Salem Reporter on Downtown should Examine Drive-to Model

Yesterday Salem Reporter published a story on downtown health, "The problems and promise of downtown Salem."

At Salem Reporter

With the photo they highlighted, the first impression was the traffic sewer of Commercial Street at its intersection with State Street. The street was the center and the buildings a little incidental.

The story summary focused on "people coming into their stores" and the photo emphasized downtown as a drive-to destination like a mall. Driving was normative. Driving is what makes downtown.

But the story undercut a good bit of that and some other themes might have been given even more prominence.

[Dino Venti is] hopeful the housing developments downtown will bring in more foot traffic. He’s also looking forward to larger developments, including The Cannery which will add 382 apartments, a brewery, restaurants and retail north of downtown.

“I’m optimistic about downtown,” he said....

[T. J.] Sullivan said that the investments in housing downtown make him feel optimistic.

“The more people we get living downtown, the more eyes you get on the streets, the more there is a sense of safety. And the more people that are right there, for ready-made consumers for the downtown businesses,” Sullivan said. 

The most important thing for downtown is the increase in residents, in treating downtown as an actual neighborhood and not as a drive-to destination and mall.

"Foot traffic" really means foot traffic. Walking, not driving, is the key!

As for parking, one recently-departed business owner highlighted the downtown parking tax as a burdensome expense.

But the discussion of a shift to right-priced curbside parking framed it as an inconvenience to those driving to downtown, and still accepted the frame of downtown as a drive-to mall.

Our stories of downtown health need to burrow into and examine the concept and frame of drive-to destinations.

There were other interesting notions that could be developed more. Venti identified inequality and consolidation of higher-end wealth as a factor in squeezing out businesses that appealed to the middle.

Another former business owner there did not frame homelessness as a safety issue but instead as a humanitarian and housing problem.

[Bee] Decker said homelessness downtown wasn’t a major issue for The Freckled Bee. She stocked up on supplies, including food, tampons and condoms, to give away to unsheltered community members.

In eight years downtown, she can recall only one instance, in March, where someone left excrement near her business. She’d like to see more resources for unsheltered people downtown, including access to hygiene.

Large-scale economic forces and nationwide cultural shifts exert real influence, and attempts at hobo evaporation are not durable and will not guarantee downtown health.

Downtown is a complicated system, and it may not be possible even in a long news piece to give each factor the weight and nuance it deserves.

This frame is outdated! August 1st, 1977

But we really need to consider more deeply how the frame of a "drive-to" regional shopping center is no longer adequate to downtown's 21st century reality. We've tried it for 50 years, it never really worked, people always complained, there was no golden era even in the prime of the auto age, and it's definitely broken now.

A perennial theme here, see especially:

• "Causes of Downtown Struggle: Insufficient Free Parking or Loss of Residences?" (2020)
• "End the Failed Skybridge Experiment Downtown; Refocus on Housing" (2020)
• And on the first big blow to downtown, "Evolution or Erosion? Capitol Shopping Center Rose on Edge of Downtown in late 1940s" (2022)