Downtown Salem’s shuttered JC Penney will continue sitting vacant after a local real estate investment group announced it’s pulling out of a plan to purchase and renovate the building.

Back Line Real Estate, the firm led by Salem real estate investor Nat Borchers, announced in a statement Monday it would not move forward with buying the building at 305 Liberty St. N.E., several months after publicly announcing the pending deal.

“While we had high hopes for transforming the space into a vibrant community hub, our evaluations revealed that the building requires significant investment to bring it up to code and meet the quality standard that Salem deserves. We worked with the sellers to find fair solutions and shared detailed estimates to make the project viable; however, we were unable t

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