bay Area with an extraordinary organization that does grantmaking working throughout the diversity of the San Francisco Peninsula and Silicon Valley. I had an opportunity in those almost five years to see all the ways in which we are trying to support, through the public sector, the quality of life within community, the diversity of opportunity, equity of opportunity, sustainability, [and] conservation. And because of my interest in architecture, I also think that there was a natural connection I made to wanting to work upstream on the way in which we lay out the gameboard, rather than as a grant maker. That brought me, of course, to architecture, and the work that I’ve been doing in this last decade really focused on sustainable urban design. 

I wanted to chat with you about founding the housing advocacy organization Better Housing Together in 2017. What motivated you to start that group?

I had been in practice locally for a little over a decade, and what I was seeing was a real need for the community to step in and support our shared understanding of the housing crisis. Architects have a unique opportunity to help the public to clearly articulate the design problem and then propose solutions that are likely to lead to better outcomes. 

When Better Housing Together was founded in 2017, I was working on that idea in different ways and in some work that I was doing through our local AIA chapter. Really, that was about an upstream effort to help our community better understand the challenge we were facing and respond to it effectively. 

I think that the housing crisis is an interesting one because so many people presume housing to be a fixed existing condition. One of the things that I love about working with the public is the opportunity to help people see that we are designing all of this within our urban environments, and we have been over generations. 

A particular challenge like the housing crisis that we face in Eugene, and across most of our country, is the result of many different decisions made over years. And a lot of those decisions are almost invisible to the typical person or family. It was important in 2017 to organize, to be more effective, and to truly face the crisis that was building in our community. 

I was aware of it because I was looking at how our community was responding to all sorts of different proposed housing solutions: affordable housing projects, market-rate housing projects, and co-housing projects. The response to those projects was not the response of a community in crisis. The response to those projects was really fractured. It was like every project existed within a vacuum, with no connection to a larger set of concerns or a larger community stability. Each individual client or organization trying to accomplish that project was sort of fighting that fight alone. We had an opportunity to do something very different. 

What we did through Better Housing Together was to organize a collective impact effort to say, “We want to work collaboratively to increase housing affordability, diversity, and supply. That’s what we’re going to agree to work on together.” 

We brought together a network of partners that is about 50 local businesses and organizations across the spectrum of our community, but all of which have a connection to housing as a concern and have done a lot of work to actually make progress. We’ve negotiated the creation of our affordable housing trust fund with our partners. At that public process, we negotiated Lane County’s first affordable housing action plan. We’ve done a lot of local advocacy, and I’ve been involved in statewide advising for Oregon’s middle housing laws, and those changes to re-legalize housing options. We’ve also done an enormous amount of work to support things like the creation of an approved ADU plan library, and changes to regulatory structure at a granular level that allow for the creation of quality housing. That’s work that you can only really do as an architect when it comes down to construction details and a level of regulation that the public is not going to be comfortable engaging with. 

What made you interested in running for office? 

I saw an opportunity to be of use to our community. I think that’s probably the simplest motivation. Through all the work that I have been doing related to housing advocacy and building relationships across our community, seeing what’s possible when we have those relationships in a shared set of goals. That is a reason to be hopeful about the future in our community. I think, also, knowing that so much of the city’s work relates to building a city, literally building a city that is more sustainable and more equitable. Certainly, my research and teaching in sustainable urban design is a great support to that work and to our community conversations about the decisions that we have to make. 

I’ve always cared a lot about how architects are truly building community. From my first papers in graduate school, I was reflecting on the fact that to be a holistic builder in the 21st century means to be a person who can connect relationships and points of influence within community to accomplish a shared vision. The role of the architect, I think, is profound in the work that we have ahead. We understand the built environment, but we also can understand how to work with the people that make up these communities that we love. I was encouraged by many people for about ten years to run for public office. 

I think in my professional work and the type of civic projects that I worked on and the ways in which I worked with people, I was always doing my best to demonstrate values in the work every day. I think that led to early encouragement from friends and colleagues to consider running for office. It really wasn’t until these last couple of years and being directly asked by people to consider stepping into this space. It’s not an easy time or an easy decision to step from professional practice into public service. 

There are a lot of parallels to working on complex architectural projects and working on community agreements and the work of guiding a community, but it’s a different type of work. I made it very seriously with a lot of consideration, but also with absolute confidence that I would do my very best to help us build a stronger community here. [I wanted] to contribute to the building of a place where people feel more connected and prouder of the work that we’re doing. 

How do you think that your experience as an architect has uniquely shaped you for this role? 

Certainly, it is a strength to be a generalist. I think that the way in which a design education and architectural training teaches you to interpret context and to seek a diversity of solutions that deliver values and meet goals—[the mindset that] it’s possible to find many paths of success into the future. That type of thinking, I feel, is very powerful in this role. 

There are aspects to architectural training, or how certain people think about the work of an architect, that makes them very well-suited to working on cities and serving in public office, even if that’s not what they might think the profession is building them towards. I was fortunate to be able to work on a wide range of projects in my own community. Those ranged from neighborhood-scale mixed-use redevelopment projects to really tricky energy retrofits and interior renovations of civic buildings to new downtown development, new buildings in our city center, and also the master planning and public involvement work for Eugene’s Downtown Riverfront, which is a project that continues as a redevelopment project, but that I led as part of the burgeoning firm that I worked [at] in Eugene for 10 years, Raul Brook Architects. We led that master planning and public involvement process 15 years ago. 

I talk with my students about that project because it’s a good example. The timeline that it takes to actually redevelop something like 30 acres of a downtown, or on a tricky previously urbanized site with some brownfield conditions that hasn’t been inhabited by the public or been a sociable space for its entirety, in the case of our downtown riverfront. Being able to work on projects that had really significant public involvement and civic engagement components were natural fits for me as a designer. I love that kind of complexity in design processes. I know that not all architects do. There are some aspects of those kinds of projects that can seem really overwhelming. But I really love them, and I think that also being able to work on civic-scale projects in the community that I will now be the mayor of – just this incredible orientation. I’ve seen how our community works on building itself, investing in itself, and imagining itself in a lot of different ways, and I think that will be a strength as our new mayor. 

What advice would you give to other architects who might be looking to pursue public office? 

I would advise them to find a way to do it, to find a way to engage your professional expertise at a granular local level in support of your community. And that doesn’t have to be running for mayor—that could also be serving on a planning commission. It could be serving on a sustainability commission or an affordable housing trust fund. There are a lot of different places where architects’ insight into how projects work, how redevelopment works, how city networks operate, and [how] financing or funding works—that is all very valuable to community conversations. It keeps us well-oriented to the reality of the challenges we’re facing. I would absolutely encourage architects to look for ways to be engaged in systems change from the inside out. 

We oftentimes, as architects, are dealing with the end product of, you know, regulatory structure and decision-making. But when our goal is a more sustainable and more equitable future, we really need for that insight to be engaged upstream, helping to shape policies that are then more likely to successful and help us stand on those successes with future work. 

I would encourage people to just test the waters and get their feet wet in their local community. It doesn’t have to be running for a citywide elected office as a first endeavor. I could not have seen it at the time, but initiating a public interest project and carrying that essentially as a largely pro-bono effort within my small consulting firm for a number of years, that was just an expression of care for my community. That design and organizing work was needed, and there wasn’t a project or an RFP that [the] work could fit into. But that doesn’t mean the work wasn’t necessary. So even finding opportunities like that to be involved, I think, are very powerful. 

What do you hope to accomplish as mayor? 

What we will be focused on addressing is our housing and homelessness crisis, and supporting a safe and beautiful public realm, and making sure that Eugene has a sustainable, thriving, green economy. Those are the three issues: housing abundance, safe public spaces, and a healthy economy. Those are the three issues that I talk with people about all around our community. I absolutely see this work as interconnected. That, I think, is also the strength of being an architect. 

I see a lot of different paths and opportunities where we can strategically work in advancing these goals in different ways, but also in relationship to one another. When I look into the future for Eugene, I see a community that is better-connected—a community that has more sustainable transportation options, that has high-quality redevelopment that supports a really positive experience in the public realm and brings new investment and activity to our city center, that is more resilient in the face of a changing climate and what I expect to be the typical extreme weather events that will be part of our future in the 21st century. So there’s a lot to plan for on those fronts. 

Being better connected to one another’s concerns and having a sense of our shared vision for the future, that’s the beginning of being successful in all of those different areas, and in many others.