School Sites Could Provide Ample Space for Affordable Housing

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The real estate of public schools could be an important piece of the solution to the affordable housing crisis in California. The State of California has 10,668 free sites, made up of 10,521 K-12 public schools, 114 community colleges, 23 state colleges, and 10 university campuses. A new report from The UCLA Ziman Center for Real Estate looks at how these sites could provide space for affordable housing development, particularly for teachers and students, demographic groups that are often the most susceptible to rent increases.

“We have to address the affordable housing crisis from as many directions as we possible can. I am particularly focused on looking at ways that we don’t displace anyone directly at least, and in direct displacement also,” Dana Cuff, director at CityLAB – UCLA and the author of the paper, tells GlobeSt.com.

According to Cuff, after preliminary research, these sites seemed like obviously places for affordable housing. They are already available, free spaces and are evenly spread throughout the state. “After we were successful in doing some design research, it seemed like one of the obvious, hidden-in-plain site locations were the more than 10,000 schools that we have across the State of California, which are pretty evenly distributed throughout the state,” she says. “Thousands of affordable units could be built without removing any recreational space on the school sites.”

Each of the sites that CityLab evaluated had space for affordable housing, and because it is already in the public domain, it is essentially free land, benefitting both stakeholders and the public. “The land is already in the public domain, so we can in effect make sure that this land stays in the affordable range by only permitting affordable housing to be built,” says Cuff. ‘Not every school site has an obvious place to put housing, but every school site that we looked at could be adapted to add affordable housing onto the campus, essentially making mixed-use sites out of single-use sites for educational use only.”

School sites generally have untapped space at the edge of campuses, which would ultimately also be ideal locations for housing developments without disrupting the school. “The main locations for housing would be at the edges, where there is often surface parking and parts of the property that aren’t used any more,” says Cuff. “The reason that this is really a design project as well as a policy project is because each site is unique and the neighborhood is unique.”

Using school land sites will essentially create mixed-use sites throughout the state and help evolve to the post-suburban city landscape that CityLab has imagined. The current sprawling single-use school campus—which was largely developed in the post-war era—is outdate for current needs. While utilizing schools sites for affordable housing development is just one prong of what should be a complex solution to affordable housing, it is just the beginning of a shift in how we look at real estate. “We are just beginning to become more opportunistic in how we think about affordable housing. Surely the first approach should be the naked land that school districts own already and don’t have any schools on them,” says Cuff. “I think that schools have understandably been in a defensive stance. They don’t want to give up land or classrooms for fear that they won’t give is back. It is a scarcity model that there isn’t enough space for schools and housing, but that comes from an old fashioned model.”