The Kelsey Civic Center — San Francisco Affordable Housing

The Kelsey Civic Center set out to prove that housing built around disabled residents works better for everyone. The nine-story building at 240 Van Ness Avenue opened in San Francisco in 2025 with 112 affordable apartments stacked above a ground-floor Disability Cultural Center. Mercy Housing California and the nonprofit developer The Kelsey built it together, with WRNS Studio and Santos Prescott and Associates sharing the design and Cahill Contractors as general contractor.

Project Scope
Every apartment is built to be accessible or easily adaptable, and the design goes past code minimums on door widths, sightlines, wayfinding, and sensory comfort. Units serve households earning between 20 and 60 percent of area median income, and a share of the homes are set aside for people with disabilities under the group’s inclusive housing model. The all-electric building rises nine stories on a tight Civic Center lot. Cahill started construction in mid-2023 and topped the structure out in 2024, with move-ins following the grand opening. Funding came together from low-income housing tax credits, city support, and philanthropy.

Why It Matters
Accessible housing usually means a handful of adapted units in an otherwise standard building. The Kelsey flips that, treating disability access as the starting point rather than a retrofit, and the Disability Cultural Center at street level makes the mission public. The project also lands in a city where new affordable supply is expensive and slow to build, so a completed 112-unit deal in Civic Center carries weight beyond its size. Advocates are watching whether the disability-forward model can be repeated elsewhere without ballooning costs. If it can, San Francisco has a working prototype a few blocks from City Hall. It’s a small building doing outsized work on a question most housing developers still treat as an afterthought.

Project Team & Details