A little less than a year ago, the cash-strapped Philadelphia School District closed a number of public schools to the chagrin of thousands of parents. With the children who once roamed their halls spending their weekdays someplace else, the vast majority of shuttered school buildings have sat vacant this year, with an unclear future. Finally, the district has retained PIDC to help them sell off a number of closed school buildings via a useful website called PHLschoolsales.com. Twenty buildings are currently offered for sale on the website. In the coming days, we'll be profiling a few of those schools which we consider to be interesting development opportunities.
Today, we look at the former Walter Smith School, located at the corner of 19th & Wharton.
The building was constructed in 1925 and rises three stories, as you can see in the photo. It's zoned for multi-family, and it's got about 65K sqft of space, which could easily translate into dozens of apartment units. Well, maybe easily isn't the right word. Converting a hundred-year old school building is complex and costly, but we've certainly seen examples as recently as last year at the Wharton Street Lofts. Other, more interesting conversions are certainly possible, but housing seems like the most likely option here.
The building only takes up a little less than half of the lot that's for sale. The parcel extends all the way down to Reed Street, encompassing just over 50K sqft. Depending on the proposed development, the currently open space could be used for surface parking (hopefully not), another apartment building (works for us), or single family homes (also seems reasonable).
At an asking price of $3M, we would imagine that a couple of developers will be coming forward with offers. So it stands to reason that this site could be redeveloped relatively quickly. Unless, of course, the same developer purchases all twenty school buildings, which is an option, in which case we could see redevelopment getting delayed some for bandwith reasons. Still, the more likely scenario is an individual developer, an infusion of cash into the district's coffers, and new development very soon at the corner of 19th & Wharton.
The deadline to submit an offer is June 9th, if you're thinking of putting one together.