A new homeless shelter in Washington's West End will now open in the spring or summer instead of this year as city officials had originally hoped, representatives from the city’s Department of Human Services said Wednesday, pushing the timeline back at least six months on a project that has been divisive in the surrounding community.
The District in August closed on a $27.5 million purchase of the Aston, a former George Washington University dormitory, with the intent of converting it into the city’s first homeless shelter that would allow adult couples and mixed-gendered adult families to stay together, offering privacy as well as services for the medically vulnerable.
DHS officials said the delayed timeline largely reflects prolonged contract negotiations with a provider that would coordinate services for shelter residents. At the same time, the shelter has faced external challenges and been the subject of several meetings, strongly worded letters and a rally organized by advocates for the homeless in August who spoke out against nearby property owners who’ve said the shelter should be built somewhere else.
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In July, a group called the West End DC Community Association filed a lawsuit against the city seeking to delay the building’s sale on procedural grounds, though it was withdrawn after the sale went through. But the same group filed another lawsuit in late October to prevent the city from converting the Aston into a homeless shelter, alleging among other concerns that D.C.'s desire to offer on-site medical services at the facility is a violation of zoning restrictions.
The challenges facing the Aston in some ways mirror those that slowed the construction of shelters in other city locations, which were borne out of a plan from D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) to build short-term shelters in each ward to replace the decaying D.C. General shelter. At a meeting hosted by the neighborhood’s Advisory Neighborhood Commission (ANC) Wednesday night, DHS chief of staff David Ross said that since the building’s purchase, “there has been a lawsuit, a federal complaint. So that has added to our plan, having to respond to things that maybe we did not anticipate having to respond to. But nevertheless, we have experienced some delays.”
A DHS spokesperson told The Washington Post the federal complaint was filed Sept. 24 with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, but declined to comment on details within the complaint. A HUD spokesperson did not immediately return an email Thursday requesting comment.
DHS officials also said there have been some changes to the plan for the Aston, compared to what they had laid out to the ANC this summer.
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Instead of a peak capacity of 190 residents, Ross said, DHS now plans to onboard no more than 50 residents at a time until they reach 100, at which point officials will reevaluate whether the building could support more people.
Ross also sought to clarify the medical services that will be offered at the Aston, noting a provider will offer services for people with chronic conditions, like liver disease, who may require visits to a doctor; he said this was similar to offerings at the city’s other shelters, “except that it’s located on-site.” DHS has said medically vulnerable people cannot be as easily accommodated in the city’s other “low-barrier” shelters, which are mostly single-sex and contain congregate sleeping areas with multiple beds. The Aston “is absolutely not a medical facility,” Ross said.
“No needles, no drawn blood, no procedures, no anesthesia, so forgive us for being a little loose of the lip by saying medical because that’s what is conjured up,” said Anthony Newman, deputy administrator for DHS’s family services administration. “But health assessments, screenings … medical attention — not medical care.”
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DHS wants the Aston to attract people who are facing homelessness and may otherwise avoid the city’s low-barrier shelters, including mixed-gendered families and couples. Unlike those facilities, the Aston would have stricter admission criteria, like mandatory case management, which they anticipate will expedite the average stay (an estimated three to five months).
But concerns related to medical services at the Aston are at the core of the new lawsuit filed by the West End DC Community Association, which is now represented by Scott Morrison of the law firm Katten Muchin Rosenman LLP. In July, Morrison wrote a letter to Ward 2 D.C. Council member Brooke Pinto (D) and the ANC on behalf of residents in nearby condominiums raising questions about zoning as well as concerns about how the shelter might negatively impact public safety and the neighborhood’s local economy.
At the time, he told The Post the lawsuit was a “prelude to litigation” if the group’s concerns were not addressed. The October lawsuit, first reported by the GW Hatchet and Washington City Paper, raises complaints similar to those seen in the letter. It alleges the city “ignored and/or intentionally circumvented” D.C. zoning laws in its efforts to build a medical clinic in a residential zone, and generally failed to get proper zoning approval for the shelter based on the specifics on its design that were communicated over the summer. The suit also argues that an August 2022 determination letter from zoning officials was based on incomplete and outdated information from the District.
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Spokespeople for DHS and the D.C. Attorney General’s office declined to comment on the lawsuit. When asked about zoning in a June ANC meeting, then-DHS interim director Rachel Pierre said the Aston building was “zoned for what we needed, basically almost turnkey.”
Morrison in an interview Tuesday said that beyond the zoning complaints, the West End group behind the suit — which he said includes “hundreds” of residents in the area — feels as though the District government hasn’t been responsive to their concerns on how the shelter might negatively impact the neighborhood, nor their requests to discuss potential alternative locations for it.
“No one in our group is against homeless shelters. The problem is where this particular one is located, in one of the most economically viable areas of the entire city,” Morrison said. “The District made a terrible choice in location, we offered to work with them to find another location in that ward — putting it someplace else that doesn’t have pernicious economic effects of locating it at the Aston.”
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DHS officials in June highlighted the shelter’s location in Ward 2, which is one of the city’s most affluent wards, including multiple nearby grocery stores and nonprofits that support the homeless. And unlike the city’s seven other wards containing shelters from Bowser’s plan, Ward 2′s shelter only serves adult women experiencing homelessness; advocates for the homeless have said that only adds to the new project’s significance in the area.
The ANC has pushed back on one facet of the lawsuit that was also raised in the previous legal complaint: a suggestion that the city failed to properly engage the commission on its plans for the Aston. Jim Malec, chair of the ANC, noted in August and again in a tweet this week that the body has held at least 10 hours of meetings about the shelter since June.
But on Wednesday, members of the ANC urged District officials to move more quickly to establish a community advisory team that is supposed to help facilitate discussions about the project moving forward. When one commissioner apologized to Ross and Newman for ire that was occasionally directed at DHS from some community members in previous meetings, Newman said he understood, adding repeatedly that DHS wants to be “good neighbors” throughout the process.
“We know that people take pride in where they live, it’s important that their voices are respected and this is a very passionate issue,” Newman said. “We’re just pushing, we are supporting and advocating or city’s values, our mayor’s values, in a way that respects the voice of the community.”
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