The City of Cleveland is asking developers and other organizations to propose plans for a dozen buildings the school district is shuttering at the end of this month.
The city and board of education are partnering on plans to reuse 18 publicly owned school buildings that will close. Five of those buildings will stay in public use for now either as district-owned properties used for administrative offices or as temporary classroom space; others could be swapped with the city for use as fire stations or public safety training buildings.
Throughout February, the city hosted meetings in neighborhoods where the schools are located, asking residents in neighborhoods where buildings are closing what they’d like to see. The responses varied. Some neighborhood residents were more interested in seeing old schools transformed into housing, others preferred non-housing reuse projects like community or youth centers.
The 12 schools included in the “request for qualifications,” or RFQ, are:
- Adlai Stevenson School
- Alfred A. Benesch School
- Bolton Elementary School
- Dike School of the Arts
- Hannah Gibbons School
- Kenneth Clement Boys’ Leadership Academy
- Louisa May Alcott Elementary School
- Mary Church Terrell Elementary School
- Michael R. White School
- Charles A. Mooney Intermediate School
- Tremont Montessori School
- Collinwood High School
What is the city looking for?
In the lead up to putting out this call, city planners conducted a number of resident engagement sessions and opened up a survey reaching more than 200 residents.
The biggest concern they heard was that neighbors did not want to see these buildings sit empty, Matt Moss, who works for the city and is running point on the school building reuse process, told Signal Cleveland. There are still close to a dozen empty school buildings Cleveland left over from past closures.
The request for projects put out by the city is relatively open-ended; the city and CMSD don’t have specific intentions for any particular site, rather are looking for projects that might be a good fit. Those can range from affordable housing to a community center.
The city will prioritize projects that reuse the existing buildings, have opportunities for community ownership, support children and youth given the past legacy of these buildings, and are responsive to the community feedback the city collected ahead of time.
In the past, school buildings have been transformed into parks, affordable senior housing, a manufacturing training center and more expensive market-rate housing.
How will the process work?
The city will host site visits at the buildings from June 10 to 19. Interested organizations need to submit a letter of intent by June 5 to RSVP for those visits. It will also release an FAQ and hold a webinar later in June for interested organizations.
Final proposal submissions are due June 30. After that, a combination of officials from different city offices ranging from city planners to staffers who are tasked with evaluating the financial workability of any proposal and officials from CMSD will also be involved will evaluate the projects. The group will score each project based on the rubric in the RFQ document.
A short list of developers will be selected by mid-July, and final decisions will be made by Aug. 7.
If a proposal is accepted, Cleveland City Council and the CMSD school board would need to vote to transfer the property to the city, which would then sell it to the developer, though the details and timeline for what comes after selection would be hashed out between the developer and the city.
Alternatively, in some cases, the school district may decide to do a “sale leaseback” where it sells the property to the developer and then leases back parts of it for educational uses. At the end of the day, who owns the buildings and what happens to them is dependent on how the school board votes.
The city also plans to create a list of “qualified developers” based on the vetting process, regardless of whether they are selected for a specific site. The designation will qualify them to begin negotiations on other city-owned sites as well. The qualified developers list comes from a combination of need and opportunity.
“We’ve done a lot of work for the RFQ, so we were thinking: Can we use this as a tool to identify developers for other sites?” Moss told Signal Cleveland.
What resources exist to help these projects happen?
Redeveloping school buildings can be a challenging and lengthy process because interested organizations or individuals often have trouble getting the funding for costly renovations, especially in neighborhoods that have historically been disinvested in.
The city is trying to take that into consideration with flexibility in what it’s looking for, Moss said. That means it’s also open to organizations or developers who might be interested in leasing a building as opposed to buying it outright. It is also willing to consider, in some cases, negotiating the sale price of the land below market value.
Other districts that have dealt with empty school buildings, like Kansas City, found success when they adopted a strategy that was flexible and prioritized reuse over sale, Signal Cleveland found.
The city will offer some incentives to help with the financing of these projects. That could include residential tax abatements or grants from the Cleveland Housing Investment Fund for affordable housing projects. In addition, other supports, like a program to help subsidize construction costs, could apply to some reuse projects. A full list of potential incentives is included in the RFQ.
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Is being involved in school building reuse only limited to developers?
The city has been pretty explicit that it is open to including as many organizations and groups interested in reusing these buildings as possible, not only traditional developers.
Moss said that it is encouraging other organizations that might be interested in providing programming out of a reused property or being involved in the reuse process in some way to submit letters of interest by June 5.
The city has also already been working to match interested organizations with developers that might be able to take on these redevelopment projects.
Last week, it held a “matchmaking session” that was attended by a wide range of organizations, including developers that worked to turn the former Nathanial Hawthorne school into The Hawthorne, a 37-unit apartment building. Also attending were nonprofits like Starting Point, which supports child care providers, and community development corporations like Famicos Foundation.
Site visits are also open to any group interested in reuse regardless of whether or not they have a development background, Moss told Signal Cleveland.
What about community input?
Before releasing this call for proposals, the city conducted community engagement with residents. It compiled this feedback into community engagement reports. These reports are neighborhood-based rather than school-specific.
The city is asking proposals to include community feedback, and the rubric will also score projects on how well they align with the community desires for each site.
The city will also require selected developers to sign an agreement with the city and/or CMSD that includes responsibilities like sticking to a development timeline and managing community engagement throughout the process.
