How people are feeling about Salem’s downtown

More services for people experiencing homelessness, more parking and cleaner streets. These are just a few of the concerns citizens shared in a survey about Salem’s downtown, conducted by the Statesman Journal. Many feel the future of downtown is unknown and the district needs a clearer vision. Whitney Woodworth is a city reporter for the Statesman. She joins us to share some of the survey results and gives us a closer look into what is top of mind for many residents.

Note: The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. We turn now to Salem. Like many cities in the west, its downtown has been hit hard in recent years by COVID and a housing crisis. But as a recent series of articles by The Statesman Journal makes clear, downtown Salem faces longer term issues as well. Big questions about its identity, about how it could become a more vibrant city center with more shops and restaurants and housing, with more foot traffic that goes into the evening. Whitney Woodworth is a City reporter for The Statesman Journal. She joins us now to talk about the city’s present and possible futures. Whitney Woodworth, welcome.

Whitney Woodworth: Hi, thanks so much for having me.

Miller: Thanks for joining us. One intersection that you wrote about at Liberty and Chemeketa Streets seems to really exemplify both the challenges and the opportunities in downtown Salem right now. Can you just describe this corner?

Woodworth: Yeah and that was kind of the crux of our whole story. Your view of downtown really depends on where you are. At one of the corners at Liberty and Chemeketa, you look to the north, you see the vacant J.C. Penney building that has been empty since they went out of business in 2020. You see a struggling offshoot of the mall that has a lot of empty storefronts and then you look and you see an empty pit that has been vacant since the property was bulldozed five years ago. If you go a little bit further south and look around, it’s a totally different downtown. There’s boutiques, there’s local restaurants, there’s a huge seven story hotel being built, there’s people out and about enjoying their day. So really, the struggles of downtown also very much depend on what areas you’re looking at.

Miller: Are there any plans or official projects in the works for that intersection, though?

Woodworth: A lot of those properties are still up for sale or trying to find tenants, so there aren’t any solid ones for those. I know they’re struggling. Liberty Plaza is working on trying to rebrand itself. A little bit further, we did have a vacant Nordstrom’s building, since it closed in 2018 and that was empty for years until an investor bought it and decided to turn it into housing. So that is being converted into a 157 unit apartment complex.

Miller: The Statesman Journal, as part of this series, conducted a survey to get a sense of how people there feel about downtown. How much interest was there in the survey?

Woodworth: Oh boy, a lot. Usually when we do a survey, 10 responses is good feedback. 20 is great. We got almost 700. People are very passionate about the issue.

Miller: What stood out to you in the responses?

Woodworth: They definitely ran the gamut, people saying things like downtown was dying. They hadn’t been in years. They didn’t feel safe going down there, basically saying that there’s no hope for downtown. And then on the other end of the spectrum, you have people who said they went every day or they lived downtown, that they loved the local restaurants and small businesses and they appreciated being able to walk to Riverfront Park and enjoy our new amphitheater. And then there were a lot of people in between who thought Salem was great, but they wanted things like more accessible parking, more walkable, fewer vacant stores and more beautification efforts, like a cleaner downtown with more character.

Miller: Are there business groups or developers in Salem that actually have the power and the money to develop a unified vision and to make it a reality?

Woodworth: So that’s one thing. In order to understand the present, we tried to look back into the past. I looked, worked with fellow reporter Kathy Lynn on this, on what was done in the past and what is going on right now. And one thing we found out is past efforts, they sputtered out, lost funding. Groups that would put on festivals and art fairs and kind of unite the businesses, had more funding in the past. Now you kind of have a split. There’s a downtown advisory board that shapes policy and helps form visions of downtown. And then you have a nonprofit group of mostly business people who are there to promote downtown, but they’ve struggled with having enough funding, it slowly petered out over time to the point where they’re just working with not a lot right now.

Miller: It does seem like this is one of those chicken and egg problems though. There’s a lack of services or stores or a grocery store, which is something that you mentioned in the article that a lot of people want, but a lack of those things because there aren’t enough people, so says, you know that that’s the argument, but then a lack of people because there aren’t those stores or amenities. So how do you jump start this kind of development and downtown life?

Woodworth: I believe it’s on its way. 15 years ago, there were virtually no residential units downtown and now we have hundreds. There’s even more coming with that big apartment complex. So does the chicken and egg situation, people maybe not wanting to go down there because, especially if they’re going to be living without a car, because they can’t walk to the grocery store. So I think soon it might reach that critical mass of developers seeing the value in adding a grocery store. But these city-based incentives to attract residential units to downtown, that’s one thing they do tout of trying to get more and more people hopefully reaching that amount where it warrants having a grocery store and more amenities.

Miller: What did you hear about the connection between housing and a revitalized downtown Salem?

Woodworth: Well, basically, if you have people downtown, it’s just going to pour dollars back into downtown, they’re gonna go to the restaurants, they’re going to go to the services, they’re going to promote a more vibrant nightlife. More people will be out. It’s not gonna, maybe, close down at five o’clock, which was the reputation in previous decades.

Miller: I was really taken by one of the details that you included, which is that according to the most recent Oregon employment department data, 65% of people who work in Salem don’t live in the city, which says something about, about what you’re, what you’re talking about here. You also, you talked to Salem’s downtown revitalization manager, Sheri Wahrgren, who said that the city doesn’t have the ability even to have holiday lights in downtown or to hang flower pots, the kind of beautification details that that some people said they wanted, to make it a cuter place more like McMinnville, was one of the, the smaller, not too far away cities that some residents I think apparently looked wistfully at. Why is it that there can’t be holiday lights?

Woodworth: So that’s something the city is working on. The infrastructure of the sidewalks is so old that they kind of have to repair it, section by section, to basically even have the ability to have those twinkle lights, to have baskets that can be watered. And so it is something that’s in the works, but because they’re doing it section by section, it’s gonna take some time before there’s a cohesive holiday in downtown, there’s flowers on every street. And then also a lot of beautification efforts that are funded by the downtown parking tax which has been hit by the pandemic. There were fewer people downtown during 2020, and 2021, and then we also had a lot of retail closures which also decreased those revenues.

Miller: You noted that this is a city that has been known to close up early. When work ends, people leave. How much has that changed in the last couple of years?

Woodworth: Definitely, like all other cities that did get hit by the pandemic. But as our reporter, Em Chan, found out, she did an additional section on nightlife. While people still want more, they still want more reasons to not go to Eugene and not go to Portland, to instead stay in Salem. There are at least a dozen bars and restaurants and a club, some entertainment venues and even a late night convenience store for people who are there late at night. And so it’s not as much as people would like. But there are signs of it growing and thriving.

Miller: Whitney Woodworth, thanks very much.

Woodworth: Thanks so much for having me.

Miller: Whitney Woodworth is a City reporter for the Statesman Journal. As I noted, you can read her and other articles in this series of articles about the present and the future and also the past of Downtown Salem at the Statesman Journal site.

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