- June 29, 2026
- By Maggie Haslam
For most U.S. cities, a public school is as multifunctional as a Swiss Army knife. Beyond a place for learning history and algebra, schools often double as disaster shelters, host community meetings, serve as neighborhood parks and polling sites, and even house food pantries.
Yet since 2000, thousands of public schools have been closed across the country, falling victim to aging buildings, the rise of charter schools, shrinking budgets and plunging birth rates.
These closures remove essential public services while creating fear and uncertainty for surrounding communities, said University of Maryland urban studies and planning Associate Professor Ariel Bierbaum.
Her new book, “Schools for Sale: Disinvestment, Dispossession, and School Building Reuse in Philadelphia,” co-authored with Julia McWilliams, Amy Bach and Elaine Simon and published on Friday by the University of Chicago Press, examines the social, environmental and political costs of school closures and different kinds of reuses, using one city as a case study.
The heart of the issue, they argue, is more than just the decision to close; it’s the aftermath: how an abandoned building impacts residents, who has a say in the property’s fate, and what that future will be. This is particularly important in neighborhoods that have endured decades of harm through race- and class-based policy decisions, said Bierbaum. A closed school building’s reuse is an opportunity to strengthen a community’s fabric—or fracture it.
“How we manage that public process of school closure and decisions around the life of the school after it closes, to ensure that those most impacted have a voice in reimagining its reuse and retain it as a public and civic good, really matters,” she said.
Below, Bierbaum offers five lessons on the wider impact of school closures:
When a neighborhood school closes, a piece of its identity goes with it. Schools are social anchors for communities, said Bierbaum; they can define a neighborhood’s identity and drive housing choice. They are also unique venues that integrate people across race and class and provide a place where kids and parents feel like they belong. “When a building becomes vacant it can broadly impact day-to-day dynamics of a place, the flow of people and opportunities for connection,” she said.
Abandoned buildings create environmental risk. “Schools that sit vacant are the schools in neighborhoods where underlying land values are not high enough to bear a market price,” said Bierbaum. These are communities that already experience neglect from city agencies, and school vacancies invite persistent dumping, overgrowth and other environmental hazards.
In Philadelphia, school district administrators dismissed residents’ alternative proposals for reuse because they desperately wanted to get the buildings off their books. “They ceased to be public goods, they were financial lines in a spreadsheet,” she said.
Civic participation can take a hit. Research from Sally Nuamah on school closures in Chicago and Philadelphia, Bierbaum said, indicated that residents who felt demoralized or alienated during the school closure process were less likely to participate in other forms of civic and political endeavors. “Local public schools are often the first entry space for families who aren’t necessarily engaged politically, and it's often where they get their feet wet in advocacy.”
Community health can suffer. School yards, tracks and basketball courts see action at all hours, particularly where recreation space is scarce, said Bierbaum. When schools close, the accessibility of open space can shift dramatically for area residents. “Schools can fill an important role for supporting physical and mental health, a problem that often doesn’t come to the attention of city or park planners until after a closing,” she said.
For marginalized communities, closures are a pile-on. Inequalities that have historically segregated communities set the groundwork for disinvestment in schools and eventual closures, said Bierbaum. If residents don’t feel part of the process of determining the new use of a school building, where “connections are rich and deeply tied and very complex,” it can exacerbate generations of displacement.
Land is expensive in strong-market cities, she added, but school buildings offer an opportunity for land to be conveyed cheaply for reuse that serves residents, like affordable housing and or social service hubs.
Drawing from examples across the country, the authors point to alternative planning approaches that acknowledge the harms and loss that closures create, while also inviting communities to reimagine what public purpose these school buildings can serve in their next life as a civic asset.
“School reuse is not merely a building-level problem,” they wrote. “Rather, it is a challenge of collective city-making and an opportunity for achieving more just places.”