Let's set price, maybe fix up '60s-era place.

Byline: Bob Welch / The Register-Guard

I was driving into Eugene across the Harlow Street overpass when I saw it:

ENTERING EUGENE

For Rent

Huh? What happened? Did the state landlord kick us out for trashing the place? (I thought our damage deposit took care of replacing those anarchist-broken windows years ago.) Or given Eugene's quirkiness, had I fallen into some sort of "Twilight Zone" vortex and, like in that 1965 Jonathan King song, was about to find "everyone's gone to the moon"?

Naw. Somebody, of course, had simply nailed a house "For Rent" sign beneath the "Entering Eugene" sign. But it got me thinking about what would happen if Eugene were, indeed, put up for rent.

For starters, who would rent us? And why?

Eugene, after all, isn't everybody's cup of herbal tea. To our credit, even if we're slouching toward Anywhere USA with our Blockbuster/Wal-Mart/McDonald's clusters, we're not like anyplace else, as next week's Eugene Celebration Pajama Party & Slugfest will undoubtedly attest.

But we are an acquired taste. We're that house on the block that causes cars to slow down and their drivers to say either "Wow, there's a cool place!" or "Whoa, there's a purple house with hubcap garden art." We'd need to target the "cool-place" type, the person who sees the virtues amid our vices.

Obviously, we'd need to do some de-cluttering before placing the classified ad in the newspaper. We've gotten a head start by dismantling the old Agripac plant, which will be replaced by a federal courthouse - where the first case probably will be a lawsuit filed against the feds for having no wheelchair ramps.

We'd need to consider remodeling northwest Eugene. For tire-kickers coming in from the airport, the industrial-oriented entryway won't score us any points - unless the person has a fetish for billboards, railroad tracks and stacks of 2-by-4s.

Once ready to show the place, we'd need to determine a price. (Although, really, what price can you put on a community that, just this week, was named by Sports Illustrated as the seventh-best college town in America?)

Eugene's real-market value is $10.7 billion, according to the county assessor's office. Assuming you might pay, oh, $1,200 a month to rent a $200,000 house, I think we'd be looking at asking $63.7 million a month in rent for Eugene.

That, obviously, is going to scare away a few folks. Of course, you'd have to charge first and last month's rent ($127.4 million). And probably require a major damage deposit ($100 million) to discourage oppressed students from lighting campus area neighborhoods on fire to protest future social injustices such as the inevitable breakup of Ben Affleck and J Lo.

We might consider seeking one wealthy individual with a built-in affinity for Eugene. Nike's Phil Knight comes to mind but, then, he's not really a rental sort of guy is he?

Or we'd need to go for a group deal - say, the 20,000 University of Oregon students each kicking in $31,850 a month. But the thought of a 36-square-mile "Animal House," complete with blocklong food fights, hardly warms a landlord's heart.

In either case, what you really need is a good classified ad, something like:

"For rent: Charming 141-year-old fixer-upper located in the center of the desirable southern Willamette Valley. Needs work but great potential. If you love one-way streets and traffic calmers, this is heaven! Within walking distance of the '60s. Open ceiling design allows intimate relationship with nature's elements, particularly November-May. Remodeled downtown has the latest in urban design: streets! Nonsmoking pets OK. Comes complete with nationally respected Bach Festival, primo performing arts center, 98 miles of bikeways, 2,200 acres of park lands, one Division I university, three colleges, two buttes, two rivers and a much-maligned millrace."

Hey, let's just keep it.