Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
I like living in Eugene. I am from San Jose CA originally which has a drier warmer climate. Very much prefer Oregon rain and greenery. This is, of course, when the state is not burning like it is right now.... I also lived in Bellingham WA for 3 years for college which I also really loved but it was time to move on after graduating. Plus the cost of living in WA is typically higher than you see in OR. I think you would like Eugene. It's a small city with enough going on not to get bored, but doesn't have the overwhelming traffic navigating the freeway system like you would have in a big metro area. I was always afraid of driving in the Bay Area, but I have no problems driving here in Eugene. Easy enough to get out into nature in any direction with just a short drive. I live in the South part of the city which is more scenic, backs up to some wooded hills. North and west part of Eugene feels a little more industrial and more of a strip mall feel. Our sister city is Springfield and the cities basically run together. In my opinion, better living in a stand alone small metro rather than just a suburb of Portland or Seattle. I moved down from Independence, OR to be closer to my job. I wouldn't have moved to Eugene if I didn't already have a good job here, but I suppose if you are retired this wouldn't really matter! Hope this helps
OP I'm a native Texan and we've lived in a few different states now outside of Texas. You might really love Eugene, but if you do come here you might want to rent at first and give it some time for the honeymoon period to wear off a bit (if it ever does) before you decide to buy. Maybe even as much as 2 years or so. You may love it or you may have trouble accepting some of the not-so-great things about living here. We used to really love it here, and we still love some aspects of it, but it has changed since the whole Occupy Wall Street thing happened several years ago. There was a certain rough element that came here at that time and it has stayed or even grown more in some areas. Recent riots haven't helped, either. And with covid and now fires there are more desperate people, break-ins, etc. We know people who have still never received unemployment because of the state's broken system. There are a lot of upset and struggling people in the area right now. A lot of people here down on their luck, currently. We are really hoping that those things improve as we get through this and people can pick themselves up again, but that is going to take time. Or, like Seattle and other cities out here that used to be wonderful magical places and now are overrun and overpriced and awful, it may just continue to get worse, though I really hope not. But then even before pandemic, protests, natural disasters, etc. being on the I-5 corridor comes with its own problems. Drugs, sex-trafficking. We also don't like how mixed the neighborhoods are (I'm not talking racially, oh my goodness, I mean types of housing... who wants to spend $500K on a home that is across or down the street from a trailer park?), we consider ourselves liberal-leaning moderates... but here we don't like quite a bit of the politics (it seems extreme left to us at times), and we don't like how air gets trapped here due to being at the south end of the Willamette Valley. But that is just us, you may really love it and those things may not be an issue for you. It is still one of the most affordable places to live along the west coast, which we do like. We have lived in CA and WA as well and those places seem crazy $$$ by comparison. So the affordability of homes here by comparison we do like, though prices are rising rapidly. However we do not like how small the lots are for the houses that are here due to the urban growth boundaries and how tricky the housing market is here in general. I feel like I'm complaining, so I'm going to stop now!
Things you might love about living here: The totally laid-back casual atmosphere. You can dress up or down - nobody cares. The local food. The local beer (maybe... if you like hops, the beer out here seems to be very hoppy...). The local wine. The local cider. The snow sports if you're into that sort of thing. The lakes - they are so clear and so blue! The fishing. The coast. The location - it is the perfect home base for day trips or long weekend getaways to amazing locations. The hiking trails, the rivers, the buttes, the parks. The library. The proliferation of down-to-earth do-gooders and lots of non-profits who love volunteers if you want to get involved with something in the community and meet cool people while helping out. And I love that for a college town as small as Eugene is, we have a surprising number of things to keep us busy, entertained, and occupied. I'm not going to say what those are right now because half the fun for us as we've been living here has been the stumbling upon such things over time, thinking we have discovered all Eugene has to offer and then out of the blue discovering there's more.
You've received a lot of great suggestions from others here. While I was reading through this thread for some reason Olympia, WA sort of popped into my mind. Have you checked that place out?
Hubs and I moved from Austin to Eugene early 2020. Yup right in the middle of the pandemic.
Hubs had lived in Austin since late 70's, me since 1998. We love Eugene. You'll find a lot of posts extolling Eugene and a lot of posts dissing Eugene.
So it really depends on what you, personally, find important.
I hated the Austin heat - summers I felt ill due to my body temp being elevated all the time. No amount of A/C fixed this. My allergies in Austin were off the charts, the mold gave me super headaches as did the cedar pollen. But the worst part was the mosquitos. I would be swarmed within seconds of stepping outside. No amount of chemical spray or protective clothing helped - I would get bites through my jeans. And I love to garden. And no, winter months didn't help.
Moving to Eugene I've maybe seen two mosquitos. So now I get to go outside instead of fleeing from the house to the car. I get to walk my neighborhood or in parks. I have a huge garden that I can actually work in.
There are allergens here - the grass pollen, so far, doesn't bother me. The mold that folks talk about is almost nonexistent and compared to Austin? There is no comparison.
It's cool here. I don't get that sicky overheated feeling.
And the rain that folks talk about? Well with climate change that's changing. The weather patterns are making things a bit hotter and drier. Yes, there is a lot of rain, with the dry season being summertime.
The food here is far different than Austin. No Mexican food to speak of but lots of farmer's markets and healthy stuff. Locally grown lettuce doesn't taste bitter. Market of Choice is the Whole Foods corollary and there are other natural food choices as well as the traditional supermarkets. You won't find an HEB Plus equivalent.
What I miss? I miss Hill Country Weavers and Chuy's
What's new to me? Insane craft brewing industry. Like hundreds of little microbrewers, micro distillers. Marijuana is legal here and while I've never been a big fan, hubs is a happy guy. Crazy amount of semi-urban parks and wilderness areas a few minutes away. Water. Tall trees, like really tall. Fall color and spring here is full of flowers. Every yard seems to have a flowering rhododendron and a Japanese maple.
Many medium sized towns in Oregon will probably exhibit similar characteristics. Some will have a university, some won't. Some will have more "culture," some less.
Regarding homeless. There is a sizeable homeless population and the Eugene City has a ok/not-ok attitude. Sometimes camping in the city parks is tolerated, sometimes there's a massive clear out. Sometimes campers on the street is ok, sometimes not. There are mini-shelters, shelters, and some outreach but like most places lack of funding drives the efficacy of response. As with nearly all urban areas, homeless people exist, panhandlers exist.
In your shoes, I think I would look around the edges of Portland. And I would also explore the Puget Sound region of WA. I think for someone who isn't from Oregon and didn't go to the UO that Eugene would get kind of parochial after a while. It is a college town and all the Duck stuff would get tiresome after a while. Kind of like living in College Station and having no connection to A&M. Well, maybe not quite that extreme, but almost. I'd check out places like Beaverton, Wilsonville, Portland west hills, Vancouver WA, Camas WA, and other towns around Portland as well. Kind of depends on your budget.
I expect there are other locals here who will pipe up although this forum is pretty quiet. Who knows, it might be exactly what you are looking for.
My son went to grad school at U of O and while he enjoyed living there while he was in school, he moved to Portland as soon as he graduated. Of course, you can't compare the two in the sense that Portland is so much larger; with that comes advantages and disadvantages. But you are correct that Eugene revolves so much around the University, and he felt that was already getting a bit old by the time he left. Others might find that a positive, of course - especially if employed by the University.
I agree about checking out some Puget Sound towns and cities in WA. I live in one and would recommend checking them out, too. I'm having friends over for drinks and snacks later this afternoon and one couple emailed me yesterday asking if we should bail "because of the heat." It's forecast to be 86, which is slightly warm for this time of year, but not very humid. To me that's a perfectly wonderful summer temperature. We do get the occasional heat wave where it gets up to the high 90s, and a very few times in the 12 years I've lived here, it's actually surpassed 100, but that's not that common. A lot of my neighbors don't have a/c and get by with fans. I will say, though, that recent years have been trending warmer and in 2021 after one of the heat waves, my a/c and furnace tech who was doing a routine maintenance for me said they had 1500 calls the week after that for people interested in installing air conditioning. Honestly, I hardly use it and if my house had not come with it, I might not have bothered to put it in.
Besides the nice summer temps, it's not that cold in the winter and snow is infrequent. Yes, it rains a lot, but that's what keeps it green, and western WA and the PDX area are about the only places on the west coast that rarely suffer from appreciable drought.
If you can handle the rain, it's a pretty easy climate to live in. And you can always head to the rainshadow of the Olympic Peninsula if you can't.
Eugene's not as rainy as the OP might imagine, anymore, Weather events such as hurricanes and the recent spate of storms in California make headline news, but the drastic decline in rainfall here isn't seen as "weather" and doesn't get reported much. The lack of rain is a case of nothing happening, and news sources would rather report "something". Meanwhile, chirpy weather reporters happily forecast more sunny days.
Compared with the thirty years from 1980 - 1910, average annual precipitation from 1991 - 2020 declined by more than 10%, to about 41 inches annually. Forty inches of rain per year still sounds like a decent quota, but here's the problem: Over those years, we see not a steady average, by which the rain was about that amount annually, we see instead steady decline. Taking just the last 15 years of that period, from 2006 to 2020, the average went down a further 10% to about 36 inches annually. And in 2022, which wasn't included in that dataset, we got about 32".
When will we hit bottom, here? Not this month, because even with the new "normal", we are a third below that, so far in the month.
Except for established trees, all the plant life already turns crispy brown in the summer, because summer rains have become hardly more than a memory.
Eugene's not as rainy as the OP might imagine, anymore, Weather events such as hurricanes and the recent spate of storms in California make headline news, but the drastic decline in rainfall here isn't seen as "weather" and doesn't get reported much. The lack of rain is a case of nothing happening, and news sources would rather report "something". Meanwhile, chirpy weather reporters happily forecast more sunny days.
Compared with the thirty years from 1980 - 1910, average annual precipitation from 1991 - 2020 declined by more than 10%, to about 41 inches annually. Forty inches of rain per year still sounds like a decent quota, but here's the problem: Over those years, we see not a steady average, by which the rain was about that amount annually, we see instead steady decline. Taking just the last 15 years of that period, from 2006 to 2020, the average went down a further 10% to about 36 inches annually. And in 2022, which wasn't included in that dataset, we got about 32".
When will we hit bottom, here? Not this month, because even with the new "normal", we are a third below that, so far in the month.
Except for established trees, all the plant life already turns crispy brown in the summer, because summer rains have become hardly more than a memory.
Annual rainfall in some selected cities to compare with Eugene's long-term average of about 40 (which seems to be dropping if the above is correct)
Chicago: 39.05 inches
New York City: 46.6 inches
Atlanta: 47.12 inches
Washington DC: 41.82 inches
Boston: 43 inches
Miami: 61.9 inches
Houston: 49.77 inches
Brookings OR: 73.55 inches (rainiest place in Oregon)
What makes the Pacific Northwest seem more rainy is that we have more rainy days in the winter when it basically just drizzles for days on end without much total rainfall. So we get more days of rain that mostly fall in the winter.
By contrast, eastern cities get most of their rain in the summer and usually in big downpours when a week's worth of rain in the Pacific Northwest can fall in one or two hours.
Although it might not feel like it, having most of our precipitation in the winter is actually a blessing because it builds big snowpacks in the winter which fill our reservoirs and streams for most of the summer. So we have abundant water resources despite having only average rainfall.
And now we're at 20% of normal for this point in February. Without significant precipitation in the rest of the month, and there's almost nothing in the immediate forecast other than a possible half inch of snow in the next couple of days, we may bottom out at less than 10% of normal for the month.
I moved to Oregon in 2002. There has been a dramatic change in the weather (it is getting hotter and drier). The wildfires, if they are close enough to where you live, can be terrifying. You do not want to live up against the tree line (you want to live in the valley where there are plenty of firemen running around putting out fires). The wildfire smoke is hell if you has asthma; if you don't have asthma you may develop it here. Look up the Labor Day fires of 2020.
If I was a young person I might move somewhere that will end up where climate refugees from the South move to in groves. Yes, 20 years ago Oregon was attractive. Not so much now. Now you might want to move close to the Canadian border somewhere there is a ton of fresh water supply. Maybe Oregon and Washington will work out for Climate Change on par with those areas. However, depending on your age whether Oregon would be your best option. You have 40-50 years left to live then, no, because Oregon will just be an extension of the desert that California is... There are still 30 million acres of forests to burn down here. Think Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Vermont, maybe parts of NY and PA? N WA further north on the Columbia River? Think sources of water.
I maybe have 15-20 years to live. I might ride it out here; but, I have been thinking about my options upon retirement in a few years.
Not to be negative; but, I think you need to realize we are not kidding.
Last edited by Wile E. Coyote; 02-12-2023 at 11:14 PM..
I moved to Oregon in 2002. There has been a dramatic change in the weather (it is getting hotter and drier). The wildfires, if they are close enough to where you live, can be terrifying. You do not want to live up against the tree line (you want to live in the valley where there are plenty of firemen running around putting out fires). The wildfire smoke is hell if you has asthma; if you don't have asthma you may develop it here. Look up the Labor Day fires of 2020.
If I was a young person I might move somewhere that will end up where climate refugees from the South move to in groves. Yes, 20 years ago Oregon was attractive. Not so much now. Now you might want to move close to the Canadian border somewhere there is a ton of fresh water supply. Maybe Oregon and Washington will work out for Climate Change on par with those areas. However, depending on your age whether Oregon would be your best option. You have 40-50 years left to live then, no, because Oregon will just be an extension of the desert that California is... There are still 30 million acres of forests to burn down here. Think Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Vermont, maybe parts of NY and PA? N WA further north on the Columbia River? Think sources of water.
I maybe have 15-20 years to live. I might ride it out here; but, I have been thinking about my options upon retirement in a few years.
Not to be negative; but, I think you need to realize we are not kidding.
Very entertaining (and melodramatic) post.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
A lot of people here down on their luck, currently. We are really hoping that those things improve as we get through this and people can pick themselves up again, but that is going to take time. Or, like Seattle and other cities out here that used to be wonderful magical places and now are overrun and overpriced and awful, it may just continue to get worse, though I really hope not. But then even before pandemic, protests, natural disasters, etc. being on the I-5 corridor comes with its own problems. Drugs, sex-trafficking. We also don't like how mixed the neighborhoods are (I'm not talking racially, oh my goodness, I mean types of housing... who wants to spend $500K on a home that is across or down the street from a trailer park?), we consider ourselves liberal-leaning moderates... but here we don't like quite a bit of the politics (it seems extreme left to us at times), and we don't like how air gets trapped here due to being at the south end of the Willamette Valley. But that is just us, you may really love it and those things may not be an issue for you. It is still one of the most affordable places to live along the west coast, which we do like. We have lived in CA and WA as well and those places seem crazy $$$ by comparison. So the affordability of homes here by comparison we do like, though prices are rising rapidly. However we do not like how small the lots are for the houses that are here due to the urban growth boundaries and how tricky the housing market is here in general. I feel like I'm complaining, so I'm going to stop now!
