Salem Planning Board unanimously approves House of Athletes fitness studio at South Broadway plaza

SALEM -- June 9, 2026, Salem Planning Board unanimously approves House of Athletes fitness studio at Funhouse Plaza with reduced parking allowance. The board voted 7-0 Tuesday to grant a change of use and conditional use permit for the 18,000-square-foot second-floor space at 291 South Broadway, allowing the site's 236 existing parking spaces to stand in for the 409 spaces required under zoning. Applicant engineer David Jordan of Greenman-Pedersen Inc. presented a trip generation memo showing House of Athletes would produce roughly 50 percent fewer daily weekday trips than a retail tenant, and parking counts from October through November 2025 showed an average of about 150 of 236 spaces available throughout the day. Town Council representative Paul Pelletier criticized staff for allowing pending engineering, fire, and police reviews to remain incomplete at the time of the hearing, calling the delay costly to the applicant. The board dropped a proposed condition requiring classes be by appointment only after property manager Adam Abbas argued it could complicate future lending and leasing, instead relying on the applicant's own binding representations that no open gym would operate. The 10-condition approval requires a post-occupancy traffic monitoring report six to nine months after opening if deemed necessary by third-party consultant Steve Pernau, whose review of the traffic memo remains pending as a condition of the building permit.