Freedom West Homes has secured a $23 million city subsidy, alongside private financing, for its long-planned transformation into a residential district with nearly 2,400 homes.
The project is designed to replace ageing buildings while allowing longtime cooperative shareholders to retain their ownership stakes rather than being pushed out by redevelopment, according to the San Francisco Chronicle and local news outlet SFist. A housing cooperative established to help Black and immigrant families remain in San Francisco after urban renewal displaced residents from the historic Fillmore neighbourhood is moving closer to a major redevelopment.
The proposed redevelopment, known as Freedom West 2.0, covers a 10-acre site in San Francisco’s Western Addition. The revised plan calls for nearly 2,400 homes, of which 17% would be income-restricted. Its complex was completed in 1973 and consists of 382 cooperative homes spread across four blocks, according to SFist. The site is home to around 1,000 cooperative shareholders, about half of whom are senior citizens. Rather than simply replacing older buildings with new apartments, Freedom West 2.0 aims to preserve the residents’ ownership interests while creating additional housing on the site. The San Francisco Chronicle reported that the new $23 million city subsidy, combined with private financing from organisations including the Crankstart Foundation, provides important financial momentum. In December 2024, Freedom West announced that commitments from organisations including the San Francisco Foundation, Low Income Investment Fund and Menorah Park had brought its predevelopment funding to more than $30 million. The organisation described the wider Freedom West 2.0 plan as a $2.3 billion revitalisation project.
Because of its unusual cooperative ownership structure and the cost of replacing ageing housing, the funding boost marks an important step for a project that has faced financial challenges. Freedom West’s board president, Mattie Scott, said the founders created the cooperative so that Black and immigrant families displaced from the Fillmore could continue to live in the area and own homes there.
The redevelopment, she said, should allow those families to remain part of the neighbourhood’s future. The organisation has said it wants current shareholders to move into modernised housing without additional monthly housing costs. It also includes a new affordable senior housing building intended to accommodate current residents as the larger project advances in phases. Freedom West’s origins are closely linked to the urban renewal programmes that reshaped San Francisco’s Fillmore District during the mid-20th century. The neighbourhood had developed into an important centre of African American life, culture and business, particularly as Black residents moved to San Francisco during the Great Migration. Redevelopment projects later cleared large areas of the Western Addition, displacing residents and disrupting established communities and businesses. Freedom West was among the housing initiatives that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s in response to that upheaval. The cooperative was created to give Black and immigrant families a way to remain in the neighbourhood through shared ownership rather than relying solely on rental housing. Many have family connections to the original development and view ownership as a way to preserve a foothold in a neighbourhood transformed by decades of redevelopment and rising housing costs. The cooperative model is central to the project’s purpose. To help address this issue, the redevelopment’s financing strategy includes private contributions and a mechanism that would use future property tax revenues to support affordable housing. For Freedom West, the challenge is to modernise an ageing complex without repeating the displacement that led to its creation. Its cooperative structure gives residents a stake in the property, and the redevelopment plan is intended to preserve that stake through replacement homes. New construction can expand the housing supply, but its benefits depend in part on who can afford to remain and who has a say in shaping the neighbourhood.
The cooperative’s land is bounded by Gough Street, Fulton Street, Golden Gate Avenue and Laguna Street, surrounding the historically African American Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church. The latest funding announcement follows earlier efforts to raise money for the project. The proposal also reflects a wider dilemma for historically Black neighbourhoods: how to replace deteriorating housing and add homes without excluding the people who have maintained communities there for generations.
It should not be confused with the total construction budget or the newly announced $23 million subsidy.
That earlier fundraising was intended to support the work needed before construction, including planning and development.
How the 2,400-home plan will work
The current proposal is smaller than an earlier version of the redevelopment plan, which envisioned 2,515 homes. The proposed mix includes 1,885 market-rate homes and 267 replacement co-op units, alongside the initial senior housing phase. Overall, 17% of the planned homes would be income-restricted. The first stage, known as Phase 0, is planned as a 115-unit affordable housing building for seniors at 880 McAllister Street. SFist reported that Freedom West was targeting a groundbreaking in mid-2027 for this initial phase. The broader project also involves a proposed 25-year development agreement with San Francisco. The agreement would provide long-term planning certainty and allow zoning for buildings of up to 345 feet on the site, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. Freedom West 2.0 is not yet a completed redevelopment, and its construction will unfold over multiple phases.
Because the property operates as a limited-equity cooperative rather than a conventional affordable rental development, financing Freedom West 2.0 has presented a challenge. The revised scheme combines replacement cooperative housing with market-rate development and affordable homes, allowing the organisation to use the value of part of its land to help finance the rebuilding of the existing complex. Under the plan described by SFist, Freedom West intends to sell roughly two-thirds of its property to market-rate developers and redevelop the remaining third for affordable housing and replacement cooperative homes. It is intended to provide housing for older residents as the wider redevelopment moves forward. That is a planned milestone, not confirmation that construction has begun. The city’s financial support and private gap financing are intended to help bridge the difference between the cost of development and the funds available through conventional housing programmes. Many established affordable housing subsidies and tax-credit programmes are designed around rental properties, making them difficult to apply to a project in which residents own shares in a cooperative. But the new financial support moves the proposal forward while keeping resident ownership at its centre. For a cooperative founded in the aftermath of urban renewal, the ambition is to make redevelopment a means of staying in the neighbourhood, rather than another reason to leave it You use AI every day. Now get your AI Quotient. Take the AIQ test.