NICK'S VIEW - The day of reckoning is at hand, and our local officials must confront hard truths with bold action. More directly, we must assess what is best for the community over what is more comfortable for city council and school district board members.
Declining enrollment has left many schools underused, and converting these vital assets into community resources will require coordinated action. In Los Angeles, both the city and the school district need bold leadership, but that demands a level of coordination and political courage neither has yet shown.
Schools are emotionally meaningful, politically sensitive, and legally complex public assets, which makes adaptive reuse more difficult than it may seem.
Closures or major repurposes are challenging because schools serve as neighborhood anchors. But when students leave, that anchoring role quickly weakens. A school’s value as an anchor comes not from the building itself, but from the daily activity it brings to the community.
The clear solution is to turn schools without students into places that once again generate community life. But this cannot be done without help from the city council. While the school district owns the building, the city controls the land use.
Any reuse would involve city-controlled regulatory steps, including building permits, conditional use permits, zoning variances, environmental review, and related approvals. The city also oversees public hearings, neighborhood council engagement, and negotiations with community groups, while the city council must approve funding, partnerships, or intergovernmental agreements.
Despite these inherent challenges, coordination between the City Council and LAUSD is possible. The structural barriers are real, and cooperation will require intentional effort rather than natural alignment. The law does not stand in the way; politics and bureaucracy do. That is why bold action is necessary.
Policies may be severe, but the cost of inaction is even worse. With boldness, the city and district can convert underused schools into some of the most valuable civic assets in a community.
As I wrote in this space (From Empty Schools to Healthy Neighborhoods: New Uses for Public Land, June 22,2026) that over the past 25 years, the Los Angeles Unified School District has lost about 330,000 students. Officials predict that enrollment will continue to drop by another twenty-eight percent by the 2030-31 academic year. High housing costs have driven many families to less expensive states, while financial uncertainty has led others to delay or forgo having children.
To add to what is viewed by demographers as "California's fertility collapse", are the low immigration levels which are much lower now. And Los Angeles has aged. Consequently, the share of residents in their prime childbearing years has declined.
The obvious result is that the school district has a vast amount of underused space. What some saw as a liability, I saw as an opportunity.
Converting closed schools into parks would be more than a land-use decision; it would be a rare step that benefits multiple systems at once, advancing equity, climate resilience, public health, youth development, neighborhood stability, and stewardship of public land. Parks build community, strengthen resilience to heat, protect young people, and shape neighborhood identity. In a megacity, they are as essential as roads and water.
If correctly re-envisioned and managed, many other uses can be made of closed school properties.
In a recent Los Angels Times article by Kate Sequeira, declining enrollment in California public schools is spawning a new and growing partnership that is helping to keep child-care centers in business — vacant classrooms being filled with toddlers and babies.
Across the counties of Los Angeles and Solano, nonprofit day-care providers view underused, child-centered facilities—such as spacious blacktops, empty classrooms, portable space, and closed campuses—as opportunities to expand infant and toddler care for families facing severe shortages in California.
On campus child-care programs attract future students and build family loyalty without running the programs themselves.
Closed schools should be used for parks, cultural affairs benefits, and health. School districts, cities, counties along with foundations and private do-gooders, should work together to help take old schools and make better neighborhoods.
Michael Maltzan, who designed the Sixth Street Viaduct and worked on the Bakehouse Arts Complex plan to convert a Miami arts facility into affordable studios and artist housing, said some closed schools could become artist studios. He warned that Los Angeles risks losing a generation of young creatives as rising living and workspace costs become prohibitive.
School sites can be developed as "intergenerational villages" combining senior housing with nursery and pre-kindergarten facilities.
LA’s closed and underused schools are more than an education issue—they are a citywide challenge involving land use, housing, community vitality, and fiscal sustainability. The longer leaders wait, the harder and more costly the problem becomes. A closed or half-empty school is not a neutral asset, it harms the city, the district, and the surrounding neighborhood.
By boldness, I do not mean rhetoric; I mean the courage to make structural decisions that change how the city and LAUSD operate. City Council and LAUSD must create a standing, empowered, intergovernmental body that forces coordination—not a task force or working group. It must also commit to mixed-use, affordable housing, community-serving redevelopment, create a unified community engagement process, and share the political risk.
Boldness means being willing to absorb short-term political pressure in pursuit of long-term civic benefit. Indeed, the day of reckoning is at hand.
LAUSD is projected to exhaust its operating cash by November 2027, with a negative cash balance of about $231 million and a roughly $1.46 billion negative unrestricted general fund by 2027–28. A joint development agreement similar to Metro`s policies for using surplus land could generate desperately needed resources, but only if treated as a serious, long-term fiscal strategy rather than a side project. It will not solve every problem, but it could become one of the few structural tools capable of changing LAUSD’s trajectory.
This is a major opportunity for Karen Bass or Nithya Raman, candidates for LA mayor. The mayor has real leverage over school-site reuse, even though LAUSD is a separate government entity. So far, Bass has not created a formal city–school district governance structure or treated empty schools as a central opportunity. Raman has shown interest in intergovernmental coordination on land use, but her influence is strongest in policy framing and council legislation rather than executive coordination. Here, there is an opportunity for Raman to change LAUSD`s trajectory towards receivership, as a self-proclaimed agent of change.
Bold leadership would mean openly acknowledging that Los Angeles has more school buildings than students and committing to turn closed campuses into new community assets. The tools are already available; the real question is which candidate has the courage to use them.
(Nick Patsaouras is an electrical engineer, civic leader, and a longtime public advocate. He ran for Mayor in 1993 with a focus on rebuilding L.A. through transportation after the 1992 civil unrest. He has served on major public boards, including the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, Metro, and the Board of Zoning Appeals, helping guide infrastructure and planning policy in Los Angeles. He is the author of the book "The Making of Modern Los Angeles.")
