Salem

How much are you attached to the place where you live? A book I've just started reading, Melody Warnick's "This is Where You Belong: The Art and Science of Loving the Place You Live," lets you find out by answering 24 simple questions -- which I've shared below. I answered 21 of the 24 questions "true." So I'm attached to Salem, Oregon (my wife and I have a Salem address, though we live in a rural neighborhood about six miles from the city limits). Warnick says: The more times you answer "true," the more likely you are to be attached…

Yesterday my wife and I saw what sort of new house $1,147,000 will buy in Salem. Also, what $600,000, and $875,000 will buy you.  There were quite a few less expensive houses in the 2016 Salem Tour of Homes, but we zeroed in on several of the spendier ones in the south part of town -- where we live. Our first stop was Torrey Pines Drive S, near Illahee, where we reverentially entered the million dollar home. I'd never been in this particular part of town. It's filled with new'ish nice houses in what the Tour brochure said is "one…

"If you designed a new downtown, what would it look like?" This week's Rapid Responder feature in the Statesman Journal asked a good question.  The answers from people who live in Salem and some nearby towns were equally good. Below I've excerpted cogent parts of the responses (leaving out the names of the people), arranging them in categories. Some responses could have gone in several categories, so I picked the one that seemed the best fit. I'll comment on the Numero Uno Most Frequently Mentioned category -- Bike and pedestrian friendly, streetscaped, fewer lanes -- after the responses. Diverse vibrant energyDiversity... venue for…

Like I noted a few months ago in "Is Statesman Journal Best of Mid-Valley contest really about 'best'," the only guaranteed winner in this annual event is... the Statesman Journal. The biggest winner in the Best of the Mid-Valley contest has to be the Statesman Journal itself. The newspaper sells ads that appear with the category being voted on. Here's a few 2016 screenshots....A bit of Googling revealed that "Best of..." contests are a lucrative moneymaker for newspapers. Second Street, which the Statesman Journal is using for its Best of the Mid-Valley contest, talks about this in "How Record Journal…

Yesterday Dylan Chavez, president of the Salem Chapter of the AIA (American Institute of Architects), gave a fascinating Salem City Club talk about Influence in Design, "the nature and significance of architecture in our community." His slide presentation included interesting observations about what's good and bad in Salem's built environment. To semi-quote Madonna, we are material beings living in a material world -- not ethereal entities who can float through life blissfully unaffected by the physical stuff that surrounds us. Likewise, Chavez said that architecture is the background in which we live. Why does it matter? Because the background influences our behavior, both…

For a long time I've written about local Salem, Oregon political issues on this blog. Recently I started a new blog, Salem Political Snark. That's where new posts about Salem politics can be found. If you're a Facebook user, give the Salem Political Snark Facebook page a "like." Then you'll get new posts in your Facebook feed. Scroll down for new HinesSight posts.

For a while I'll continue to plug my Salem Political Snark posts here on HinesSight, where I've done my political ranting until recently.  Eventually I hope that HinesSight readers interested in local politics get into the habit of making Salem Political Snark a regular visit in the blogosphere. Giving the Salem Political Snark Facebook page a "Like" is a good way to keep track of new Snarks if you're a Facebook user. Feedly is another good way.  Anyway, here's two new Salem Political Snark posts: "My artistic critique of 2016 Salem political yard signs""Mean-spirited letter to editor cheapens Salem mayoral…

Last night I spent 3 1/2 hours of my increasingly short senior citizen life at one of the most irritatingly unproductive government meetings I've ever seen -- a Salem City Council meeting (or maybe a work session) on plans for a new police facility. You can read all about it over on my new Salem Political Snark blog. I wrote much of the "Salem City Council struggles with police facility and earthquake-safety questions" before the meeting, knowing that I'd want to focus on watching the Villanova-North Carolina national championship game when I got home. Then I updated the post on…

Another day, another post on my new Salem Political Snark blog: "City of Salem officials acting stupid on earthquake safety." It starts out with... Gosh, maybe this is too radical an idea for Salem's Mayor and City Council, but it sure seems like a "Public Safety" bond voters will be asked to approve in the November election should actually keep the public safe -- rather than being a massive waste of taxpayer money to build an overpriced Police Palace. A few years ago our sometimes-wise City officials recognized a scary truth: City Hall and the Library are almost surely going to collapse…

Political junkie that I am, the notion of having a purely political blog has rattled around in my old-man mind for a while.  When the name Salem Political Snark joined the rattling mental clutter, I thought DAMN, GOT TO DO IT! So, I have. Here's the clickable links for the JPEG image above.  Blog: salempoliticalsnark.comFacebook page: Salem Political Snark ("Like" it, please, please, please)Twitter feed: @SnarkySalem Spread the word about Salem Political Snark.  I'm not doing this just because it is election season. Local politicians and public officials are always doing sleazy stuff, so I'm not worrying about running out of…

Ah, George Orwell would be so happy with T.J. Sullivan, a Chamber of Commerce mouthpiece who was selected in 2014 by Mayor Anna Peterson to chair the Blue Ribbon (is there any other color?) Task Force on the Police Facility. "Doublespeak," says Wikipedia, is a close relative of Orwell's "doublethink," a central concept in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four book. Doublespeak is language that deliberately obscures, disguises, distorts, or reverses the meaning of words. Doublespeak may take the form of euphemisms (e.g., "downsizing" for layoffs, "servicing the target" for bombing), in which case it is primarily meant to make the truth sound more palatable.…

Are the skybridges good or bad for downtown? That's a simplistic question. Like most things in life, the answer is, "They're both good and bad."  But streetscaping Salem's Historic District -- making the streets and sidewalks much more pedestrian and cyclist-friendly -- that's pretty much an All Good in my opinion. The Salem Breakfast on Bikes blog has an interesting post, "Skybridges as Pedestrian Displacement Systems: Shelter, but anti-Sidewalk." But another ingredient in the lack of foot traffic is the way the skybridges here suck people, energy, and life off of the street-level sidewalks and reinforce the blank walls and…

The title of this post captures a core theme of the conversation I had yesterday with John Southgate, a Portland consultant highly knowledgeable about downtown revitalization.  Along with Public Affairs Counsel staff, Southgate did most of the writing and research for the Salem 2025 report that I blogged about recently. I've since learned, by the way, that Salem businessman Larry Tokarski commissioned the Salem 2025 study, a fact not mentioned in the report. Why can't Salem get its act together?  The Salem 2025 report points to the same question in various ways. Here's some quotes: -- ...it is clear that…