Parks, affordable housing, food banks? What the future might hold for SLC’s 4 closed schools.

Almost a year after district leaders closed four elementary schools in Salt Lake City due to declining enrollment, ideas are swirling over how the properties might be redeployed.

Affordable housing, child care, food banks, open space, job training and senior services have all surfaced in the intervening months, with ardent support in some cases from community advocates and nearby residents — in a city short on developable land.

District officials have sought to pause the larger conversation so far this year, reportedly to focus attention on transitioning displaced students, families and teachers to their new schools — and on passing a $730 million bond to fund renovations and add-ons at East, West and Highland high schools and undertake energy-efficiency upgrades districtwide.

The district’s moniker as it sorted through the challenging aftermath of school closures has been: “The buildings can wait.”

With Tuesday’s board elections and bond vote done, the district has promised a new round of brainstorming on future uses of Hawthorne, Riley, M. Lynn Bennion and Mary W. Jackson elementary schools and the choice acreages they occupy.

Officials plan to convene discussions in the coming weeks, according to a district spokesperson Yándary Chatwin, and begin reviewing their options and gauging needs and public sentiment.

“We’re hearing community feedback already,” Chatwin said, “and it’s been great to have those conversations.”

In the near term, she added, the district is probably going to keep and reuse the four school buildings and campuses for its own purposes.

“We have a lot of needs in the district right now that could be met through those spaces,” Chatwin said. So selling one or more of the properties anytime soon for housing development, for example, “is not a priority we’re looking at in depth at the moment.”

‘Nothing concrete’ amid calls for housing

School board members voted in January to close Bennion and Hawthorne on the east side, and Mary W. Jackson and Riley on the west. New visions for the storied buildings, blacktop playgrounds, grassy fields and parking lots started surfacing well before that.

The day the closures were announced, several of the properties were vandalized, so the district has temporarily opted to shift employees from several departments to work at each location along with a full-time custodian.

“That way,” Chatwin said, “there’s someone there every day just to make sure the buildings don’t become a blight.”

District officials have since talked about a series of public-private partnerships with nonprofits to deliver much-needed services for families out of the emptied schools, such as food pantries, clothing deliveries or mental health programs.

“Nothing concrete, but again,” Chatwin said, “we’re just really open to creativity and trying to have these properties stay an asset to the community.”

If the past is any clue, the district has held onto the Rosslyn Heights elementary school property, 2291 S. 2000 East, since it shut down in the last round of school closures nearly two decades ago, leasing it to a charter school for years before deciding to convert it into new athletic facilities.

Similar destinies of adaptive reuse or leasing to third parties could well await the newly closed schools, Chatwin said. Along with its own ideas, the district has heard outside pitches since January for repurposing individual schools and adjacent properties.

Not surprisingly in a landlocked city short on housing of all kinds, many voices are urging the district to include plans for affordable residential construction in whatever it does.

‘Once-in-a-generation’ chance

In February 2023, as district leaders eyed which of seven possible schools to close, members of a pro-housing advocacy nonprofit called SLC Neighbors for More Neighbors urged them to create what the group labeled a school-to-housing opportunity task force.

The goal: Add an option for transferring land from closed schools into some kind of community land trust, allowing development of rent-subsidized homes with two or more bedrooms and replacing similar homes now disappearing from those neighborhoods.

The group’s executive director, Turner Bitton, said such projects could happen on smaller portions of several of the school sites, including Mary W. Jackson, at 750 W. 200 North, or Riley, 1410 S. 800 West — both of which boast large parking lots or other potentially developable spaces.

Portions of M. Lynn Bennion, at 429 S. 800 East, should be considered for transit-oriented housing, he added, given its proximity to TRAX light rail lines and bus routes and the many downtown attractions within walking distance.

The group’s underlying concept, Bitton said, is aimed at spurring infill housing suited to each location that might also help counteract population declines that have prompted school closures in the first place.

The suggestion has not drawn a response from school officials thus far, he said, but it should be in the mix, given the scale of the city’s housing gaps.

“This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity,” said Bitton, who also heads the west side’s Glendale Community Council. “We haven’t had this many properties open up in the center of already built-out neighborhoods.

With reduced land costs from using school property, he said, “we have an opportunity to build housing that the market isn’t going to build without either a subsidy or some kind of public-private partnership — and I’m thinking of larger, family-sized units.”

“I’m under no illusion that the district itself needs to become a developer,” he added, “but there’s an opportunity here to leverage its position as a landowner to help catalyze some of these innovative projects.”

New park next to Hawthorne?

Community councils for the Liberty Wells and East Liberty Park areas are supporting a plan to convert the soccer fields east of the Hawthorne school site at 700 East and 1700 South into a small, tree-lined park.

That land, which is on the two councils’ shared border, is owned by the district as a separate 3.49-acre parcel from where the school stands, at 1675 S. 600 East.

A rendering of the pocket park circulated by community council members shows it wouldn’t displace a state Department of Environmental Quality-managed air-pollution monitoring station that continues to operate on school grounds.

Liberty Wells residents have presented plans for the new park to district officials and Mayor Erin Mendenhall’s office, said Bill Davis, head of that community council, in hopes of starting that conversation ahead of wider talks about all the schools’ futures.

Davis said early discussions for the Hawthorne building itself include the possibility of it becoming some kind of technical training center. “Bear in mind,” he added, “everything is tentative at this point.”

A spokesperson for East Liberty Park Community Organization, said that group also supported the park concept.

Like the rest of the city, those neighborhoods between 900 South and 2100 South from State Street to 700 East, Davis said, “are facing an unprecedented housing availability crisis and also a housing affordability crisis.”

The Liberty Wells Community Council has issued its own detailed “missing middle” housing plan for the area to encourage more construction of duplexes, triplexes and fourplexes, with a maximum of one off-street parking space required per home.

Neighborhoods encircling Hawthorne, said Davis, “don’t exist in a vacuum, OK? So instead of saying, ‘Don’t do anything,’ let’s acknowledge that there’s going to be increasing density. But let’s try to increase density that is in scale with the neighborhood.”

Creating a park next to Hawthorne won’t boost the city’s housing stock, Davis acknowledged. But setting the school fields aside as permanent green space would create a neighborhood amenity and buffer between busy 700 East and any new dwellings constructed where the school stands.

“We’re fine with missing-middle housing where the school currently is,” Davis said. “Having a new park is going to increase the quality of life for people living in the new housing.”

Community services, senior housing

There’s been a flurry of outside work around the notion of using the Riley property, which sits next to chunks of city- and state-owned land and the Sorenson Multi-Cultural Center at 855 W. California Ave., as an enclave for new senior housing.

Before the district chose it for closure, some housing advocates wanted to district consider downsizing Riley to fewer classrooms and converting vacated portions to affordable living units for elderly residents and for the school’s own employees, creating a place of intergenerational learning and living.

Plans developed by Jeff White, a community activist and volunteer for Crossroads Urban Center, along with others, called for splitting the school in half and developing the freed-up portion into a small business district nestled into senior apartments, row homes and town houses.

White said school officials were reluctant to discuss it while closure talks were underway, then got diverted by coping with the ensuing fallout.

But a study of all closed school sites revealed that Riley “is the most perfect of the four for it,” White said. And with the city’s dire need for senior living units, he said, he hoped the district would consider the option now.

Salt Lake City Council members Alejandro Puy and Victoria Petro, who is also parent to two children displaced by the Mary W. Jackson closure, have also advocated for community and mental health services at the vacated school, which sits on 5.8 acres and includes sizable playing fields next to Interstate 15.

West-side schools, Petro said as closures were being finalized, don’t just function as education centers. “They are cultural centers of community building and coalescence, and there are so many holes now by taking this away.”