By Alyn Turner
When districts announce school closures, the framing is almost always educational: declining enrollment, underutilized buildings, operating costs, academic performance. But for the communities where these schools sit—particularly historically marginalized Black and Brown neighborhoods—closures aren’t experienced primarily as education policy. They’re experienced as land-use policy that reshapes neighborhood futures.
Research across multiple cities shows that what happens to school buildings after closure—and how quickly—can determine whether neighborhoods experience closures as managed transition or compounding disinvestment. The building question isn’t secondary to the student question. It’s a parallel track with profound implications for community stability, safety, and whether closures deepen or interrupt cycles of neighborhood decline.
Schools as Anchor Institutions: What Gets Lost
Before examining what happens after closure, it’s worth understanding what schools are in communities—particularly communities that have experienced sustained disinvestment.
Researchers studying Catholic elementary school closures in Chicago tracked what happened to surrounding neighborhoods after schools closed. Even after controlling for demographic changes and other predictors of neighborhood decline, they found consistent patterns: lower social cohesion, lower collective efficacy (the shared capacity of neighbors to act together for common good), and higher perceived disorder.
These results are not minor. Social cohesion and collective efficacy predict everything from crime rates to economic development to health outcomes. Schools function as gathering places, employment anchors, and symbols of institutional commitment. When they close, communities lose more than a building—they lose a node in the social infrastructure that holds neighborhoods together.
In her ethnography of Chicago’s South Side school closures, sociologist Eve Ewing documented how communities described schools using kinship language—places where multiple generations attended, where family histories were embedded, and where teachers and peers were considered family. Ewing also introduces the concept of “institutional mourning”: the social and emotional experience of losing a shared institution, especially for communities already socially marginalized and thus more reliant on the institution’s presence.
This matters for policy because it explains why closure announcements so often trigger intense community resistance that district leaders experience as disproportionate to the “objective” metrics driving closure decisions. When administrators see underutilized buildings, communities see the removal of an anchor that symbolizes—and materially contributes to—neighborhood stability.
The Disinvestment Signal vs. The Gentrification Pattern
Research on how closures affect neighborhood economic health produces seemingly contradictory findings. This apparent contradiction reveals an important truth: context determines pathway.
- A national study examining 2000-2010 data found a statistically significant negative association between school closure rates and median housing values—closures appeared to signal neighborhood disinvestment. Critically, this effect was larger in neighborhoods with higher proportions of Black residents. This is difficult to interpret as causal, though, because closures often concentrate in weaker housing markets to begin with.
- Ewing’s Chicago research situates closures within the city’s longer history of racialized housing policy: restrictive covenants, redlining, and later public housing demolition that reduced the number of children in certain neighborhoods, which then became justification for closing schools. The closures weren’t happening to stable communities—they were happening as communities were being actively restructured through housing policy.
- But other research documents a different pattern: closures occurring as part of gentrification In these contexts, when new residents move into historically divested areas—often residents with fewer children or children who attend private schools—public school enrollment declines. This can put neighborhood schools at risk of closure precisely as housing costs rise.
The takeaway for districts: closures don’t happen in a vacuum. They occur within existing neighborhood trajectories—and they can either interrupt or accelerate those trajectories depending on what happens next.
The Building Vacancy Problem: Scale and Persistence
The research reveals an uncomfortable truth that challenges the fiscal rationale often driving closures: districts struggle to move closed school buildings into productive reuse, and holding vacant buildings is expensive.
A 2013 study by the Pew Charitable Trusts examined Philadelphia and 11 other large districts. Across these 12 systems, districts had successfully sold, leased, or repurposed 267 properties since 2005. That sounds like progress until you see the other number: 301 unused sites still sat on the market at the end of 2012.
The fiscal implications matter. Pew found that net operating savings from closing a school building are typically under $1 million—because districts must continue paying for security, maintenance, and insurance on vacant buildings while searching for buyers or tenants. The longer buildings sit vacant, the more those holding costs accumulate and the more the expected savings from closure evaporate.
But the neighborhood costs are even steeper. Research on blight remediation shows that vacant buildings signal disorder, attract criminal activity, and depress nearby property values. When school buildings—often among the largest structures in residential neighborhoods—sit empty for months or years, they don’t just fail to generate revenue. They actively harm surrounding communities.
What Replaces the School Matters
Research on Chicago’s 2013 mass closures reveals that post-closure building outcomes shape neighborhood safety trajectories. Researcher Noli Brazil examined what happened to crime rates depending on whether closed school buildings were merged with existing schools, left vacant, or repurposed for non-school uses.
The findings were striking and specific:
- Merged schools (where displaced students were reassigned to nearby schools and buildings were combined) showed the biggest increases in nonviolent crime. These increases persisted over time and occurred at multiple distances from the school. Brazil interprets this as evidence of poorly planned reassignments—students forced to cross neighborhood or territorial boundaries without adequate support.
- Vacant and repurposed buildings, by contrast, were associated with decreased These effects were more spatially localized and relatively short-term, but they’re important: they suggest that removing student activity from buildings where students faced safety risks (or where buildings attracted crime) can reduce neighborhood crime—at least temporarily.
The crucial variable isn’t closure itself. It’s what happens to the building and how students are reassigned.
The Reuse Pathway: Charter Schools and Policy Tensions
When districts do successfully repurpose closed buildings, research shows that charter schools are the most common reuse—accounting for over 40% of repurposed properties in the Pew study. Housing and other public/nonprofit uses make up most of the remainder.
This creates a policy tension that districts rarely address publicly. When a traditional public school closes due to declining enrollment and the building becomes a charter school, two dynamics can unfold:
First, if the charter succeeds in attracting students who might otherwise attend nearby district schools, it can further depress district enrollment—potentially putting additional public schools at risk of closure.
Second, community members who fought against the closure of “their” neighborhood school often experience charter reuse as adding insult to injury: their school was deemed not viable, but the building itself clearly remains viable for education—just not district-run education.
These tensions are particularly acute in Black communities that have experienced closures. The shift from district to charter governance can be perceived as privatization of a public asset in neighborhoods where public institutions have historically been the primary mechanism for community voice and stability.
Policy-Produced Outcomes: What Districts Can Control
The research converges on a clear message: neighborhood impacts after closures are not inevitable—they are policy-produced through implementation choices.
Districts that move buildings quickly into beneficial reuse—or at minimum rapidly stabilize and maintain them—can prevent the vacancy-driven harms. Districts that allow buildings to sit empty for years compound disinvestment in communities already experiencing displacement and disinvestment.
Similarly, the social cohesion losses aren’t automatic. They’re mediated by whether districts pair closures with neighborhood reinvestment, whether communities have voice in what replaces schools, and whether the post-closure period includes intentional efforts to maintain or rebuild community infrastructure.
So What Can Districts Do?
The evidence base points toward specific actions that recognize closures as neighborhood policy requiring cross-sector coordination:
- Create Cross-Sector Coalitions for Closure-Impacted Areas
School closures affect more than schools. They affect housing stability, public safety, transportation access, and community services. Districts could consider convening coalitions that include city government, county agencies, regional planning bodies, and philanthropic partners to align existing initiatives—housing stabilization, safe routes, parks and recreation, violence prevention, youth employment, library and health services—around neighborhoods losing schools.
This isn’t about creating new programs. It’s about coordinating what already exists so closures don’t happen in isolation from other neighborhood supports.
- Pair Each Closure with a Neighborhood Reinvestment Package
Because closures function as land-use policy, they require land-use responses. Districts could work with municipal and county partners to develop publicly specified, time-bound reinvestment packages for each closure-impacted neighborhood: what investments, which agencies, when delivered.
This serves both practical and symbolic functions. Practically, it can offset some negative effects of losing a school. Symbolically, it demonstrates that closure doesn’t mean abandonment—that communities remain priorities for public investment.
- Adopt a “No Limbo” Building Policy with Enforceable Milestones
Given cross-city evidence that buildings often sit vacant for years, districts could adopt policies that prevent limbo status:
Within 30-60 days of closure, every site has a publicly posted plan covering:
- Security protocols and response times
- Maintenance schedules (landscaping, winterization, repairs)
- Interim activation strategies (temporary uses that prevent blight)
- Community contact for issues or concerns
Reuse milestones with enforcement:
- RFP release deadlines
- Proposal review and selection dates
- Contract execution timelines
- Penalties for purchaser/lessee nonperformance
The goal is to eliminate the gap between “closed school” and “productive reuse” where neighborhood harm concentrates.
- Be Transparent About the True Fiscal Picture
Districts could publicly acknowledge that net operating savings from closure are often modest (typically under $1 million per building) once holding costs are factored in. This honesty can shift the conversation from “closures save money” to “closures may save some money if we move buildings into reuse quickly and if that reuse doesn’t further depress district enrollment.”
- Engage Communities in Reuse Planning Before Closure
Rather than closing buildings and then seeking community input on reuse, districts and their partners could engage neighborhoods in reuse planning during the announcement period. This doesn’t mean communities have veto power over closure decisions already made. It means they have meaningful voice in what comes next—which can reduce the sense of procedural injustice and create more community-beneficial outcomes.
- Address the Charter Reuse Tension Explicitly
If districts anticipate charter schools will be likely tenants for closed buildings, they might consider addressing this possibility transparently during closure planning. This might include:
- Analyzing enrollment impacts if charters occupy buildings
- Creating community preference policies for charter applications
- Establishing performance expectations for charter tenants
- Being clear about the rationale for charter vs. other reuses
Avoiding the conversation doesn’t make the tension disappear. It just means communities experience it as betrayal when it unfolds.
- Use Long-Term Enrollment Planning to Prevent Future Closures
Tools like the Bellwether Education Partners declining enrollment toolkit can help districts diagnose enrollment drivers, align strategy to community goals, and make decisions that don’t inadvertently trigger further decline. For example, cutting the very programs (arts, athletics, career-technical education) that attract families can accelerate enrollment loss—creating a self-fulfilling prophecy that requires more closures.
If they haven’t already, districts should invest in demographic forecasting and scenario planning that looks 5-10 years ahead, allowing proactive responses (consolidations, boundary changes, program relocations) rather than reactive crisis closures.
The Bigger Picture
School closures are education policy. But in the neighborhoods where they happen—particularly historically divested Black and Brown communities—they’re also housing policy, economic development policy, and public safety policy. The building doesn’t stop mattering when the students leave. In many ways, it matters more, because what happens next determines whether closures deepen pathways of disinvestment or create space for community-beneficial reinvestment.
The research shows both outcomes are possible. Closures followed by prolonged vacancy, community exclusion, and lack of coordinated reinvestment produce measurable harm: reduced social cohesion, increased crime, housing value decline, and erosion of trust in public institutions.
But closures paired with swift reuse, community engagement, and cross-sector reinvestment can interrupt these pathways. The difference isn’t the closure itself. It’s the implementation architecture built around it.
For education leaders and community advocates, this reframing creates both challenge and opportunity. The challenge: closure implementation can’t be purely an education department function. It requires coordination across city agencies, engagement with community development sectors, and long-term commitments that extend beyond typical school planning horizons.
The opportunity: districts that recognize closures as neighborhood policy can build implementation frameworks that hold both system sustainability and community stability as co-equal goals. Not efficiency or community harm, but efficiency designed to prevent community harm.
The buildings will outlast the students who once filled them. The question is whether they’ll outlast them as symbols of abandonment or as foundations for community futures.
This is the second article in a four-part series examining what happens after school closure decisions. Coming next: where displaced students actually land and what they lose in the transition.
Research Sources
This article synthesizes findings from the following peer-reviewed studies and research reports:
Community cohesion and anchor institutions:
- Brinig, M. F., & Garnett, N. S. (2010). Catholic schools, urban neighborhoods, and education reform. Notre Dame Law Review, 85(3), 887-953.
- Ewing, E. L. (2018). Ghosts in the schoolyard: Racism and school closings on Chicago’s South Side. University of Chicago Press.
Housing values and gentrification:
- Brazil, N. (2019). The effects of public elementary schools closures on neighborhood housing values in U.S. metropolitan areas, 2000-2010. In E. M. Duncan-Shippy (Ed.), Shuttered schools: Race, community, and school closures in American cities. Emerald Publishing.
- Pearman, F. A., II. (2019). Gentrification, geography, and the declining enrollment of neighborhood schools. Urban Education, 1-33.
Building vacancy and reuse:
- Dowdall, E., & Warner, S. (2013). Shuttered public schools: The struggle to bring old buildings new life. The Pew Charitable Trusts, Philadelphia Research Initiative.
Crime and neighborhood safety:
- Brazil, N. (2020). Effects of public school closures on crime: The case of the 2013 Chicago mass school closure. Sociological Science, 7, 128-151.
- Kondo, M. C., Keene, D., Hohl, B. C., MacDonald, J. M., & Branas, C. C. (2015). A difference-in-differences study of the effects of a new abandoned building remediation strategy on safety. PLOS ONE, 10(7), e0129582.
Community voice and procedural justice:
- Shiller, J. (2018). The disposability of Baltimore’s Black communities: A participatory action research project on the impact of school closings. The Urban Review, 50, 23-44.