The appearance of tents on narrow strips of public land and planting strips up and down the West Coast has become commonplace and surprises no one these days, at least no more than does the omnipresence of shanties in Dharavi. The problem – and I stand with those who regard it as a problem, both for the people themselves exposed to the elements and for those in communities facing health and sanitation risks posed by impromptu camping – is not getting better. A few years ago, Bill Maher offered the common sense solution: “There is a solution to homelessness: building affordable housing, possibly in your neighborhood.” Yet, for reasons Maher and others have identified, this solution has not been effectively implemented. Principally, few desire affordable housing in their neighborhood.


Like other cities up and down the I-5 corridor, Eugene has been “trying” to address the issue – and by that, I mean the City Council engages in a lot of handwringing – but the wound has not been staunched. A few years ago, Federal data revealed that Eugene had the worst per capita houselessness rate in the nation: over 430 per 100,000 people.


The Council’s good intentions could possibly yet produce improvement for the unhoused, but the ridiculous expense of even the most basic attempts hamstrings efforts. When care for others is professionalized and moves out of the zone of volunteers, expenses soar. This happened with health care in the late nineteenth century, and today we see it occurring with society’s efforts to help those living in the shadow of the American dream. It should be shocking but ends up being no surprise to learn that the cleanup of Washington-Jefferson Park cost over $800,000. This is what happens when the city must employ professionals like Northwest Hazmat, who charges $45/hour for a crew to remove trash. Eugene had to allocate $3.6 million to respond to and clean up camps in 2022 alone.


The neighborhood that is most disproportionately affected by these camps happens to be my favorite neighborhood south of Portland and north of Ashland (despite my affection for some parts of Cottage Grove and Roseburg to be sure): the Whiteaker Neighborhood, which is Eugene’s oldest neighborhood. Bounded by the Willamette River on the north, Chambers St. on the west, and 7th Ave. on the south, the Whit stretches from the Washington-Jefferson Park to include Skinner Butte on its eastern most border, making it the oldest neighborhood in Eugene, as it includes the location of Eugene Skinner’s first settlement and the many nineteenth-century homes at the southeast base of the Butte. Such are the boundaries marking where the Whit ends.


For me, where the Whit begins has always been its main north-south boulevard, Blair, once part of a thoroughfare connecting farm country to the city. Being a mixed-zoned neighborhood with most of it being zoned for residential, commercial, and industrial purposes, the neighborhood makes for lively neighbors. If you live there, you can likely walk out your door and quickly find a neighborhood shop, local restaurant, or lively watering hole. Living there frees one up from having to jump on a bus or drive a car or ride a bicycle across town for life’s little necessitates. Living there also habituates residents to the sounds of life: of commerce and neighbors…the kinds of sounds and smells and sights that are typical daily experiences for people living in big cities, but which are unusual for most Eugene neighborhoods.


I first moved to the Whit in January of 1998. It was quite different than it is today, but what isn’t? In the 1990s, the Eugene Weekly ran a front-page feature on the neighborhood where it quoted some residents who were so concerned with the possibility of gentrification that they advocated walking about the neighborhood and dropping hypodermic needles in people’s garden beds in order to maintain the perception of the neighborhood as a dangerous place, and thereby to keep real estate values (and therefore rent) down. A real classy suggestion that I’m sure was appreciated by hardworking parents with toddlers tottering through their gardens to smell the flowers.


Living in the Whit is always an adventure. Across the street is a row of artists’ studios, painters and leaded glass artists; down the street is a brewery with a music recording studio inside, the historic district features some of the oldest and most storied buildings in the city. Murals can be found throughout the neighborhood, which includes a lovely stretch of the Willamette River before it makes its bend north up toward the Columbia. Buskers will still perform on corners – although this happens less frequently now – filling the air with song. Breakfast is still served at New Day Bakery; food carts can be found throughout.


The neighborhood has a rich history of community activism…I remember Heather Flores’s Food Not Lawns initiative in the 1990s, movie nights where films were projected onto the side of the old New Day location (presently Izakaya Meiji), Last Friday Art Walks, St. John the Wonderworker’s First Saturday Community Breakfasts, the Block Party that started in 2008 and continued until COVID. There is always something happening, whether it be an outdoor concert, a family day at Scobert Gardens, a talk on theology at the Pilgrim’s Way Bookstore, a Whiteaker Community Council meeting, or groups meeting to discuss anarcho-syndicalism. It is no surprise that Occupy Eugene originated in the Whit in 2011. The University District may house the area’s professional thinkers, but the Whit has long been the site for the most dynamic intellectual and artistic life of Eugene.


But then there is the visible – even in-your-face – presence of addiction, untreated mental health issues, and psychosis. The advantage of living in the Whit, though, is that people living here can learn to live with and alongside this aspect of American life. It is one of the reasons I chose to go to schools that were in urban areas like Detroit and New York City: they do not insulate one from this reality like rural campuses do (even though I would eventually have the rural campus experience two decades on). Many of Eugene’s neighborhoods are a series of subdivisions, divorced from industry and commerce, let alone the Eugene Mission, the Buckley House, or 50% of the city’s safe sleep sites.


Just sitting here taking a few minutes to recollect, a flood of bizarre and sometimes potentially violent encounters during my years living in the Whit come to mind.


  • A friend and I once performed CPR on a poor person who had overdosed and died from heroin. His name was Roy and he had gone clean but later found a bag of heroin and made the fateful decision to oblige himself. A passerby alerted us to him when they saw him lying in a field; we rushed to help, but he had been too long without oxygen.
  • A roommate once made the mistake of leaving the front door unlocked. I woke up at 3 am with an unknown man walking into my bedroom, uttering nonsense. I sat him down and made a pot of coffee and talked to him for an hour-and-a-half before he started coming down and could walk out the door without endangering himself or others.
  • A friend of mine bicycling home from work at the hospital found a man stabbed in the neck lying in the middle of Blair…he survived.
  • I have spent two decades cleaning hypodermic needles out of my front lawn (thank you, Eugene Weekly).
  • I have driven off kids shooting up on private property – both in broad daylight and secretly at night…but also provided a place to sleep for people who did not qualify for a bed at the Eugene Mission a few blocks away and were cast off and exhausted and looking for nothing more than a place to rest.
  • I coordinated – spontaneously in the moment – with neighbors to escort a very aggressive squatter off private property when a Eugene police officer who was called for assistance left the scene before stepping out of his vehicle because a more important call came through the radio.
  • I have caught a would-be bike thief attempting to steal a locked bike. Confronted, he violently tore off his jacket and bared his breast primatelike. I was able to draw him out into the street and lead him away from the residence for a block-and-a-half before his adrenaline rush dyed down and he stomped off never to return.
  • I have helped secure sites for multiple families to park their RVs overnight, providing a respite from being shoed away.
  • I coordinated with others to close down a meth house. When it was finally torn down, I kid you not (and I have the video to prove it), scores of crows appeared out of nowhere and circled above the building getting demolished, cawing as if an exorcism of evil spirits was driving them out of an ancient land.
  • I had a 300 lb. man – convinced that he was possessed – throw his head back and howl, and then, in one motion, pivot 360 degrees, executing a head-high spinning kick three inches from my nose…exhibiting such dexterity that he had me convinced that he was possessed.
  • I once had to break into our own apartment that had been trespassed and barricaded by a hallucinating meth addict. Forcing the door open, I found this unknown man stripped naked with a skirt that he found in the place halfway up his knees.
  • I have passed scores upon scores of muttering, snarling, drooling persons. I always look them in the eye, as if to say “hello.” Usually, the experience is akin to viewing a fellow human from a telescope: faraway eyes indicating a soul trapped deep within, trying to claw free.
  • I have had to pick up human feces so frequently that I have a technique for it.
  • I came upon a homeless woman one morning who had been raped in the middle of the night by the man from whom she scored her meth a mere half-block from our home; I assisted her with reporting it to the police.
  • I once came home to discover the child of former acquaintances slumped in the doorway of the building next door, high out of his mind on meth and hallucinating worse than I have seen anyone hallucinate before. I called CAHOOTS (the local mobile crisis intervention team) and we were only able to get him in the van and driven to Buckley House by me entering first and riding with him.
  • In 2008, Thomas Egan froze to death sleeping on the streets a mere block from where we lived. I observed the people of Eugene and the Whit respond by creating warming centers to help prevent this from ever happening again.
  • I have observed a church community rehabilitate a condemned property; a dozen people locking arms and marching together through the backyard to safely pick up and dispose of discarded needles (is this gentrification?).
  • I have seen people in the most difficult times of their lives treated with compassion by people in the Whit – whether it be getting someone without a home a motel room or merely getting them a cup of coffee – because in the Whit, these are your neighbors. It is easy to demonize people when they are an abstraction. It is much harder to hate the person who stands before you in need.


Whiteaker: Eventful? For sure. Colorful? Check. Filled with people who in the past made life choices they most certainly regret in 2024 (if they lived this long)? Most assuredly. But is this not true for us all to one degree or another? The problems and issues exposed to the public in others can become representative for obstacles and tendencies that we all must overcome. We share a humanity, such that our issues – however dramatic – often amount to like in kind, only different in degree.


Between 2004 or so and 2014, the Whit experienced an exciting revitalization. Yes, the addiction and mental health issues were still visible, but the residents, business owners, and sometimes even the city collaborated to make it beautiful, to reveal the dignity of the people who live there that was sometimes too hidden. When this revitalization is discussed, it is often described with an emphasis – sometimes total – on the exciting restaurants and unique businesses that flourished in the neighborhood: Papa’s Soul Food Kitchen, Sweet Life Patisserie, Grit, Wandering Goat Coffee Company, Hop Valley Brewing Company, Laughing Planet. Articles on the neighborhood would usually mention that the only chain in the neighborhood was 7-Eleven in order to emphasize the uniqueness of each business. Everything else was locally owned and operated with love and care. I even mentioned the businesses in my description of the neighborhood above.


Since 2015 or so, the neighborhood has fallen upon hard times again. In 2022, the crime rate in Whiteaker was 4557 incidents per 100,000 people – twice the national average and about 900 incidents/100,000 people more than the rest of Eugene. Of those crimes, 454 were violent – about 100 incidents per 100,000 people greater than Eugene’s average. The property crime rate is more than twice the national average. The picture that emerges is not merely drawn with statistics, though. To the eye, the neighborhood simply looks uglier than it did a decade ago. Graffiti mars murals and building surfaces, abandoned camps are strewn a few feet from sidewalks, and, yes, hypodermic needles in the flowerbeds remain. The Whit will bounce back; I have no doubt. But, for the last decade, the neighborhood has returned to how it was, in some ways, in the 1990s…not all the way, but much of the beauty has been tarnished.


With all the talk of Ninkasi moving in (2006) and investing in the neighborhood – and it most certainly did – the success of the Whiteaker Block Party, and so forth, the presence and influence of St. John the Wonderworker Orthodox Church is usually not mentioned. Despite – to anyone familiar with the neighborhood – the visibility of the transformation it wrought after moving into the condemned property that was once Icky’s Tea House at 3rd Ave and Blair, right in Whiteaker’s heart.


Icky's Tea House in 1997 after it was condemned. 

St. John the Wonderworker Orthodox Church at the site of the former Icky's in 2014.

Photo by Billy Belchev.


Icky’s had been an early-to-mid 1990s anti-establishment performance venue as well as tea house founded by a man named Sunshine…a place where punk rock thrived and where anarchists gathered. It strove to be a community hub – featuring a lending library and free classes – and it fostered an atmosphere where outcasts could bond, but it became overwhelmed by ugliness. A close friend of mine was working there when a man overdosed and died in the bathroom (“it seemed like he was in there a long time,” she told me). A chop shop was run out of the backyard, furnishing a dropping off place for hundreds of bikes that had been disencumbered of their owners. Sexual assaults occurred there. Runaways were exploited. Finally, in 1997, the city condemned the property, shuttering it for good. Icky’s Tea House, 1993-1997: rest in peace.


Into this picture walks Fr. David Lubliner, a native Portlander who had recently relocated his family to Eugene from Atlanta. Raised Jewish, Fr. David had a transformative experience before the Holy Sepulcher – the tomb of Christ – while in Jerusalem in 1969. He and his wife Esther shared an interesting American odyssey, having joined a Christian sect in San Francisco in the Seventies and then having lived in many American cities throughout the years. Reacting to the self-indulgent extremes of the Sixties and Seventies, the sect was composed of spiritually-minded youth who moved into rundown neighborhoods weighed down by recession and poverty, purchased dilapidated properties, fixed them up, and then filled them with life, usually creating community-centered programs like soup kitchens, shelters, and schools for those who lived in the neighborhood. The twenty- and thirtysomething kids who were doing this work were the same kids who a few years earlier had been dropouts, runaways, and seekers. Some were users who cleaned up. Some were merry pranksters who wised up. They recruited from the counterculture and created a counter-counterculture.


Fr. David Lubliner in 2014.

Photo by Daniel Mackay.


Moving to Eugene in 1991, the Lubliners founded a tiny Christian community in a rented bookstore that sold spiritually-related books. In 2000, Fr. David was ordained a Serbian Orthodox priest, but not before leading his community to purchase the condemned Icky’s property in the Whit in late 1997.


Fr. David’s community purchased the property – built as a chicken hatchery in 1935 – with $5000 in the bank. The members of the growing community spent two years stripping the building down to its four terra cotta block walls and roof and then rebuilding it into an Orthodox church, complete with onion domes and bell tower – which was raised with funds donated in the memory of a six-year old girl who died from a brain tumor in 2006. There were many helping hands along the way, including the city (its Neighborhood Economic Development Corporation [NEDCO] provided important initial loans), other nonprofit groups and churches, and passersby who were inspired to lend a hand.


Fr. David would also offer opportunities for the unhoused and destitute. Very often he would recruit helpers from the Eugene Mission, paying them to assist with the renovation of the building that would become St. John the Wonderworker Orthodox Church, to help with yardwork, or to contribute in some other capacity. He did this for hundreds of people over the years.


He offered the opportunity for people to earn money while participating in a project larger than themselves. Their rehabilitation occurred even as they worked to help rehabilitate what eventually grew into a three-quarter acre patch of the Whiteaker Neighborhood.


Fr. David did all this while working full-time as a painter and resurfacer of bathroom counters, tubs, and sinks. For a full decade, he earned no income as a parish priest, instead he guided the community to direct all of its funds to the development of the property and charity for others…which is, of course, tantamount to the development of the neighborhood.


And he was never really publicly recognized for this, even as the Whiteaker neighborhood began to receive more public attention. This lack of recognition is likely because the church community he led did not have a commercial relationship with its neighbors. This emphasis on commercialism as basis for defining a neighborhood struck me one time, years ago, when I was having a conversation with Nikos Ridge, co-founder of Ninkasi. Despite having its doors open for all – in fact, ringing its bells throughout the neighborhood for others to “come and see,” providing beds for those who had none, work for those who were desperate, and food for the hungry – Ridge did not realize that the church was interested in interacting with the neighborhood, of being part of the neighborhood. This is no slight against Ridge by any means – he has invested a lot in Whiteaker over the years in ways that few others could. Rather, it speaks to what we look for and expect from each other when confronting problems endemic to where we live. If cash is not changing hands, how often do we notice?


Fr. David and the community that he led understood that a person needs more than shelter or food, as much as these necessities are vital. People need to know that they belong, that they matter, that they can contribute to a project or a vision larger than their own immediate needs.


Two doors down from the church is the JESCO club (An acronym from the first letter of the names of the five cities where it is located: Junction City, Eugene, Springfield, Cottage Grove, and Oakridge), a member-owned Twelve-step based resource center that has been offering addicts a place to recover and socialize for decades. It too has been unheralded for its influence on the neighborhood. But the emphasis at JESCO is on personal development. Despite carrying the message of recovery to others being essential to the Twelve-step program, no singular consistent project exists beyond each person’s sobriety being their own project.


Fr. David’s vision for St. John the Wonderworker Orthodox Church was certainly bound up with personal development, but it was based on people coming together to build the church. First to establish the building, then to beautify it, and then to keep it alive with ancient chant, candles, incense, and bells so that the services inside became a kind of neighborhood hearth around which people could come in from the cold, warm themselves, and enter a different world. Having been introduced to it, they could then participate and help contribute to that world. In building up a beautiful alternative to the ugliness in the streets, they found that they were building up something inside themselves.


Painting of St. John the Wonderworker Orthodox Church by Anthony Pope,

former resident of Eugene Mission who obtained housing through help he received at the church.


Fr. David did not stumble upon this realization alone. He was part of a group that had been offering help throughout the country in this way for decades. When his family joined with another family in Eugene in 1991 to found the church, the resulting community grew to include a membership with too many names to mention; together, they labored to acknowledge the inherent dignity of others, no matter the external circumstances of each or how little money they could bring to the neighborhood.


Just sitting here taking a few minutes to recollect, a flood of memories of Fr. David’s years in the Whit come to mind.


  • I see 150 or more neighbors, mostly unhoused, seated inside St. John the Wonderworker, being served breakfast on tables decorated with vases of flowers and at settings with metal utensils. In the corner someone plays a piano for live music. There is no buffet line here; rather, everyone is served at their table by a volunteer waiter with a smile. For decades this took place on the first Saturday of the month. Everyone was invited, it was not merely the unhoused. Care packages would be available for people as they left: socks, hand-knitted caps, scarves…all this was the result of Fr. David’s initiative to have a place where each person’s innate dignity could be recognized.
  • I see a volunteer-run bookstore, where anyone could walk in off the street, into a dry refuge in the rainy months and into air-conditioned cool in the heat. One could have a coffee or two for free and sit on a couch and read through a book either from a free lending library or from off the shelf of the bookstore. For a couple years, a volunteer-run and staffed tea house and bistro inside the church also offered a place for people to sit and talk, play chess, or listen to chant music playing through the speakers.
  • I see book studies, talks, slide shows, and classes with guest speakers from around the world coming to this little church bookstore on 3rd and Blair and introducing folks from the Whit to wisdom born of desert monasteries in Egypt in the third and fourth centuries and Turkey from the fourth and fifth centuries. All of this was free and so routine that the radical nature of it could be overlooked: outside people whose lives were informed by the standards of capitalism would protest for an alternative, inside Fr. David’s neighborhood church a genuine alternative existed, not based on reacting to the superficialities of America, but by living according to much older (and tested) ways.
  • I see hundreds upon hundreds of people over the years who walk through the always-open door off the street, asking for a handout. Sometimes that is all that they would receive, some little bit of money to help. Often, they would be offered a job for more money: mow the lawn, trim the trees, paint a room. An exchange took place where people knew they earned their money, and they knew that they were helping others out as much as they were being helped out. That knowledge remains as a lasting impression, even for those whose lives lead them elsewhere.
  • I have seen scores of people visit St. John the Wonderworker and talk to Fr. David as part of their ongoing rehabilitation from addiction, either coming to the church from JESCO next door or through other channels. Also, I have seen the church space used by other non-profits and county programs to assist with the rehabilitation of sex workers and addicts.
  • I have seen Fr. David protect the community by fearlessly standing up to a murderer and sharing information with the police that led to the arrest and conviction of that man.
  • I have seen Fr. David encourage the dissemination of folk and ethnic arts – using the church space as a place for art classes, folk dancing classes, baking classes, painting classes, and music classes – always making the church space available for free as a community space.
  • I saw Fr. David insist, early in the renovation of the Icky’s building, that one of the bathrooms would include a shower so that people with no shower at home could use one at the church. I then went on to note that over the years, people coming in from off the streets would be offered that shower to use.
  • I saw Fr. David acquire an adjacent vacant lot and gather a community of gardeners to work the land over the years, digging in some places seven or eight feet deep to unearth rich silt deposited from millennia of the Willamette’s floods. An experienced gardener, I saw him erect a hoop house and open the garden to the neighborhood. In this way, fallow earth that once was a dumping place for scrap metal produced lush vegetables for years.
  • I saw Fr. David grow the church community, both in numbers and in land space. What started as Icky’s became a much larger property of landscaped yards, gardens, a playground, and an evocative architecture of arches, domes, and crosses.
  • I saw Fr. David, through this initiative, stamp out all drug dealing on West Third Alley between Blair and Polk. Once the foot traffic and crime down this Alley was incessant as people would stalk to one of a couple different drug houses to get their fix at all hours. No more.
  • And I not only saw, I heard. I heard Fr. David always in conversation with those who might need counsel or just someone to bend an ear. Rarely was Fr. David too busy to not stop and share with others the precious gift of time and attention.
  • At his home, I heard Fr. David being diverted from his family to take calls, often from people with mental health issues. He never talked down to others; often he would listen for a little and offer a few words before establishing his boundaries and gently ending the call.
  • I heard also the bells ring out across Whiteaker in bright, upbeat melodies in the Russian style of bell-ringing. The bell ringing was related to the daily church services, but for neighbors, the bell-ringing became a beautiful punctuation of melody throughout the day amidst the constant industrial hum of Ninkasi, the sound of traffic, and the other audible signs of life in the hood.


Fr. David is not dead. He acquired Parkinson’s Disease and finally had to retire and move away ten years ago. He changed over the years. Starting in 1991 as an establisher and teacher, always organizing events, classes, and activities, he grew to become a more inward-directed person. He identified the quiet desert within and would retreat to it, sometimes even in the midst of the hustle and bustle of Whiteaker, with its commerce and commotion. Perhaps it is that interior desert that gave birth to the beauty that he contributed to this neighborhood?


Sometimes people who influence their neighbors in profound, yet unnoticed ways go unrecognized. The tragedy is not that a man might go unflattered and unrecognized for his deeds. The tragedy is that the hidden acts of compassion that helped rebuild a neighborhood might be forgotten. Whiteaker, look what you have become again. Perhaps there is a lesson from your past you have not fully learned.


Now, when the Whit is again facing an apparent dead end, remembering that lesson is more important than ever. Whiteaker accomplished its revival through the self-sacrifice of neighbors supporting others, no matter how those others might look, smell, or talk. Human nature does not change. Therefore, with resolve, I think we can get there again. All that it takes is commitment to interact with neighbors differently – where people are not potential customers but sovereign persons who actively, not passively, contribute to a larger vision – a lesson that is lasting even for those whose lives take them beyond Whit’s end.