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.
SilverSphere Capital presents itself as a master-planned development firm led by Aaron Stickney and Josh Wagner, with a focus on mixed-use projects combining housing, retail and public space. On its website, the firm says it uses features such as solar, geothermal, green roofs and automated parking systems in some projects. The company also highlights Stickney’s decades in construction and development, but publicly available materials reviewed for this story offered limited independently verifiable detail on which SilverSphere projects have already been fully completed under the firm’s current banner, as opposed to work tied to its founders’ prior careers. That is not fatal to the Salem project, but it is a real due-diligence question for a development of this size.
Public records also leave several money questions unanswered. City records reviewed for this story show the project has land-use approval and required public-works conditions, but they do not identify a city subsidy package, tax-increment financing award or urban-renewal commitment tied specifically to the cannery redevelopment. Salem does have broader grant and incentive programs, and the city previously secured federal funding to study Front Street corridor improvements, which could eventually benefit the area, but that is different from direct project financing.
Ownership records help explain why the property has stayed central to local redevelopment talk for years. Marion County assessor records list Front Street Properties LLC as owner of 1105 Front St. NE, while city hearing documents identify Truitt Properties LLC and Front Street Properties LLC, tied to Peter, Lynda and Luciana Truitt, among the owners involved in the approved application. That suggests the site remains closely connected to the Truitt family entities even as the next development chapter is negotiated.
What happens next is simpler than the sales pitch. First, the property deal has to close. Then demolition and horizontal site work have to begin quickly enough to keep the entitlement clock from becoming a problem. If SilverSphere can clear those hurdles, Salem may finally see real movement on a riverfront property that has sat for years between industrial past and redevelopment promise.