The Mobile County school board took up two separate property sale matters involving former school sites at its January 2015 work session, part of an ongoing effort to convert vacant campuses into revenue for the district.
Board members reviewed a letter of intent from Hix Snedeker Companies LLC to purchase the roughly 3-acre site of the former Crichton Elementary School, located off Spring Hill Avenue, for $500,000.
The Crichton school building itself was demolished in the late 1990s, and Tommy Sheffield, the school system’s facilities director, described the now-vacant property as attractive for commercial development given its location.
Spring Hill Avenue is one of the established commercial corridors of central Mobile, running northwest from the heart of the city toward Spring Hill, and vacant parcels along it have grown scarcer as the corridor has built out. A cleared, roughly 3-acre site with frontage in that corridor is a scarce commodity for developers, which explains the interest despite the absence of any usable building on the land.
A letter of intent is the opening move in a property transaction of this kind. It signals a buyer’s serious interest and sets out price and basic terms before the parties draft a binding contract. For the school board, the document gives a basis for public discussion while preserving the ability to negotiate or entertain competing interest before any final vote.
The Augusta Evans Site
The board also had on its agenda a sales contract tied to the former Augusta Evans Special School property at 100 W. Florida St. in Mobile.
The board had voted back in October 2014 to accept a $1,550,000 offer for the roughly 8-acre site from MAB Acquisitions, a Delaware-based company, with local developer John Vallas handling the transaction.
The W. Florida Street property carries particular significance for the district. At roughly 8 acres near the city’s core, it is among the larger tracts the school system has moved to sell, and its price — more than three times the Crichton offer — reflects both its size and its location inside the city’s urban fabric. The October vote accepting the offer put the transaction on a contractual footing, with the January work session providing a status check on its progress.
The involvement of a local developer alongside an out-of-state acquisition company is a common structure in commercial real estate. MAB Acquisitions supplies the capital, while John Vallas, a name well known in Mobile development circles, manages the local work of due diligence, entitlement and eventual construction — the tasks that require familiarity with the city’s zoning, permitting and market conditions.
Augusta Evans served the county for decades as a special school, educating students with significant cognitive and physical disabilities before the system transitioned to newer facilities. The closing of the old campus left the district holding a substantial property in a part of the city where land has long since grown valuable for other uses.
Both items were scheduled for discussion at the board’s work session, held at the school system’s central office at the corner of Schillinger and Howells Ferry roads, ahead of a possible vote at a subsequent board meeting later in the month.
Work sessions and voting meetings serve distinct roles in the board’s calendar. The work session is where administration brings matters forward for discussion without action — board members ask questions, raise concerns and shape the outcome before anything becomes official. A vote at a later meeting then formalizes the decision, making the January discussion the last public examination of both sales before they advance.
A District Managing Its Real Estate
The sales reflect a broader pattern among South Alabama school systems of shedding underused or vacant properties as enrollment patterns shift and older buildings become too costly to maintain or renovate.
Mobile County Public School System, one of the largest school districts in Alabama, oversees a property portfolio accumulated across a century of building, consolidation and shifting population. As the county’s population moved south and west over the decades, campuses in older neighborhoods saw enrollment decline, and the system found itself maintaining buildings that served fewer students each year.
Every vacant campus carries costs even when no students walk its halls: insurance, security, grass cutting, roof repairs and the steady deterioration that unoccupied buildings suffer. Determining when a closed school has become a liability rather than an asset is the calculation facilities directors like Sheffield make, and for the Crichton property — empty since its building came down in the late 1990s — the answer had long since arrived.
Selling such properties converts a recurring expense into a one-time payment, and it removes the district from the business of maintaining land it cannot use. In the case of a building that no longer exists, the sale represents pure recovery of value from land the district has held unused for well over a decade.
For Mobile County, converting sites like the former Augusta Evans and Crichton campuses into private commercial development can generate one-time revenue for the district while also returning the parcels to the local tax rolls once they change hands from a public entity to a private owner.
The tax roll effect is a benefit that extends beyond the school system itself. Public entities do not pay property taxes on the land they hold, so every acre the district sells becomes taxable ground contributing to the city, the county and, through property tax levies, the school system’s own future funding. A half-million-dollar sale price is immediate; the annual tax revenue is ongoing.
Commercial development on the sites also brings the secondary benefits that follow private investment — construction jobs in the short term, and in the long term whatever businesses eventually occupy the parcels, with the employment and commerce they generate in surrounding neighborhoods.
Developer Interest in Older School Sites
Neither the Augusta Evans nor Crichton properties had been used for active school operations for years prior to the proposed sales, and both transactions underscore how Mobile County continues to manage a real estate footprint shaped by decades of school consolidations and campus closures.
The board’s willingness to entertain competing offers and letters of intent also signals continued developer interest in commercial parcels within the city of Mobile, even for sites tied to older, now-demolished school buildings.
The pricing of the two transactions tells its own story about the Mobile land market. The Crichton parcel, at $500,000 for roughly 3 acres, prices the land at a level consistent with commercial corridor values along Spring Hill Avenue. The Augusta Evans site, at $1,550,000 for about 8 acres, reflects both its larger footprint and its position closer to the city’s traditional core — proximity that developers value for the rooftops, traffic and workforce nearby.
School systems elsewhere in South Alabama have pursued the same playbook, with Baldwin County districts among the most active in selling surplus campuses during the region’s growth years. As districts built new schools to follow population movement, the old sites became inventory to manage — and boards that moved quickly found buyers waiting, while boards that hesitated watched vacant buildings deteriorate and drag down surrounding property values.
Timing matters for another reason as well. Commercial real estate moves in cycles, and parcels that command strong prices during expansion periods can sit unsold during downturns. The school board’s decision to process both sales in the same season reflected a market window: active buyers, available capital and demand for in-town land that made the district’s offers worth serious consideration.
The work session also gave board members a chance to weigh the public interest questions these sales always raise. Neighbors of a former school often hope for uses that complement the surrounding area, and board members serve as the community’s voice in negotiations. While the district’s primary obligation is to its students and taxpayers, the ultimate development of each site will shape its neighborhood for decades.
Former school sites hold particular appeal for developers. The land is typically flat, cleared and already served by utilities, roads and sidewalks installed for a campus that once hosted hundreds of students daily. Zoning questions aside, a cleared urban lot with infrastructure in place can move from contract to construction faster than raw land at the edge of town.
Spring Hill Avenue and the W. Florida Street corridor both sit within parts of Mobile where infill development — building on vacant parcels inside the existing urban fabric — has become increasingly attractive as outlying greenfield sites grow more distant from the city’s population center. Buyers like Hix Snedeker Companies and MAB Acquisitions are betting on that demand.
For the district, the January work session represented the administrative routine behind what is, in effect, a portfolio strategy. The board reviews each potential sale on its own terms — price, terms, intended use — while the aggregate effect is the gradual rationalization of a land inventory assembled by earlier generations for a school system that no longer exists in the same shape.
The proceeds from such sales flow back into district finances, where they can offset capital needs across the system. In a district the size of Mobile County’s, where maintenance backlogs and new construction compete for limited funds, money recovered from surplus land stretches further than it might first appear.
Residents interested in following the board’s decisions on these and other facilities matters were encouraged to monitor upcoming Mobile County school board meeting agendas for final votes on both property transactions.
The board’s facilities agenda will continue to surface similar items in the years ahead, as the district works through the remaining inventory of closed campuses and surplus tracts. Each sale closes one chapter in the system’s physical history — a school that once anchored a neighborhood — while opening another in which private investment renews the ground the school vacated. For the Crichton and Augusta Evans properties, January 2015 marked the point where that transition moved decisively forward.