Salem's renewal has Boston roots

20 July 2001

Salem may not seem a lot like Boston: a fraction of its size and with a much better Halloween, the quaint seaside town seems an oasis far removed from the bigger city to its south.

But peer past the historic buildings and grand sailboats tucked in its harbor and one finds a city struggling with many of the same issues that Boston once had to confront. And in Salem's case, it's doing so with a mixture of homegrown ideas and programs first pioneered by Boston - and with Boston people, to boot.

Despite pockets of wealth, Salem is a diverse, blue-collar town. Over the last few decades its downtown has deteriorated and the city has lost much of its middle-class base. Combined with an unhappy transportation problem - there are no good roads in or out of Salem - it has experienced the same kind of decline that devastated cities around the country.

Coming into office three years ago, Salem Mayor Stanley Usovicz faced a potentially grim future. Rather than acquiesce, he decided to fight back.

Last summer Usovicz hired Tom Philbin, who for years worked for Boston Mayor Thomas Menino, to be his chief of staff. Philbin started to experiment with Boston's more effective programs.

One involved graffiti. Commercial and residential buildings in Salem were covered with graffiti, creating a sense of disrepair and blight. For some time the city had mulled over how to handle the problem, stymied by issues such as liability for city workers cleaning up privately owned property.

Boston's chief of basic city services, Mike Galvin, years earlier had tackled and solved just such issues. Philbin, with Galvin's blessing, implemented the same program in Salem down to using release forms developed by Boston's corporation counsel.

As in Boston, the program worked. Philbin is now planning to implement a residential street-sweeping program, also along the lines of one used in Boston's neighborhoods.

Usovicz was also a fan of Main Streets, the federally funded program used by Boston to revive its neighborhood business districts. The Salem Partnership, an economic development agency funded by the city and some large local businesses, committed monies to initiate the program in Salem. It hired Rosemary Powers, formerly head of South Boston's Main Street's program, as its executive director. (Ironically, Powers used to be a leading activist demanding that all city workers had to live in Boston. Although now working for Salem, she hasn't moved there.)

Implemented in two locations, downtown and a largely Latino neighborhood called the Point, Main Streets has improved facades, cleaned up commercial streets and worked to attract shoppers from the malls and back into the city. Powers hopes to implement soon a pushcart program along the lines of the one at Fanueil Hall.

Usovicz acknowledges the debt he owes to larger cities like Boston which, with greater resources, can develop and test the programs he has adopted in Salem. But Salem has some advantages as well: A small city can be less bureaucratic and often more creative.

Salem has been able to do some innovative things with its schools - such as creating one of the state's first year-round elementary schools, the brainchild of former School Superintendent Edward Curtin - that would be almost impossible in larger cities.

And it recently has been in the forefront of efforts to save subsidized housing developments from being converted to market-rate housing.

Like many cities, Salem has low-income housing developments built decades ago with federal money. Under the federal program, owners were required to keep rents low for 40 years, after which the restrictions would expire.

Across the state, these so-called expiring use restrictions have created a crisis as cities and towns face the prospect of thousands of units no longer being available for low-income tenants.

Usovicz went to court over one such property, Salem Heights. He hired James Gilbert, a transplant from Boston's South End. Gilbert was able to use state and local law to stop the conversion. This groundbreaking case may ultimately prove to be decisive statewide in efforts to keep those properties affordable.

On these and other issues, Salem's aggressive efforts to restore itself are proving a success. Once-empty storefronts are filling up. Downtown construction is booming, including a $100 million effort to expand the famed Peabody Essex maritime museum. Not only are commercial areas being revitalized but new housing construction is now under way. A city in danger of being caricatured as a real-life version of Spooky World is again becoming a place for residents.

Reviving the fortunes of any city means focusing on the basics: housing, business, quality of life concerns. That's what Salem is doing, using ideas both borrowed and new. The city still has many challenges ahead. But, once on a downhill slide, it is now moving up.