Indianapolis · 2002
We have done this
once, all the way through.
In 2002 we bought a historic Indianapolis school that had been written off as a derelict building, and turned it into an arts community. Years later it was sold and converted again, into assisted-living condominiums. The building is still in use today.
Most people who want to buy a closed school have never finished one. We think that is the only credential that matters, so we lead with it.
What we bought
A building the city had given up on.
It was old, it was empty, and it had reached the stage where the conversation around it had quietly shifted from restoration to demolition. That is the point in a school's life when almost every buyer walks away, and it is exactly when the building is cheapest and the community has the most to lose.
Big rooms. Tall windows. Solid structure. Hard floors and good light — which is to say, without knowing it, a building already shaped like artist studios.
Renovation was not financed from a distance. Our founder moved an RV onto the property and lived there for three months while the work was done.
That is not a colorful detail. It is the operating philosophy: someone has to be on site, in the building, through the hard part. A retired school does not come back because of a plan. It comes back because somebody stayed.
What it became
Art School 30.
The classrooms became studios. The building filled with working artists, and the school that had been slated to come down became a place people went on purpose.
It worked because the uses fit what was already there instead of fighting it — and because the space opened in stages rather than waiting years for one perfect redevelopment.
Years later the property was sold and converted a second time, into assisted-living condominiums.
A building that gets a second life and then a third is the whole argument. Demolition is permanent. Reuse compounds.
Documented at the time in DNJournal (October 2010 cover story) and in the Indianapolis Business Journal. In his own words at the time: “In 2002 I purchased and renovated an old historic school that was considered a derelict building. I turned it into art studios and recently sold the property for assisted living condos.”
What that project taught us
Five things we still do because of it.
Open early, in stages
Activity in part of the building pays for work on the rest of it. Waiting for a finished masterplan is how these projects die.
Let the building choose the use
Studios worked because the rooms were already right for them. We read what a building is good at before deciding what it becomes.
Be there
Absentee ownership is the failure mode communities have already lived through with the last buyer.
Boring things first
Roof, water, security, utilities, life safety. Nothing visible matters until the building is dry and safe.
Build for the next owner too
The conversion to assisted living happened because the bones were restored properly. Do the structural work as if someone will reuse it again, because they will.
Why we are telling you this
A school board is not choosing a price. It is choosing a story it can defend.
Selling a closed school is a public decision. It happens in a meeting, in front of people who went to that school, whose children went to that school, and who will remember who voted for what.
The risk a board is actually weighing is not whether the money clears. It is whether the building sits empty for a decade behind a chain-link fence with a new owner who stopped answering the phone.
We cannot make that risk zero. What we can do is show a board a project we finished, that outlived our ownership, and that is still standing and still in use.
Twenty-four years, two conversions, one building never demolished. That is the entire pitch.
What happens inside the building is a separate question, and we have an answer for it: a repeatable five-use model published openly at CommunityCorp.com.
We are not asking for a decision. We are asking for a conversation — and we are comfortable being asked hard questions about the project above.