Philadelphia Metropolitan Area Real Estate Law Blog

There is a great Shirley Temple movie called "Stand Up and Cheer." The year is 1934, and the country is in the depths of the Great Depression. President Roosevelt creates a Department of Amusement and gives the top job to a theatrical impressario. His job is simple: Cheer up the nation. The movie ends with a news flash: The Depression is over! Banks are opening up again! "We're out of the red!" A musical number follows, and we all, yes, stand up and cheer.

Of course, the Great Depression had no big "We're out of the red!" moment, even in retrospect. Neither, Philadelphia can tell you, did the Great Recession. But recent market analyses show that one major sector of the economy, commercial real estate, is climbing out of the hole created by the 2008 financial meltdown.

This post will conclude our discussion about the Philadelphia School District's plans to sell, repurpose or raze some 23 school buildings. In many cases, residents and businesses surrounding the shuttered sites have fought hard to keep the schools open. A combination of economics, dwindling population and deteriorating sites, though, have forced the district to close the buildings and move on.

As we said in our last two posts, moving on will require more input from the community. Any plan for a site must be considerate of the people and companies that call the neighborhood home. And that is one thing that a group of University of Pennsylvania School of Design students as well as district and city officials endorse.

The Philadelphia School District has completed the difficult process of identifying which of its buildings will close its doors permanently over the summer. The process was fairly contentious, with residents and businesses fighting hard to keep their own neighborhoods' school open. In the end, officials decided on 23 sites to shutter.

What now? The city had help with the next step in the process. A group of students from the University of Pennsylvania's School of Design spent a few months studying the options and recently presented their findings to the district. The district is not bound to follow the report's recommendations. However, one district official said that the students' plan mirrors preliminary plans the district has been working on.

On Thursday, the City of Philadelphia will be releasing a development plan for six miles along the lower Schuylkill. The area, which accounts for 68 percent of the city's underused and vacant industrial land, has been identified as ripe for new roads, green space, walking and bicycle paths, and especially for industrial and commercial uses that will generate new jobs.

Because of the land use that predominated in the area in the past, the stretch of land is largely hidden from the public, which has little to no access to the area.