Mayor Closes DC General Family Homeless Shelter

On Tuesday, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser announced the closure of D.C. General family homeless shelter following up on her promise made four years ago when she first ran for the mayor.

“The last family has moved out of the facility. It’s no longer being used as a family homeless shelter,” said Bowser.

After the building was emptied and cleaned, a chain was hung loose which announced its closure without much fanfare.

The building was a shelter for homeless for a decade. Earlier, it was a public hospital until it was shut down in 2001. About 270 families were housed in the building at one time and it sheltered more than a thousand people, including men, women and children.

Voices to close the shelter grew after an eight-year-old Relisha Rudd disappeared from the facility in 2014. She is still missing.

“We embarked four years ago on closing D.C. General. We all believed it was too big, too rundown, too isolated to serve families who need emergency shelter. We have worked over the course of the last four years to create short-term family housing in all eight wards of the city,” said Bowser.

The D.C. General shelter will be replaced with six smaller homeless shelters across the city, out of which two have been completed and the third will be completed next month. The other three shelters will be completed until 2020.

“It’s a big, big undertaking. It’s been complicated, it’s been fraught with a lot of political debate, some of it not so nice. We’ve endured lawsuits that we have won,” said Bowser, adding that the city doesn’t want to lose another child. “We want families who are experiencing emergencies to have a safe place to land so that they can take care of employment, take care of health and provide a better life for their families.”

Since last two years the number of homeless families has come down by about 40 percent. However, advocates for the homeless say strict eligibility requirements don’t allow some homeless families to get access to shelters.

“We will always have a need in a city like ours for emergency housing, for families and for single people, and so we still have a lot of work to do,” added Bowser.

In the coming months, the D.C. General will be demolished, according to City officials. The site had earlier been offered to Amazon as part of district’s bid for housing Amazon’s HQ2.