I can provide only a short explanation that won't do justice to the failure of Eugene's "planning" culture.

City Council adopted a "refinement plan" for Whiteaker. The Whiteaker RP is unlike any other RP that I'm familiar with in Eugene. It has a progressive vision of intermingled, _compatible_, commercial and residential. It certainly didn't plan for being overrun by alcohol manufacturing plants and boozy transients (and I _don't_ mean homeless or street people, I mean bar hoppers).

But three things went wrong:

a) Some court decision weakened the legal application of RP policies.

b) The Planning Division staff swung 180 degrees from protecting and enhancing Eugene's older neighborhoods (in the 1980s) to seeing them as outmoded and needing to be "transformed."

c) The City Council failed to direct planners to update RPs to deal with unanticipated market, social and other forces.

The enlightened vision that Whiteaker community members produced in their RP will never come to be.