Developer envisions Goodpasture project.

Byline: The Register-Guard

Portland developer Brent Keys says he's not going to jam 1,176 apartment units on the 23 acres of riverfront property along Goodpasture Island Road that he bought from PeaceHealth last May - as opponents of the project have been saying he could.

Keys said he won't shoehorn 35 buildings onto the property, and he's not planning five-story structures, which is the maximum height he would be allowed to build if he succeeds in changing the zoning to allow the high density development allowed by the Eugene-Springfield Metro Plan.

It's not just aesthetics stopping him from building such a dense wall of residential buildings, he said. There are commercial reasons, too. Renters don't want those sort of cubby-hole apartments, and home buyers don't want crow's-nest condos.

"Everything's got to be marketable, you know?" Keys said, while standing in the middle of the bare field he bought for $8.75 million. "You won't see concrete buildings here. I'm not a concrete-high-rise builder. It's not what we do. We want to build stuff that the community is going to like to live in, number one. Hopefully that means it's nice to look at."

Keys said he's waiting for a thorough market analysis before he decides what exactly he'll build on the property. But he can say this much: It's likely to be a mixture of apartments, condominiums and neighborhood-level retail spaces for such uses as a corner market, an eatery or a hair salon. He plans to include transportation help for residents within his development such as Zipcars that can be reserved by the hour or day - so residents can get by with a bicycle if they wish.

The complex will include large community centers and pools and recreation facilities, he said. And the buildings will be no taller than the adjacent four story structures: One of the Willamette Oaks Retirement Center buildings and the River Island Estates condominiums.

"I have never built a product over four stories. And I will not do it here," Keys said.

This was the developer's first public appearance in Eugene since news of his large-scale project appeared in The Register-Guard in April. Keys said he couldn't return earlier phone calls from a reporter because he was bound by a confidentiality agreement with PeaceHealth. He said he signed a purchase agreement with the hospital a year ago.

Keys is a fourth-generation home builder whose family has raised single-family homes, duplexes and cottage homes in the Portland metropolitan area since 1908.

Keys and his brother, Sean, operated Keys Homes through the late 1990s. The company finished 193 homes and logged sales of about $23.8 million in 1997.

In 1998, the Keys family business was bought by Hawaii-based Schuler Homes and Sean Keys took the helm of the merged Keys & Schuler Homes Oregon operations.

A few years later, D.R. Horton swallowed Schuler homes. The merger voided the Keys brothers' non-compete pledge with Schuler and they bailed out and began working from their own development management firm: Willamette Builders Group. The Keys brothers found a new niche building multi-family housing with a mix of investor partners.

Today, the firm is launching a 432-unit apartment project in Bend at the site of the former Sun Country Mobile Home Park. Keys worked through relocation of the mobile home park residents, filed and then settled a lawsuit against the city and negotiated the maximum building heights. Construction will be under way within two months, Brent Keys said.

"I've been looking at Eugene for a while for something to do," Keys, 39, said. "I'm not a Duck, but I do come down all the time to the (football) games. I just love Eugene. I have a lot of good friends down here."

To get the PeaceHealth property, Keys said he had to present not his project, but his intentions and his style. "I know there were more well-financed groups that were bidding on this. I believe it was a relationship I was able to form with the folks at PeaceHealth. They saw we were going to do a good job for Eugene."

Keys said he has no clear timeline for the Eugene project except to say he "certainly hopes" it will be competed by 2015. With the sluggishness in the housing market, there's no need to hurry, he said.

Not every project the Keys brothers launches comes to fruition.

A deal the brothers were trying to do in Bend last year collapsed after neighbors objected to plans to build 134 condominiums next to an established neighborhood. To go forward would have meant a trip to the state's Land Use Board of Appeal.

"We walked away," Brent Keys said. "We have some issues on some sites with neighbors and we go sit down and meet with them. If it doesn't work out, it doesn't work out."

"I can't come in and say, `Here's what we're doing. We're going to put up the concrete buildings and this and thate_SSRq - which nobody would buy. It's a public process. Our goal is to work with the public,'" he said.

To succeed at the Eugene property, Keys may have to get past the owner of the adjacent Willamette Oaks retirement center and the 180 residents who live there. Willamette Oaks owner Bill Reeve rallied opposition to Keys' move last month to raise the parcel's zoning from medium to high density to match the parcel's high density Eugene-Springfield Metro Plan designation

A hearings officer is scheduled to rule Aug. 7 on the Keys' request to change the zoning. The hearings officer is likely to give them a green light - but Reeve has been adamant that he will appeal.

Reeve markets his Willamette Oaks center as an upscale retirement center in a pastoral location along the Willamette River, next to the Delta Ponds wetland conservation area. Reeve built the retirement center in partnership with PeaceHealth in 1986. He bought the hospital's share in 1998 for $1.3 million, county records show.

PeaceHealth, in fact, launched the process to rezone the property to high-density residential in 2004 but dropped its plan some months later.

The hospital found out that any development on the property first would require a zone change to match the land use designation, said Philip Farrington, PeaceHealth's director of land use planning.

PeaceHealth officials initially thought that if the hospital changed the zoning designation, the land would be more valuable at the time of sale.

"We just decided we'd let somebody else go through that zone change process themselves," Farrington said. "It's an expense and it's time and we, of course, had other things that we were working on."

PeaceHealth was asking for the highest residential density designation, which would have allowed 112 units per acre and buildings up to 120 feet tall, which could be 12 or more stories.

The Keys brothers are asking for a lesser degree of density - called limited high density - that allows 56 housing units per acre in buildings as tall as five stories. "Right down the middle of the fairway is our goal," Keys said.

But a public pledge isn't strong enough to quell the worries of some Willamette Oaks residents.

"Four stories is pretty high and we've already got Willamette Oaks in the area. If the city allows this all over the outlying areas we're not going to be a beautiful city any more," said Saul Toobert, retired UO professor and retirement center resident.

It's part of a problematic pattern of development, he said. The new, four-story Crescent Village in north Eugene, for example, "has obliterated the view of the Crescent Hills," he said.

Toobert said he'd have to see Keys' pledge in writing, but even then he could sell the property to someone with plans for higher-density development.

Reeve said he also wants to see plans. "I have had to take a defensive posture because I have absolutely no idea what he intends to do. Obviously, he has chosen not to share with anyone outside his organization. I don't have the information I need to determine what my view is until I understand what's going on - that's a very simple thing," Reeve said.

Keys, meanwhile, has hired the Ulum Group and launched a public relations offensive. He's also arranged to meet face-to-face with Reeve. And he said he'll present his plans, complete with renderings, for public discussion when the market study is completed.

"I don't know why they're suspicious," he said. "If they'd called me upfront and said, `Here's our concerns, we want to make sure you're addressing our concerns through the process,e_SSRq we would have loved to sit down and work that out up front with them."

Development Report appears in Tuesday's Register-Guard.