A step up for student housing.

Byline: Scott Maben The Register-Guard

The paint is peeling off the old house at 1626 Hilyard St. Several windows shattered by vandals are boarded up. The kitchen sorely needs updating, and the wood floors could use a good sanding.

And the bathrooms? Don't even go there.

On the living room wall is scrawled a quote from Denis Diderot, the 18th century French writer and philosopher: "Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest."

Yes, college students lived here. And they will again, after the new owner completes a much-needed makeover.

"Most of this stuff to me is cosmetic," Curt Large said as he surveyed the renovation work he will tackle this summer in the neighborhood just west of the University of Oregon campus.

Large, a general contractor in Eugene and owner of Evergreen Roofing of Oregon, recently paid $1.95 million for 12 run-down rental houses, including the 70-year-old house on Hilyard. Most of them are in the West University neighborhood, where students occupy some of the oldest and, in a few cases, shabbiest housing in the city.

"I walk into a place like this and think, "How can anyone live this way?' " Large said.

Then he remembers his own years at the UO and how students tend to overlook certain shortcomings, he said.

Large plans to fix up four of the houses over the next two years and rent them out, and sell another four to buyers with similar intentions to fix them up. The remaining four are too dilapidated to save or too small for the lots they sit on, he said, so he'll raze them and rebuild multi-unit complexes.

"The true value is in the property," he said. "A number of them could have small apartments built on them. It's best to level them out and build new."

What Large is doing is echoed up and down the streets of this neighborhood. Rental owners and builders, aided by favorable interest rates and an active real estate market, are upgrading rentals or building new multi-unit complexes with students in mind.

"It's all over the place," said designer and builder Gordon Anslow, whose firm Anslow and Degeneault has finished about a dozen student housing projects in the West University neighborhood with "a bunch more on the boards."

Anslow, who used to live in the West University neighborhood, said there's "tons" of home improvements happening there.

"It's been really intense in the last few years," he said. "Some of the worst of the worst is long gone."

His company's recent developments include Mallard Park, a 13-unit complex completed in January at the corner of Patterson Street and 17th Avenue. Just up the street, between Alder and Hilyard, the firm is building a triplex that replaces an old house that was in "really bad shape," Anslow said.

"There is some economic science behind slum lords," he said. "There is a point at which houses have so many problems that people decide they're just going to milk this and not put any money into it."

When old rentals reach the end of their useful lives, the price is right for the kind of redevelopment that he does.

"They are the only ones really that pencil out," Anslow said. "These new things are typically replacing the worst out there."

Large bought properties formerly owned by Dr. Fred Rankin, a longtime rental owner who died in February 2004. Doc Rankin, as he was known, had a reputation as a miser when it came to maintaining his rental homes.

In 2002, Rankin told The Register-Guard that there is little point in making improvements to student housing because they quickly get mistreated.

"You can fix a house up, but if you rent houses you know it doesn't do much good because the kids mostly want a place to chase women and drink beer and sleep at night," he said. "When you rent stuff, it's going to get torn up all the time. That's the way it is."

Rankin's philosophy was to provide the lowest rent possible, which certainly appealed to students on tight budgets, said Large, whose company repaired several of the doctor's roofs over the years.

But the homes suffered neglect: dry rot, deteriorated siding, shot roofs, cracked foundations.

"He definitely let things go," Large said. "Every unit has issues."

Homes on the west side of campus were built around World War II and first occupied by university faculty members and families. By the 1980s, much of the area had been converted to student rentals, with investors picking up houses for as little as $10,000, Anslow said.

Many of the structures have reached the age of needing major work, Large said. And he believes new owners are more apt to spend the money to do it.

"I think for a lot of these non-owner-occupied places it's often tough to get the people to do the upgrades," he said. "They're out of town, they're going to just do the minimum. But the people who recently invested in these homes, those are the ones who are bringing the standard up a bit."

That has a ripple effect on the entire area, Anslow said. "As you get more and more units getting built, you have people with older houses who realize if they want to keep them rented they need to fix them up," he said. "When you get a lot of new apartments, the first things not to fill up are the funkiest old houses."

Anslow also said that he believes that, as more new housing replaces older stock, more students will return to the neighborhood from rentals north of campus, across the Willamette River.

"All students would like to be near the university," he said.