There is not an easy way to write about what's happening in downtown Salem.

Every angle leaves something out.

Lead with the business owner who's scared to unlock her door and you risk flattening the people on the sidewalk into a threat.

Lead with compassion for the unhoused and you risk dismissing a 24-year-old who poured her savings into a downtown dream and now wakes at 6 a.m. afraid for her staff.

Both of those people are real.

Both angles are sympathetic.

And in Salem right now, the loudest voices want you to pick a side

Lexi McKay, 24, owns Style House & Co, a downtown store she opened at 22. In her statement, she described daily anxiety tied to safety. She said she checks her security cameras at 6 a.m. on days off to confirm employees can enter the store safely, and that she experiences panic attacks and physical symptoms of stress at work.

Her store has two entrances and she keeps one locked at all times, opening the second only when customers are entering or leaving. She attributed this to an incident in which a man stood outside the store waving a butcher knife while customers were inside. She said a 911 call during that incident did not produce a police response.

McKay has been threatened and verbally harassed inside the store, has had difficulty hiring and retaining staff who are uncomfortable working downtown, and spends just over $500 a month to park directly in front of her store rather than walk to a parking garage because she doesn’t feel safe at night. 

She said she was not asking for "perfection" but for herself, her employees, and her customers to feel safe.

The city's community satisfaction surveys track residents' sense of safety over time, and the recent trend is upward.

In September 2025, residents ranked homelessness and public safety as the top two issues facing the city. Most residents reported feeling safe in all parts of the city during the day, but most reported feeling unsafe downtown and in north/northeast Salem at night.

The February 2026 survey showed movement on several measures. Residents' feelings of safety at night improved in all areas of the city, with the largest increase in north/northeast Salem. Daytime safety held steady. Ratings of downtown livability rose six percentage points from September. Eight in ten residents reported visiting downtown in the past month, and those who had visited reported feeling safer downtown, day and night, than those who had not.

Salem police report the most calls for service in Downtown and Northeast Salem, and Salem Fire reports those same two areas as having the most medical calls.

The citywide trend is real. 

McKay's account is also real and has been echoed by many residents and business owners who live downtown. The gap between them, between what the survey average shows and what one business owner experiences on one block, is the thing worth understanding.

Ward 1 City Councilor Paul Tigan, whose family has lived in the downtown-adjacent CANDO neighborhood for more than ten years, put the lived experience plainly. "We've seen it all," he said, adding that he understands why some residents feel the current programs aren't enough, and added that he wants to do more too.

Frida Gamez-Ireton, who has worked downtown for six years and rented her own suite for the last two, said downtown Salem has improved and cleaned up somewhat over the past couple of years, even as the number of unhoused neighbors, many struggling with mental illness, has risen statewide and nationally. 

That increase, she said, has hurt foot traffic for downtown businesses. She said she and other businesses have tried to help where they can, and that she personally helped get one individual permanently housed, but that they cannot help everyone and that it is not always safe to try. She described people storming aggressively into her suite, threatening her and directing racial slurs at her simply for being visible through her window as they passed. She said she has had to call police and use a taser more than once.

In an email exchange, Jimmy Jones, executive director of Mid-Willamette Valley Community Action, responded to McKay's statement and to the broader debate about the city's unhoused population.

Jones said his organization's sympathies were with McKay and urged the city to look into her account that she called 911 and no one responded. He said people living and working downtown deserve to feel safe from threats and intimidation, and that this includes homeless people. He said the rhetoric describing the homeless as a criminal, violent, and dangerous presence in Salem, which he said has been heard repeatedly over the past two years, is feeding the fears McKay described. 

Anyone who commits a crime should be arrested and charged, he said, but an entire group should not be demonized for the actions of a few, "no more so than we would indict a race, religion, gender, or ethnicity for the actions of a handful of people." He called for greater understanding and empathy.

Jones said conditions that lead people into homelessness are likely to worsen before they improve, citing a rising cost of living and a thin social safety net.

He said he was most concerned by arguments that there is a short, simple solution in punishing, shaming, or removing people who are poor. 

"Poverty is incredibly uncomfortable. No one wants to witness it," he said. "Seeing poverty and suffering, for most people, compels action. And it suggests public responsibility. But for some people, that discomfort is too quickly and easily assuaged by the conviction that the poor are poor because there is something wrong with them; that if they would only cease their deviant ways, their criminal habits, their drug addictions, and be responsible for their own salvation, all of this would go away overnight. It is a moral argument coming from a place of fear of falling down into poverty and affirmation that the rest of us are better than 'them'."

The city addresses downtown conditions through Safe, Clean and Healthy Salem, which it describes as a community-led, City-supported strategy focused on the two areas that generate the most calls for police and emergency medical response: Downtown and Northeast Salem. The program has three components:

On October 13, 2025, the City Council approved a supplemental budget investment of $626,000 for this work, which the city attributes to community engagement, calls for service, and survey results.

The council carried that commitment into the next fiscal year. On June 22, 2026, it adopted the fiscal year 2027 city budget that funds the downtown safety work. 

The city is also participating in the Bloomberg-Harvard City Leadership Initiative, one of twelve cities selected for the initiative's collaboration track. City leaders are developing a cross-sector pilot on downtown public safety intended to bring together residents, businesses, service providers, and people with lived experience.

Mayor Julie Hoy said the city's biggest impact comes from having more staff physically present downtown. People living on the streets and in camps need help, she said, and those struggling with mental health and addiction need treatment, which will take both more places for people to go and state legislation to create accountability. 

At the city level, though, she pointed to the Homeless Services Team and Clean Team as proof that simply having people out in the community, in regular contact, is what's working.She said she also wants community service officers, who she said can build rapport with both housed and unhoused people, connect people to resources, and enforce local laws when necessary.

Mayor-elect and current City Councilor Vanessa Nordyke said the council has consistently made public safety its top budgetary priority, noting that the majority of the city's general fund, its nonrestricted dollars, goes to police and fire. She said the city has increased downtown police presence, doubled the size of the homeless services team, and added the REACH team.

Nordyke said the city would hire more officers if it could but currently has 16 vacancies, despite a hiring push in recent years that has been offset by retirements. She attributed part of the difficulty to a broader trend, saying young people are not entering policing at the rates they once did.

The most common request from frustrated residents and business owners is simple: more officers, more presence. But the city says it is already trying to hire and cannot fill the positions it has. Sixteen vacancies, even after a recent hiring push, and a national decline in people entering policing, mean that "just add more officers" runs into a wall the city cannot quickly remove.

That reframes the frustration. The slow pace downtown is not necessarily a sign that the city is unwilling. It can also reflect a labor shortage that no budget line solves overnight. Both can be true, and for someone standing behind a locked door, the distinction may feel academic, but it matters for understanding what comes next.

It is easy to read this as a fight between safety and compassion. The sources themselves don't line up that cleanly.

McKay said she was not asking for perfection, only for people downtown to feel safe. Jones said people who work downtown deserve to feel safe from threats, and that anyone who commits a crime should be arrested and charged. He also said that protection extends to the unhoused. The officials, across the board, paired enforcement with services, more police presence alongside the REACH team, co-response, and connecting people to resources.

In other words, the loudest version of this debate frames it as businesses versus the homeless. The people actually speaking for each side mostly didn't. They disagreed on emphasis and on rhetoric, which is a real disagreement, but nearly everyone here wants both a safer downtown and a humane response to the people living on its streets.

The city has added police and cleaning staff, launched a co-response pilot, and committed $626,000 in supplemental funding, and survey data from September 2025 to February 2026 shows residents' sense of safety improving across the city. McKay's account describes conditions that, in her experience, have not improved at the street level. A staffing shortage limits how fast the city can add the presence many residents are asking for. And Jones cautions that how the city talks about its unhoused population will shape whether the response is rooted in empathy or in fear.

City officials have said publicly that several of these efforts are pilots and that their results still need to be demonstrated over time. The gap between the improving averages and the unchanged doorstep is the measure to watch.