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A Texas company that builds student housing has bought a six-acre site near the University of Oregon for $5 million, raising concerns that the supply of student housing in Eugene may soon outstrip demand.

Several other large student housing projects are under construction in Eugene. Developers for Capstone Cos. of Alabama are building an $89-million, five-story housing complex to house up to 400 students.

Meanwhile, developers for Core Campus of Chicago are proposing a $44 million, 12-story student housing complex on the east edge of downtown Eugene.

“I’m surprised to hear about this Texas outfit coming,” said Ed McMahon, executive vice president of the Home Builders Association of Lane County. “We’ve pretty much reached our limit when it comes to student housing.”

What surprising, said McMahon and other observers, is the size of some of these developments.

“There has been a glut of new developments going on around campus, and they seem to be growing in, shall we say, stature,” said Sadie Dressekie, a Eugene real estate broker who also taught marketing at the University of Oregon’s Lundquist College of Business.

“The challenge is that the university is growing, but it is not growing at the same rate as student housing,” she said.

The University of Oregon grew by some 4,000 student between 2000 and 2007. Student housing grew accordingly, said Dressekie, but housing projects kept coming even while the student population leveled off.

“The university has slowed because they are at capacity in terms of classrooms.” she said. “You’re starting to see concessions — one month free rent and so forth — even on the new units. A number of landlords near campus have told me this is the first year they’ve had trouble filling their units.”

The next big development could involve the acquisition of land by American Campus Communities based in Austin, Texas. Company executives bought the land now occupied by the Franklin Village Extended Stay motel on Garden Avenue and the Boulevard Grill on Franklin Boulevard.

On their website, American Campus Communities’ executives call their company “the nation’s largest developer, owner and manager of high-quality student housing communities.”

The company opened a 16-story building at Portland State University last year as well as a 700-unit complex at Southern Oregon University in Ashland.

Phone calls to the company were not returned.

A previous proposal for the Eugene property, made by a California architectural firm, called for a series of five-story buildings with a total of 192 units.

Dressekie said she wonders if student housing projects are being built the right way to appeal to students.

“The way developers seem to be constructing campus housing at the moment is that they’re building units that house multiple people,” she said. “My sense is that is not the way students want to live. They don’t want compromise their living environment. I wonder if these large-scale developments are going to struggle more than single-studio model.”

But while high-rise developments may cast long shadows, Dressekie said they might be what a smaller community like Eugene needs in terms of sustainability.

“I think it is a wise use of land to grow up instead of out,” she said. “We don’t want to be a teeming metropolis.”