Dave Chappelle spent $15 million saving a 19th century Ohio schoolhouse and turned it into a home for his town's public radio station

Dave Chappelle has been buying up this small Ohio village for years. The pandemic gave him the opening, businesses were struggling, and he stepped in quietly, purchasing buildings and waiving rent for tenants while they got back on their feet. Most people outside Yellow Springs never heard about it.

The latest move is harder to keep quiet. Chappelle spent approximately $15 million to purchase and completely renovate a 19th century schoolhouse in the center of town, saving the local public radio station WYSO from a forced relocation that would have ended its 68-year connection to the community. The renovated building opened earlier this month after more than four years of construction.

PBS NewsHour anchor Amna Nawaz traveled to Yellow Springs to speak with Chappelle, giving a rare look at the comedian's decade-long transformation from famous resident to the town's most consequential investor.

"It's not like I want to be a land baron in Ohio," Chappelle told Nawaz when asked about his purchasing activity during the pandemic. "But it was expediency. It was just the right thing to do at the time."

The town and the station

Yellow Springs has about 3,800 residents in southwestern Ohio, more than 80% of them white. Chappelle, who grew up in the Washington D.C. area, first came here as a child to visit his father, the late William Chappelle, who was a professor at Antioch College. When his father fell ill around 1998, Chappelle started making regular drives from New York. He eventually bought a house, married Elaine Chappelle, raised their 3 children in the village and never really left.

"There's only like 3,800 people living in this town. It's a small town, but it is a real community. Everyone kind of knows everybody," he said. "These people don't care about any of the stuff I do. It keeps you humble."

WYSO, the local NPR affiliate whose call letters stand for Yellow Springs, Ohio, went on air in 1958, operating out of Antioch College for six decades. When a series of financial crises hit the college in the years after 2012, the station's future became precarious. By 2018, WYSO was facing the prospect of leaving Yellow Springs entirely to find a new facility.

Luke Dennis, the station's general manager, says Chappelle called them.

"He listens to our station and heard that we might have to leave this community to find a new facility, and actually reached out to us," Dennis told Nawaz. Chappelle proposed buying the old Union Schoolhouse, an 1870s building that had been one of the first integrated schools in the region, renovating it to suit WYSO's needs and entering into a lease arrangement.

The deal came together. Chappelle's production company offices occupy the upper floor. WYSO has a separate entrance and a full wing below, with state-of-the-art studios, redesigned public spaces and preserved nods to the building's long history. The station now fields 9 local reporters covering 14 counties across southwest Ohio and reaches approximately 65,000 listeners.

The question of independence

The arrangement raised immediate questions about whether a major celebrity investing in a local newsroom could undermine its independence. Dennis says the station spent considerable time working through that concern before agreeing.

"Our independence is our most important asset. And we have spent 68 years earning it, and you could destroy it in a moment," he said. "We are utterly independent from Dave Chappelle."

Chappelle says he is comfortable with that arrangement and never sought to change it. "I'm just the landlord. It's a church and state-type thing. I don't want to tell them how to do anything that they do."

That independence would, in principle, extend to covering Chappelle himself. He has generated significant controversy through jokes about the transgender community, and last year performed at a comedy festival in Saudi Arabia. When asked whether he had discussed those topics with the station, he said they never formally addressed it. "I can't control that," he said.

His broader case is that backing public media is simply the right investment to make right now. "The more you empower institutions like PBS or like NPR, the more they can be ours, of and for the people. I think now, more than ever, it's been proven that that's necessary. There has to be some baseline of truth. And good journalism is a godsend at a time like this."

What he has built here

In a 2025 Netflix special, Chappelle joked that he had bought most of Yellow Springs and riffed on what that would look like if the racial dynamics were reversed. The bit drew laughs partly because the underlying reality is true: he owns a significant and growing slice of this village.

He does not frame it as philanthropy or as real estate investment. He frames it as community preservation, a different thing. The schoolhouse is one piece of that. The businesses he quietly kept alive during the pandemic are another. WYSO, he told Nawaz, is not a transaction. It is the town's team.

"That's our New York Knicks or our Golden State Warriors. That's our team. We're very proud of them."