School District Moves Slowly to Manage Its Real Estate
Despite being one of the largest financially struggling landowners in the city, the San Francisco Unified School District has largely failed to actively manage its holdings, leaving a number of valuable properties idle for years. Decades of declining enrollment led the district to acknowledge in 2007 that roughly 20 percent of its holdings had little or no educational use. It also designated 10 vacant or underused properties as surplus and concluded that selling them would net an estimated $134 million, plus millions more in property tax revenue. But interviews and records show that the district has moved slowly since then to sell or lease the properties. None of them have been sold. Last year, the district cut its real estate department director, who had been in charge of overseeing the