Schools like Detroit Prep have been a boon for neighborhood housing value in historically low-income … [+] communities.
Detroit Prep
A micro-study on what happens to real estate prices when you open a good school.
The Anna M. Joyce School Building was built in 1905 as a Detroit Public Schools’ elementary school. At its most full, Joyce held 1,100 students from the surrounding blocks. Joyce was designed and built to last, standing three stories of brick, concrete, and pine floors. Joyce Elementary had a longstanding principal, Mr. Brown, who served for 27 years, and a dedicated team of teachers, many of whom lived in the neighborhood. In 1996, Joyce Elementary was named a National Blue Ribbon School.
In 2009, Detroit Public Schools closed Joyce and consolidated students into another school, not in the neighborhood. For ten years, Joyce Elementary sat empty.
Detroit Prep purchased Joyce it in 2019, investing $7 million dollars of raised and borrowed and begged-for money into it, and filling it with a small self-managed, free public charter school that I’d co-founded with my teammate Jennifer McMillan three years prior. The building would be featured by Architectural Digest three months after opening. Detroit Prep would later be named the best school in Detroit by U.S. News & World Report.
But – that isn’t what I am most excited about in the story.
Recently, a neighbor casually shared that I was the reason he could send his nephew to college. He explained that “before you saved that building, my house was valued by a bank at $34,000.” But a couple of years later, he said that he saw a neighbor sell their house for three times that price. So, the neighbor re-approached his bank, who then valued his home at $175,000, which the neighbor re-financed to use for college tuition.
He left our conversation by saying, “A large number of us have worked hard to purchase and keep our homes throughout Detroit’s downturn, but right now it feels more hopeful that we will all have something valuable that we can pass down to our families, too.”
The National Community Reinvestment Initiative (NCRI) published research this year stating “Over the last decade, Black wealth has become more dependent on home equity which accounts for two-thirds of net worth growth from 2013 to 2022.” Our area’s demographics on the most recent census is recorded as 75% African American.
The NCRI reports, “Black wealth currently constitutes barely 15% of White wealth. Addressing this egregious inequity necessitates a focus on increasing Black homeownership, which remains disconcertingly low. For most families, their home is the primary way they store and build wealth. The Black-White homeownership gap is therefore the primary driver of the Black-White racial wealth divide.”
Feeling utterly shook, for lack of a better term, I pulled housing sales data for a five by ten radius of Detroit Prep and, then, for Detroit as a whole.
In our area, in 2018, there were ten home sales with a median sales price of $31,700. In 2024 to date, there have been thirty two home sales with a median sales price of $172,486.
Across Detroit, home values jumped from a median sales price of $31,822 in 2018 to $82,212 to date in 2024.
Adjusting for the cumulative rate of inflation (25.7%), from 2018 to 2024, the median Detroit home value increased 232%.
Impressive, but the blocks surrounding Detroit Prep tell an even bigger story. The area saw a jaw-dropping 518% increase in home value, outpacing the city by 286%. Detroit Prep’s facility was the only major development in the area during this span of time.
Still fixated on the actual, true impact, I wanted to see how many homes and families could be affected. So – I counted them. There are 1,687 homes that fall within the radius; lines drawn intentionally based on our enrollment and normal neighborhood boundaries.
If you applied the median numbers onto each home, then, the five block by ten block area saw a $231,874,542 sum valuation increase.
That’s certainly one true, measurable impact/power of the presence of a great school, particularly in a majority Black major city.
A school can change everything for a neighborhood. A good school is a reason for families to move in, not out.
In 2017, in order to open Detroit Prep in the Joyce Elementary building, I had to sue Detroit Public Schools to remove the deed restriction on the building prohibiting another school from opening there. Nationally, these restrictions are a common tool used to prevent competition from any school model other than traditional public schools.
Why would citizens anywhere tolerate this suppression of neighborhood health, of truly equitable wealth building and the delivery of a quality education for their children?
Here’s to hoping that our newest batch of elected officials take the power of a good school seriously. In this economy, U.S. citizens and dedicated members of a neighborhood can’t afford not to.