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An independent 2022 panel on redeveloping the West Salem industrial district - the ideas we are carrying forward, and where our plan goes further.
In July 2022, at the City of Salem's request, ULI Northwest convened a Technical Assistance Panel - a volunteer team of real estate and land-use experts - to advise on converting the roughly 40-acre West Salem industrial study area to mixed-use. It is a thoughtful, independent read of the site, and we share it with stakeholders because its best ideas are genuinely useful. We treat it as a reference and a conversation-starter, not as our plan of record: we carry much of its placemaking and connectivity thinking forward, and we deliberately go further than it does on parking, density, and mobility, because the options available to a district like ours have changed since 2022.
A ~40-acre transitioning industrial site in the West Salem Urban Renewal Area, two blocks from the Willamette and across the river from downtown, bounded by Wallace Road. The city rezoned it from industrial to mixed-use in August 2022. The panel addressed a southern "detailed focus area" (mostly vacant, ready to redevelop) and a northern "high-level concept area" of active industry.
This page is our summary and commentary. The complete panel report, figures, and panelist roster are published by ULI Northwest. West Salem Industrial Redevelopment TAP →
The panel's strongest contributions are about identity, focus, and sequence - and they line up closely with how we are approaching the district. These are the ideas worth keeping in front of every stakeholder.
Build the neighborhood's character from the site's food-and-agriculture past - hops, fruit, dairy, wool, and Oregon wine. Breweries, cheese makers, bakeries, maker incubators, artist live-work, stages, and festivals in the old warehouses give it an identity worth investing in.
Concentrate early energy at 2nd & Patterson and Patterson & Edgewater - the corners with the most potential - and connect them to the existing activity hubs at Roth's and historic Edgewater Street with five-minute walking loops.
Make room for open space first: a 2nd Street triangle park (which can also handle district stormwater), open space along Patterson for dining and retail, and a Patterson-Edgewater plaza anchoring a walking loop to Wallace Marine Park.
Begin with what banks will finance, save the best corners for when the market is ready, and let each success unlock the next. Adaptive reuse along Edgewater Street is the natural starting point.
The active uses north of Bassett (a power plant, West Salem Machinery, food processors) are quiet, daytime, and provide valued jobs. They can continue and transition over time rather than being forced out.
The river is the district's crown jewel and the flatland-below-the-bluffs is a distinct place within Salem. Every connection that makes the river and parks easier to reach on foot or bike adds value.
The panel's most actionable work is its read of the connectivity bottleneck - and it maps almost perfectly onto the mobility challenge our own plan is built around. These are the moves it identified.
A 2nd Street crossing was studied and rejected - an underpass at ~$30M was too costly, and ODOT will not signalize there because it sits too close to the bridge. The panel's answer is a signalized at-grade crossing at Bassett Street, further from the bridge, extended east to Glen Creek Road and west to Patterson.
Continue Taggart Drive straight south instead of curving back to Wallace, and extend Bartell Drive south through the new Bassett to the waterfront at Musgrave - taking congestion off Wallace and vastly improving the connection to Wallace Marine Park.
Extend the Union Street Rail path over Wallace Road - echoing its old trestle architecture - to land at the 2nd Street triangle park. Long-term, a bike-and-pedestrian bridge over the river to Minto-Brown Island Park would close a spectacular riverside loop.
In the mid-term, slow SR-22 to a boulevard on the west bank as it already is downtown; long-term, regional thinking about goods movement could rethink the highway's riverside route entirely, reopening the west bank to the river.
A tree-lined boulevard along the steep slope between the flatlands and the hills could circle the neighborhood and, eventually, divert through-traffic off Edgewater so it can become a slower destination street.
Every one of these confirms the same thing our plan starts from: West Salem's value is locked behind a movement problem. We add a faster-than-car circulator that can leap Wallace, SR-22, and the river without waiting on each at-grade fight. See Salem Mobility Concepts.
Industrial-to-urban conversion is hard and costs run high, so the panel catalogued the public tools that can help it pencil. This list is a useful checklist for our own conversations with the city and is echoed in our financing work.
Several of these map directly to levers in our Upside Explorer and to the subsidy stack in our underwriting.
We do not treat the TAP as gospel, and a few of its premises are ones we are deliberately challenging. These are differences of ambition and of timing - the panel wrote in 2022 for the city at large, while we are designing a single, mobility-anchored district - not criticisms of its rigor.
The panel: assumes surface parking at 1.2-1.5 stalls per unit, finds structured parking infeasible, and cautions that walkability will not solve everything.
Our plan: treats mobility as the lever that breaks that assumption. A Whoosh circulator, Cherriots integration, and active mobility are designed to lower parking demand, make shared and structured parking pencil, and convert avoided parking into land value.
The panel: recommends starting with low-density townhomes and capping density to ease opposition and transit limits - a ~400-unit, ~7% return-on-cost "suburban" scheme.
Our plan: pursues a more ambitious, attainable density at district scale, betting that placemaking, a dedicated delivery vehicle, and real mobility change both the absorption math and the politics of density.
The panel: notes a trolley line "discussed for some time" as one more transit scheme to study for funding and viability.
Our plan: moves past the trolley to a faster-than-car aerial circulator that clears Wallace, SR-22, and the river without an at-grade fight - and that can be incubated alongside the companies building it.
For reference, the figures the panel itself put forward in 2022. These are ULI's illustrative numbers for a generic, fundable scheme - useful context, but not our underwriting, which is in our Upside Explorer.
| Item | ULI TAP figure (2022) |
|---|---|
| Study area | ~40 acres; rezoned industrial to mixed-use, Aug 2022 |
| Residential scheme | ~400 units (10% studio, 40% 1BR, 35% 2BR, 10% 3BR, 5% townhome) |
| Residential value / cost | ~$135.1M value · ~$126.8M cost · ~7% return-on-cost |
| Office & retail | ~108,900 SF; office return-on-cost ~5%, adaptive reuse ~7% |
| Total estimated value | ~$160M across residential, office, and retail |
| Parking | ~300 stalls; 1.2-1.5 per unit; surface, not structured |
| 2nd Street | Reopening engineered; rebuild expected late 2024 |
| URA grant program | 20% match, $300K max (panel urged raising it) |
Source: ULI Northwest, West Salem Industrial Redevelopment Technical Assistance Panel Report, July 2022. Figures are the panel's illustrative estimates and differ from our current program and underwriting.
Read the full ULI report, then see how it informs our Activation Plan and Salem Mobility Concepts.