The Belmont Learning Complex, dubbed America’s most expensive school with its anticipated $200 million price tag, was proposed in 1985 by the Los Angeles Unified School District as a middle school to alleviate overcrowding and serve mostly Latino students from many of LA’s poorest neighborhoods. The project ballooned into a proposed 35-acre, state-of-the-art, internet-connected high school campus, with a shopping mall to jump-start area commercial development, 120 affordable apartments to address housing needs, and classrooms and innovative "academies" for 5,000 students. More than ten years later, the half-built brick building stands abandoned. Parents learned what the school district already knew—explosive methane gas, poisonous hydrogen sulfide, volatile organic compounds such as acetone, the carcinogen benzene, and residual crude oil saturated the earth where the school was being built, a former oilfield and industrial site. When construction halted, over $123 million had already been spent.