A New Jersey development firm is preparing to take over one of Salem’s most visible stalled redevelopment sites, with plans to turn the former Truitt Brothers cannery property on Front Street NE into a large mixed-use riverfront district centered on housing, retail and public access to the Willamette River. City records show the land-use approvals for the project remain in place, giving the new team a live path to move forward if the property sale closes as expected.
The approved plan for the 13.66-acre site allows three six-story mixed-use residential buildings with a total of 382 housing units, along with a food hall, a winery building, a general-market building, on-site parking and a public riverfront path through the development. The city hearings officer approved the consolidated land-use application in October 2024, and the decision requires the riverfront path to be built as a 10-foot-wide multi-use path within a 15-foot easement. The site is in the Mixed-Use Riverfront zone and partly within the Willamette Greenway Overlay Zone.
The project had previously been advanced under developer Trent Michels and The Future of Neighborhood Development LLC, which is still listed as the applicant in the city’s approval documents. Those approvals do not automatically transfer the identity of the applicant, but they do preserve the underlying entitlements for the site as long as deadlines are met or extensions are granted. For the greenway permit and subdivision approval, the current exercise deadline is October 22, 2026. Several other approvals run to October 22, 2028…