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Feature Articles |
LAUSD Learns from ULI MembersJanuary 5, 2000"For the last 15 years at every ULI national meeting, someone stands up and says, 'Our public schools are going to hell and we have to do something about it,'" notes ULI Trustee Jim Goodell. The first New Schools - Better Neighborhoods (NSBN) conference -- a two-day symposium launched by ULI real estate professionals, educators, community leaders and government officials -- began sending the message that someone is doing something about it. NSBN is a partnership of the ULI Los Angeles District Council, the Los Angeles Proposition BB Citizens' Oversight Committee, the Los Angeles Unified School District, the Getty Education Institute for the Arts, the Division of the State Architect, Community Partners, the Advancement Project and the Metropolitan Forum project. Its challenge is to promote a "21st Century vision for California's urban school districts" in which schools become true neighborhood centers.Ultimately, NSBN will draft a best-practices framework for the siting, design and building of public schools. It will also make specific recommendations for joint-use strategies as well as for making community input a vital part of school planning and design. From the beginning, ULI members have been essential to the NSBN process. David Abel, NSBN's chairman, says that ULI members can contribute a great deal of wisdom to the multimillion- or even multibillion-dollar real estate investment decisions being made by their public school district. According to ULI's Alex Rose, development director at Continental Development, NSBN "is a way for developers, contractors and designers to get engaged in creating a new process, as opposed to the more traditional form of school development in which their role -- if they had one at all-- was handed to them by virtue of state rules and regulations." Steven Ross, Playa Vista's director of planning and entitlement, chairs NSBN's Joint Use Working Group, which is exploring joint use as a way of optimizing infill locations and bringing vital services and products to the community. His group will present a paper to the second NSBN conference on January 21 that looks at opportunities and lessons learned from experiments such as the medical magnet high school at King/Drew Medical Center in South Los Angeles. Broadly, the challenge for the region, as Alex Rose explains, is a familiar Smart Growth refrain: "[It's] not unlike the need for additional housing in dense urban areas. School districts and developers are forced to fulfill educational facility needs closer-in instead of looking to clear 30- to 40-acre sites at the edge of an urban area." NSBN leaders hope to tap ULI wisdom in creating a Request for Proposal or RFP process where private developers could propose creative solutions for urban public schools. NSBN's Abel says, "The district would ask for-profit and non-profit developers to come forward with competitive proposals to fulfill facilities needs -- not unlike the affordable housing development model used in this country for the last 20 years." The NSBN Regulatory Working Group is tackling the legal issues impacting this vision. And the opportunity for successful resolution, as James Goodell says, is formidable: "If we can remove some legal and procedural constraints so that a sophisticated marketplace could work and private capital be unlocked to build classrooms and other educational facilities . . . industry would be all over it, and we could solve the school facilities crisis in 10 years." To become part of this discussion, or for more information on the upcoming NSBN conference, please call Steven Ross at (310) 822-0074. You can visit the NSBN Website at www.nsbn.org. | |
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