Housing Production Strategy is Chance to Think Deeper about Our Salem and Climate Friendly Areas

The City's announced the start of the Housing Production Strategy project.

Salem needs more housing. To help meet that need, the City is creating a Housing Production Strategy (HPS) to outline how Salem plans to encourage housing development. The HPS is expected to include tools, policies, and actions that promote the production of a variety of housing types.

The published information is mostly prelude and throat-clearing rather than anything substantive.

They did publish a schedule, however.

The schedule (notes on step 2 added)

And one of the elements for this summer, ranging from spring to fall, is to "evaluate feasibility of developing housing in mixed-use areas."

Here, an ongoing criticism of Our Salem has been that the new mixed-use zoning, MU-I, MU-II, and MU-III was deployed in unrealistic ways, mostly along the biggest of our arterial corridors.

Much of the proposed change was
for arterial corridors
Our Salem map (2021)

So I hope the project truly grapples with the realistic prospects for housing in the new areas zoned for mixed-uses.

Are the big box stores, strip malls large and small, and parking lots going to convert to housing any time soon? 

What will the market be for warehoused housing right on top of our traffic sewers? If built to the concept in Our Salem, will people really want to live there?

And what is a realistic rate of change to housing for the downtown areas proposed for Climate-Friendly Areas/Walkable Mixed-use Areas?

Catalogue plans for apartments! - former twitter

More generally, we've already eliminated parking mandates, and there will be other ways to reduce costs of building housing. Hopefully the project will also support faster implementation of single-access apartment blocks (without the long corridors with two exits), which offer greater flexibility on lots and maximize housing. There's real potential here.

I hope this planning study asks real questions and generates real answers, not hype and puffery, but sober analysis and realistic forecasts.

Previously:

• "Our Salem Vision and Draft Plan Relies too Much on Arterial Conversion to Mixed-Use" (2020)
• "Problems with Seattle's Urban Villages might Prompt more Thought on Our Salem" (2021)
• A summary on CFAs and WaMUAs, with links to further dicussion, "City Council, September 25th - Overlay Zones and Climate-Friendly Walkable Areas" (2023)