Schools for Sale: Disinvestment, Dispossession, and School Building Reuse in Philadelphia

• In Event: School Shuttering and the Fight for Black Public Educational Access, Improvement, and Protection

Abstract

Using Philadelphia as a site, this paper delves into reuse of school buildings closed a decade ago to understand how different forms of reuse or vacancy simultaneously reflect and shape the racialized dynamics of neighborhoods in which they are embedded and larger urban transformations. We show that the slow violence of disinvestment and dispossession wrought on Black communities through school closures does not end when buildings are shuttered.

The paper draws from a larger project based on nine years of ethnographic fieldwork across three closed school communities, spatial analysis of the city’s conditions over time, and photographic documentation of three sites of vacancy and demolition. These multiple analytical modes provide a layered account of the localized impacts brought by regimes of contemporary urban governance organized by racialized logics of austerity, market-based competition, and retraction of public goods. The paper concludes with a typology for the spectrum of school reuses. Based on a theory of “reparative planning” (Williams, 2020), it offers considerations to ensure that those most harmed by closures—Black communities—are central to processes of imagining new possible futures for these buildings.

The analysis is grounded in interdisciplinary scholarship from urban studies, education, planning, and geography to explain how race, capital, and place interact to influence the trajectory of closed schools and surrounding neighborhoods. It is also grounded in a collective awareness and humility about how the authors’ layered identities as White women, mothers, and scholars shape the contours of this inherently partial contribution.

While there are patterns around reuse and vacancy, what happens after closure is highly situated and contextual, shaped by long histories of racialized disinvestment and dispossession that manifest at the neighborhood level. Understanding what happens to these schools post-closure is also understanding processes that hinge on racial capitalism, or how “racial hierarchies serve as a basis for historical valuations of people and places” (Dantzler, 2021, p. 115). These processes are not new or unique to school closure but rather mirror the anti-Blackness of capital that has historically constructed new spaces, new imaginations, and new definitions of consumers, often under the veil of “public interest,” to the detriment of Black communities in the United States (Bledsoe & Wright, 2019; Vale, 2013).

What is new is how contemporary decisions about school closure and building disposition implicate public education—a lauded public good—in these destructive processes. School buildings are transformed from public assets into privatized financial assets when they are sold and redeveloped. What happens to closed schools is a refraction of the private real estate market, shaped by racialized capital flows that dispossess and displace Black communities from the places and institutions that they have created over time. As districts turn again to school closures, this analysis highlights the links between place, race, and education amidst broader urban transformations, a necessary understanding for advocates, planners, educators, politicians, and scholars as they reconceptualize the meaning of the public realm.

Authors

• Ariel H Bierbaum, University of Maryland

• Julia A. McWilliams, University of Pennsylvania

• Amy J. Bach, University of Texas - El Paso

• Elaine Simon, University of Pennsylvania