Who Killed the Neighborhood School?

New school designs really suck. It's mostly because they have to.

Jun 26, 2024

While my writing is anchored around housing, I dip into tangential topics from time to time. Architect Eric Kronberg once convinced me that most land use decisions are really about schools rather than housing. Of course, the idea of the neighborhood school remains elusive for all but a few of us. New schools, like every other aspect of the built environment, are sprawling. Everything about them. Where they are located (sprawl), and how they are located (sprawl).

And this creates a cascading series of problems. Kids can't walk to them. Stack lines are now needed. Acerage is necessary for the stack lines. Dozens of $500k buses must be purchased. Bus drivers must be hired. The bus drivers must have a union, the union must hire a boss, etc., all because we abandoned the neighborhood school. Modern life is just a series of bandaids on ever-growing gunshot wounds. The experience of checking out Durham's newest school did not help alleviate my despair. Here is the story.

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Over the January break, I toured Durham's New Northern High School. The school relocated to this brand new campus in 2023, where it is now situated off Roxboro Road, an NCDOT "stroad" in a placeless, treeless parking lot. Northern is now completely disconnected from any residential neighborhood. And as for the architecture? It looked more like a prison than a high school.

For all these accolades, at $96,000,000, Northern cost nearly twice as much as it was initially budgeted for.

I get that good people worked on this project, and it's a prideful school with a long history. I don't care to disparage any of that. But the city is now ramping up its effort to relocate its beloved, historic, urban (and unkempt) Durham School of the Arts to a new suburban campus; the failures of the New Northern High School development accelerates a few questions:

Why are we paying more but getting worse products?
What triggers such terrible design?
Is this really what we want? And how can we do better?

1 MONOTONY IS CONTAGIOUS

The most significant factor driving bad school sites is regulatory guidance. Schools have design standards that are often duplicative of zoning and building codes. A common (and growing) problem in civic building design is subjection to bloated and contradictory rules that cause projects to look uniform and terrible.

Ask any planner how they intend to deal with inconsistencies across codes, and they'll invariably respond with "whichever is most restrictive". The result is that, with each passing year, everything is required to look more and more like the code, more and more like whatever was done last, and less and less creative. Or local. Or good.

With each passing year, we fall toward the "mediocritized middle." After a while, even buildings that have nothing to do with each other start to unify their forms. In 2024, it is hard to differentiate the architecture of our brand-new, costly high school from our penal system.

Central Regional Medical Center (NC DPS) - Elevatus Architecture

Our prison is barely distinguishable from the high school. Are the guidelines the same?

Uniformity and rootlessness are hallmarks of modern architecture. There was once a time when civic buildings categorically evoked inspiration.

The Old (and current) Durham School of the Arts (DSA) is emphatically a Durham place. Its red brick creates traditional architecture almost indistinguishable from the city's industrial past. Its look and feel match those of the tobacco warehouses of West Village, immediately on its eastern flank.

DSA has a history. The New Northern, and almost certainly the soon-to-be-developed new Durham School of the Arts, will provide precisely none of this.

How did we come to pay top dollar for such placelessness?

2 MINIMUM SCHOOL ACREAGE IS A PLANNING PSEUDOSCIENCE

The primary form-shaping influence on architecture is regulatory guidance, which acts like a pituitary adenoma, causing it to grow perpetually and abnormally. This shackles designers and restricts them from doing anything innovative, site-specific, or true-to-place. The easiest way to spot this phenomenon is to look at how states dictate the minimum allowable acreage criteria for new school sites.

North Carolina's standards now require a minimum of 10 acres for a new elementary school (more if the school exceeds 200 pupils, which most do). They also advise an additional "10 acres or more if a stadium and spectator parking are anticipated."

These rules are quantifiably ahistorical, and the books they reside in function as a one-way ratchet. The guidance grows. It can only grow.

A documentation of what each state requires is listed in this American Planning Association(APA) report. It has all the hallmarks of pseudoscience. 1) presented by a credentialed trade group, 2) quantifies something that is subject to dozens of variables and largely unquantifiable, 3) utilizes uniform language across jurisdictions, 4) presents as a science something that is not.

Ironically, these standards are put forth by "Safe Routes to School" Partnerships. Thus, the advocacy groups ostensibly advocating for safe routes are 1) ensuring a likelihood that no safe routes can be established and 2) probably unaware of what they are doing.

The formula is the same across the country (a common hallmark of the APA's work), although the numbers vary. Elementary schools range from a 2-acre minimum in Florida (plus 1 acre per 50 students) to a 15-acre minimum in New Mexico (Puerto Rico allows for 1.5-acre sites). The lowest middle-school minimum acreage is again Florida (2 acres), while New Mexico requires a minimum of 30 acres.

Above is Public Schools of North Carolina's "School Site Planner":

These corpulent minimum acreage requirements fly in the face of logic or realities of place, such as topography (and available land, future elasticity, and available funds), undermining any ambition of creating a neighborhood school.

Almost never is anyone writing this stuff stress testing is against real-world scenarios. There are zero efforts made to identify case studies of neighborhood schools, particularly how historic schools are both 1) highly desired and 2) utterly non-compliant with these advisories.

Ironically, the same professional group advocating for neighborhood schools appears to be the same group codifying them out of existence.

4 A LOCAL CASE

Watts Elementary has 330 students in the middle of town, is surrounded by housing (both historic and missing middle), and sits on 4 acres (shown above in yellow). The school is top-rated, walkable, and generally has a waitlist.

Sounds great, right? Well, if built today, the same school would require three times the land (shown in red). This makes it impossible to build a new school like Watts in an urban setting. The rules effectively mandate that new schools be exclusively located on exurban sites.

5 WHAT IS THE ROOT OF THE PROBLEM?

Here's the regulatory problem:

Staffers are going to interpret any advisory guidance as a rule.
Government staffers treat rules as inflexible, even when not intended, triggering special permission processes to do anything other than meet the guidelines.
For most, special permissions prove to be an unacceptable and insurmountable amount of brain damage. Hired school leaders, architects, or politicians are unlikely to fight the rules and passively accept them.

Here's the execution problem the regulatory problem causes:

Every urban site must comply with the regulatory acreage advisory. There are no 15 acres available for an elementary school in urban Durham. Not one. Thus:

Any new public schools must be suburban (probably exurban), as no infill sites do not comply.
Only charters (relieved from stacks of dumb regulation by statute) can now be viable in the city.
Urban students will increasingly attend charters, triggering a political conflict.
The public schools will be increasingly exurban, disconnected from neighborhoods, completely car-dependent, and outrageously expensive.

This one rule triggers a cascading series of problems. Even in the middle of mass re-urbanization of cities, no new urban schools can be built. Therefore, new schools and new development must be suburban. Therefore, families have fewer viable options in the city. Therefore, those who want to live in the city will pay more for that opportunity. Therefore, a lousy school acreage policy can increase housing costs and accelerate displacement and gentrification.

5 WHAT SHOULD BE DONE ABOUT IT

It's not clear these minimums do any good at all. Like parking mandates, they appear to be a solution looking for a problem. Even when parking mandates were eliminated, most developments still provided parking. New schools will still have playgrounds. No municipality will underwrite a $50 million civic building without scrutinizing human utility.

Minimum school acreage standards could be rubbished with no adverse consequences. However, there might be positive consequences, as cities (and private entities) would now have more leeway to create creative school solutions on urban sites. Only after urban school sites become the norm will we be able to have honest conversations about walkable schools or neighborhood schools.

Design standards, like zoning, are consistently unnecessary and harmful. States must take action to reform both.