This slide show of images is a great example of public institutional development at a very low density and high (infrastructure) cost footprint. I’ve outlined the school and park properties green. The two properties are actually separated by a chain-link fence. In the second image, I have illustrated the space taken up by the two playgrounds, the tennis courts, and the school building. These two facilities together have a particularly large land footprint. They produce zero revenue, occupy lots of expensive road frontage, and eat up far more potentially revenue-producing land then they need to.

This same school built at two or three stories dramatically reduces its footprint (as in the third – hypothetical – image). The money spent on two decent playgrounds could have been spent on one exceptional playground, also reducing its footprint. Potentially, one could fit both the park and the school on a footprint one-third the size it currently occupies, opening up the other two thirds of the property to some form of development that generates revenue.

The overall up-front cost of building the same facilities on a smaller footprint would almost certainly be higher, but the benefits are numerous. First, the City and school district both benefit from the remaining property developing and generating additional tax revenues over the life of these facilities. They’d also have lower annual maintenance costs. The upkeep of the building and playground may not decrease but the amount of public right-of-way serving a tax-exempt property would dramatically decrease. It would occupy a smaller service area footprint for commercial businesses, creating more room for a higher concentration of potential customers for nearby businesses. In short, the overall cost burden of the site doesn’t change much, but the revenue potential increases dramatically—especially if the city decides to zone the space for higher-return-on-investment development types. (A side benefit: you avoid the scenario of people using the playground at the park and shaking their heads as they look through a chain link fence at a second publicly funded playground three hundred feet away.)

This building pattern is a relatively recent trend. Unfortunately, with all of our technological advancement we’ve managed to lower our built environment standards – and degrade our cities’ fiscal health as a result. For contrast, take a look at these examples from Fort Worth below. The first three images are the three public schools (elementary, middle, and high school – in order) that serve the Arlington Heights area, which developed in the first half of the 20th century.

✅ Older schools with smaller footprints: