The Fillmore co-op born out of urban renewal finally has money and a timeline to rebuild. Its elders have heard promises before.
The people who live at Freedom West have a long memory. They have to. Their parents and grandparents watched the city bulldoze the Fillmore in the 1960s and call it renewal. So when somebody shows up with renderings and a 25-year plan, the first question on McAllister Street isn’t how tall the towers will be.
It’s who gets to stay.
After six years stuck on the drawing board, Freedom West 2.0 now has a $23 million commitment from the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development, private gap money behind it, and a proposed 25-year development agreement that Mayor Daniel Lurie’s office is set to announce Tuesday, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. Groundbreaking on the first building is now expected in the first half of next year.
“This is a transformative moment for the Western Addition,” Lurie said, according to the Chronicle.
Who Lives There
Freedom West Homes is a 382-unit, limited-equity co-op on roughly 10 acres near Jefferson Square Park. It was founded after urban renewal pushed thousands of Black families out of the Fillmore and the Western Addition. The idea was simple: if the city wouldn’t let you keep your home, you’d build one together and own it.
It has roughly 1,000 shareholders, and more than half are seniors, according to the Chronicle. A lot of them have been in the neighborhood their whole lives.
“Our founders built this cooperative so that Black and immigrant families pushed out of the Fillmore would have a place to stay and to own. For more than fifty years, we have held on,” Freedom West Board President Mattie Scott told the Chronicle. “Our families will not be moved out to make way for progress. We will be part of it, in new homes we own, for our children and grandchildren.”
That’s the deal she’s describing. Now look at the numbers.
The Math
Today there are 382 co-op homes on the site. The plan calls for 267 replacement co-op units, alongside 1,885 market-rate apartments, for nearly 2,400 homes in all, the Chronicle reported. Only 17% will be income-restricted. Towers could rise as high as 345 feet. The co-op has agreed to sell two-thirds of its land for market-rate development, but only after the replacement homes and additional affordable housing are built.
The first building, which the city calls “Phase 0,” is a 115-unit affordable building for seniors at 880 McAllister. City officials say it’s where current residents will go as construction moves forward, starting with the most vulnerable, according to the Chronicle.
Add 267 and 115 and you get 382. On paper, everybody has a door.
But the Chronicle reports the plan allows most current shareholders to remain homeowners. Most is not all. And a unit in a senior building is not necessarily a share in a co-op. Public documents reviewed by the Sun-Reporter don’t spell out whether the seniors who move into 880 McAllister will still own a piece of Freedom West, or whether they’ll become renters on land their families held for half a century.
That’s the difference between staying and staying in charge.
The Promise
The developer, MacFarlane Partners, says it won’t come to that. The firm has said existing co-op members will be rehoused at no increase in housing costs, and that replacement homes come before market-rate ones.
“Freedom West 2.0 shows that San Francisco can build at scale without displacing the families who built this neighborhood,” CEO and executive chairman Victor MacFarlane said, according to the Chronicle. He said the partnership gives residents “the right to stay, and a real stake in the value being created around them.”
The residents have reason to want this. After four decades of deferred maintenance, the buildings are worn down, and shareholders have pushed for years for modern homes. Nobody at Freedom West is asking to keep the leaky windows.
They’re asking for it in writing.
What to Watch
The development agreement still has to go through the Planning Commission and the Board of Supervisors. Those hearings are where the questions get answered, or don’t:
- Does every current shareholder have a written right to return as an owner, not just a tenant?
- Do seniors who move into 880 McAllister keep their co-op shares?
- Who holds the co-op’s share of the profits from the market-rate towers, and who decides how it’s spent?
- What happens to a family whose replacement home isn’t ready when their building comes down?
Freedom West was built so the Fillmore’s Black families would never again have to take the city’s word for it. Fifty years later, they shouldn’t have to start now.
Freedom West residents: The Sun-Reporter wants to hear from you. Email sunreporter@sbcglobal.net.
This story draws on reporting first published by the San Francisco Chronicle, and on San Francisco Planning Department records.
Photo: Grove and Fillmore streets in the Fillmore District. Photo by Yair Haklai via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
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