by Jacob Espinoza

I asked Salem a simple question last week. 

Is this city a group project? A place where you get out what you put in? 

Ninety-nine of you voted and dozens wrote back.

If I could summarize the response in a sentence it would be, “Yes, but only if you can find the door.”

So this is a story about the “if.”

Most of the people who feel like Salem belongs to them are the ones who already found their way in. But the people who haven't yet gotten connected are left feeling like they're outside the club looking in.

The poll asked whether Salem is a group project. Of 99 votes, 47% picked "yes — you get out what you put in," and another 26% picked "mostly — but easier for some to break in than others." 

So…73% landed on some version of yes.

But that number is based on feelings, not facts. 

And the people who answer civic-newsletter polls tend to be the people already involved.

The more interesting data is in the roughly 30 people who wrote something underneath their vote. Because even a lot of the yes voters added a "but."

One of them, a 39-year resident who spent years as a journalist and then in state and local government, voted yes and added, "You're right that Salem asks something of you. It won't hand you a finished city. It hands you an unfinished one and waits to see if you show up." She continued, "The door doesn't open the same way for everyone. I've watched that firsthand, in newsrooms and government offices. Access has never been distributed evenly in this city, and some people still have to work much harder just to get in the room. That's the part of the group project I would add. The people already inside have a responsibility to notice who isn't there and ask why."

I emailed about a dozen of Salem's civic leaders about the group-project idea, and the replies were warm and near-unanimous. Fire Chief Dave Gerboth said what stands out to him is "how deeply people care about this community". The ones willing to show up, get involved, and do the work. Jimmy Jones, who runs the Mid-Willamette Valley Community Action Agency, put it flatly, "There are very few closed doors here."

Jason Unruh, who founded Hoopla 27 years ago, pushed back on the premise a little. He doesn't think you should have to work to enjoy Salem, but agreed the people who find the most fulfillment are the ones who invest.

Pedro Villagran, who moved to Salem from Texas, hosts tequila tastings, and works with community organizations like PODER, named the catch directly: "Access may be easier here than in a much larger city, but that doesn't mean everyone knows how to get into those rooms or feels like those doors are open to them."

Journalist Rachel Alexander, who's covered and volunteered in Salem for years, put it as a rule of thumb: "It's a hard city to be single in your 20s. It's a great city to be with a family in your 30s."

I also asked the question on Instagram, where my average audience is about 10 years younger than my email list. The replies came in fast and they were strikingly consistent. They weren’t angry, mostly just tired. 

Two complaints came up over and over. 

The first: There's nowhere to go. 

"There are very few third spaces and even less since Covid," wrote @dr_knit_flix_and_coffee_2.0. 

A "third place," if you haven't run into the term, is the sociologist's word for anywhere that isn't home and isn't work. For example, a café, a park, a rec center, a library lawn. These are the places where you bump into people without making a plan first. 

The replies kept naming the same gap. 

"There aren't really a lot of ways to meet people that don't involve drinking or religion," said @bodymindpbsoul. 

"There aren’t many spots for people to socialize without it being a bar," added @isabellaaa_heath. 

"It's mostly that everything shuts down super early unless it's a bar," said @evergreen_espresso.

The second: The circles are already closed. 

"Most people already have established connections, due to growing up here, etc.," wrote @harlow_and_molly. 

"Everything feels exclusive/already established/iykyk — groups, good hangout spots," said @alliarellano_. 

"People from here don’t need/want/interested in new friends. My friends are transplants too," wrote @wanderorbust. 

Or, from @madsanng: "It's like (a) small town mentality in a small city."

A 48-year-old who moved here from Arizona two and a half years ago, doesn't drink, and still hasn't found her footing, put it plainly: "People here are very kind, but they are not very friendly... Moving here has been really hard." She keeps hearing about events after they're over. She feels like she gets treated like an outsider over an out-of-state area code. Her adult kids haven't made friends either.

This is aligned to Rachel Alexander's line: “hard to be single here, easy to have a family here.” Salem's social life runs through kids, churches, and connections made decades ago. If you arrive without those, the built-in on-ramps aren't built for you. 

A reader (and friend) named Valerie, a transplant raising two kids, wrote an entire essay making the point: if you're Christian, she said, Salem is "remarkably smooth" because faith networks hand you an instant community, and if you're not, "that built-in roadmap does not exist." 

Her conclusion reads almost like a challenge to my headline. In Salem, "you cannot passively wait to be adopted into a social circle."

I once asked a group of people why they don’t show up to events. The most common response was, “I’ve never been invited.” 

Salem is a city where people will attend an event they are invited to, but scroll past a flyer online about the same event. 

One anonymous poll responder said, "Salem is a group project where some people are invited and others aren't. Everyone should be invited."

That's the answer to the question in the headline. Salem is a group project. The 73% aren't wrong. But our project seems to have three kinds of people in it: the ones who show up, the ones who got the invite and the ones who didn't.

Right now a lot of Salemites are in that third group, and they're not refusing to do the work. They're asking where the work happens, when the doors are open past 8 p.m., and how you meet anyone whose social circle didn't close in high school.

Councilor Linda Nishioka framed the imperfections not as things to accept but as "exactly where the group project comes in." 

If that's true, then the gap called out in the survey (no third spaces, closed circles, no roadmap for the non-religious, the single, the newly arrived) isn't a reason the group-project idea fails. It's the assignment.

So yes. Salem is full of people waiting to be invited. 

The question is who's going to do the inviting.