SAN FRANCISCO — Housing aimed at people with disabilities is often tucked away on the outskirts of cities, nondescript group homes far from shops or transit stations.

In San Francisco, however, a new 112-unit building catering to a diverse cross-section of residents with disabilities is opening at 240 Van Ness, smack in the middle of the city’s Civic Center neighborhood. City Hall is a block to the north. Davies Symphony Hall is across the street. Next door to the south is the Bowes Center, which houses Conservatory of Music dorms and performances spaces. It’s two blocks from the Van Ness Muni station and overlooks the bus rapid transit line.

Shoehorning the building into a tight T-shaped parcel on one of the city’s busiest streets “means a lot of tight pressure is put on every square inch of every square foot,” said Pauline Souza of WRNS Studio, which designed the building with Santos Prescott and Associates.

“The challenge was how to make a place that is home and feels welcoming and gives tribute to what the Civic Center has represented forever,” she said. “It’s a place of challenge, of protest, of expression. It is as urban as an urban site can get.”

The $88.3 million Kelsey Civic Center, which opens in March, is the second project completed by The Kelsey, an organization that builds affordable “disability-forward” housing and advocates for inclusive design standards. The group’s first project, the Kelsey Ayer Station, in San Jose, was completed last spring. The Kelsey is collaborating with Mercy Housing on the Civic Center project.

At the Kelsey Civic Center, 25% of the homes are reserved for people with disabilities who use supportive services. The units will be leased to households earning between 20% and 80% of area median income, with rents ranging from $500 to $2,450. More than 7,000 people entered the lottery for the building, including about 1,000 who were applying for the 28 units set aside for people with disabilities.

The units on Van Ness have kitchens and bathrooms with removable cabinets for wheelchair users and dimmable lighting for people with light sensitivity. Floors are coded by number and colors inspired by the Painted Ladies to help with wayfinding. An on-site “Inclusion Concierge” staff, a program pioneered by The Kelsey to connect residents to formal services and supports as well as build an active, supportive community. There is a soaring interior courtyard with an eight-story brightly-paneled wall and a rooftop garden.

The Kelsey was founded by Micaela Connery and her cousin and close friend, Kelsey Flynn O’Connor. O’Connor, who passed away in 2018, lived with multiple disabilities. It was through their friendship that Connery saw firsthand the obstacles people with disabilities face in finding adequate housing where they can be both independent and supported.

“For people with disabilities housing options have been limited to either segregated buildings — where it’s all disabled people — or sometimes mixed in with seniors,” Connery said.

In contrast, The Kelsey model houses families of all types — the San Jose project has about 40 children, ranging from babies to teenagers, among its residents.

“People love the fact that there are children there. That it feels like a true community with all different kinds of people,” Connery said.

Over the past two decades, California has been shuttering the large residential centers that once housed as many as 13,000 people with severe disabilities. The last of these — Lanterman in Pomona (Los Angeles County) and Sierra Vista in Yuba City (Sutter County) — were closed from 2016 to 2018. They have been mostly replaced by small community group homes.

About 26% of people in the United States have a disability — including mobility, cognition, hearing and vision — but less than 6% of housing is accessible to people with mobility or sensory disabilities, according to The Kelsey.

“One of our residents in San Jose said it was the first apartment she has ever lived in where she was able to wash her own hands,” said Connery.

Leasing agents from The Kelsey also provide addendums in plain language to make rental agreements easier to understand. The Grove Street side of the property includes a commercial space that will become the home of the San Francisco Disability Community Cultural Center.

Residents who live at The Kelsey building in San Jose say moving into the building has been transformational.

Jonta Willis had been living in a hotel room with her two sons — a 14-year-old and a 4-year-old who has been diagnosed with autism — as well as a cousin and her two kids.

“It got tough at times,” Willis said. “Two adults and four kids in one hotel room trying to make it work.”

She had run out of money by the time she learned she had been accepted to move into The Kelsey — the staff there let her family move in a few days early so she didn’t have to sleep on the streets, Willis said.

Her 4-year-old is nonverbal and has a lot of energy, which makes the programming and common areas, like the arts and crafts room, especially helpful.

“He is a wild boy. He likes to mess with everything,” Willis said. “He can go in there and play with the paint. They have a big board you can put a big piece of paper on. I let him paint all over it and then take it down.”

Having the concierge organizing family activities “makes it like you are never a stranger here.

“Everybody is a familiar face,” she said.

Another resident, Jake Fields, said he “likes the access to transportation and the activities The Kelsey organizes for us.” Fields, who has cerebral palsy and uses a wheelchair, can roll onto the light rail across the street from the building and go to the park to play his guitar or downtown.

His mother, Karen Brown, said finding a place where her 36-year-old son could live independently had been a decades-long ordeal.

“There were lots of blocks in the road,” she said. It always had to do with access. Not just access wheeling in somewhere. It was also access to community, access to transportation, access to the bathroom, access to getting into the building.”

She said, “It’s been amazing to see the friendships Jacob is nurturing.”

“He is happier, more connected to the community,” she said. “To watch it unfold has been a pleasure.”

The Kelsey is as much about advocacy as it is building housing, and Connery said she appreciates the symbolic importance of the Van Ness building being close to the federal building at 50 United Nations Plaza, where, in April of 1977, a group of people staged the “504 sit-in” to demand greater accessibility and accommodations for people with disabilities.

While there were sit-ins in other cities, the San Francisco protest lasted the longest and is widely credited as a catalyst for a movement that eventually led to the Americans with Disabilities Act.

“There is such a history in the Civic Center Plaza of disability rights,” Connery said. “At the same time that history has not been preserved. There is something cool and symbolic about coming out of City Hall and looking at this inclusive community and saying this is how all buildings should be.”

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