It’s a sign of the times for Academy of Art University, the San Francisco-based art college that once attracted students from all over the country and now has many of its students taking classes remotely.
Academy of Art may only be familiar to you because of their signage and advertising around town, or maybe you saw their ads in heavy rotation on TV at some point in your childhood. For those who have lived in San Francisco a decade or two, the for-profit school became symbolic of San Francisco’s perennial housing woes, and became known as one of the city’s biggest landowners and a kind of “corporate colonizer” of downtown, gobbling up residential real estate that might otherwise have been apartments.
And then in 2016, following reporting on their playing fast and loose with the city’s land-use rules, Academy of Art paid out $58 million to settle a lawsuit from the city — and that settlement also required them to contribute to the city’s affordable housing stock. After failing to make those contributions, the school agreed to another $38 million settlement with the city in 2020 for its removal of affordable housing.
The school, which provides housing to its students, assembled a real estate portfolio that included over 40 buildings around the city, about half of which were dorms as of 2019. And now, after selling a few individual buildings in the last year, the Chronicle reports that Academy of Art is putting a group of 10 buildings on the market in what a listing brochure called a “generational real estate portfolio.” The asking price: around $130 million.
These include several buildings on Van Ness Avenue, including St. Brigid Church, three residential buildings, and the historic former First Congregational Church at 491 Post Street near Union Square, which became the school’s Morgan Auditorium.
The Chronicle’s sources indicate that Academy of Art no longer needs the properties because so many of its students have shifted to hybrid or fully remote education models.
The school, founded in 1929, currently has around 4,200 undergraduates enrolled, according to US News & World Report, with tuition that can cost around $37,000 per year. It ranks #105-#115 in regional universities in the west, and offers degree programs in fine art, advertising, animation, filmmaking, game design, and more.
But Academy of Art could be facing some headwinds moving forward, as the Chronicle notes, particularly with its accreditation. One of the accrediting agencies, the WASC Senior College and University Commission, shows the school as “Accredited with Notice of Concern,” with that notice focusing on its graduation rates and insufficient data on student success. The US News & World Report listing shows that the school has just an 8% four-year graduation rate.
While the offloading of about a quarter of its real estate holdings seems significant, the school continues to have a significant presence downtown, and remains one of the city’s biggest landlords.
Related: Academy of Art Forced to Pay $38 Million for Eliminating Affordable Housing
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