Nordstrom Returns away from Downtown. Will new School Funding Support Active Transport?

On Wednesday a former SJ reporter now working in Portland broke news that Nordstrom was kinda, sorta returning to Salem.

via Twitter

Nordstrom HQ decided that Salem might still be a useful market, but only for the discount version, the Rack. The new store would be at the old Lancaster Mall in the former Sears site.

Some might like to interpret the shift as a story about downward mobility and its demographics in Salem.

Here, it is another data point to support the thesis that the main emphasis downtown should be for more housing, not for retail and business recruitment. 

When there are more people living downtown, businesses will follow.

But for our attempt to fashion downtown as a drive-to destination like a mall, drawing customers in from the edges by car, we now have 40 years to show that strategy is a bust. The particular vision for free parking with garages and for one giant quasi-mall with skybridges has not made downtown boom.

1980s vision for skybridges and parking garages

Rather than focusing on provisions for cars and their drivers, we need to focus on housing for people.

More parking lot expansion, too?

On the front page today was news about more funding for bond projects at the School District. Absent was any discussion of provision for walking and rolling to school. Will there be instead more parking lot expansion? The bond projects package has seemed very oriented to more driving and parking, and insufficiently attentive to making it easier for kids and parents not to drive to school.

(See brief bits on new parking lots at McNary and South High. I have not followed the school bond projects closely, and there are likely others. Generally the District has not seen any great opportunity to reduce driving and to improve facilities for families who might like not to drive. Looking back in a decade, this will almost certainly count as a huge missed opportunity.)