Ward 3 residents, District government end homeless shelter dispute with new settlement

Ward 3 residents and the District government struck a deal Wednesday to alter final details for the area’s family homeless shelter, one of six such facilities now open or under construction as replacements for the now-closed DC General shelter.

The new shelter’s playground and 1,000-square-foot outside deck were the subjects of negotiation between the government and neighborhood commissioners in the McLean Gardens area because of their potential for noise. Ward 3 DC Council member Mary Cheh helped broker an agreement to reduce the deck to 800 square feet; limit the use of both the deck and playground to between 7 a.m. and 9 p.m.; add trees and shrubbery as a noise buffer; and prohibit flood lights on the deck and playground and “amplified or unreasonably loud music from any device played outside the proposed shelter building,” according to a copy shared with The DC Line.

The deck was not included in the original plan the DC Board of Zoning Adjustment (BZA) approved in April 2017 for the shelter, which is now under construction on city-owned land at 3320 Idaho Ave. NW. Its addition sparked a new skirmish it what had already been a contentious process.

“Neighbors requested a time restriction on the patio to limit noise late at night,” Angela Bradbery, a member of Advisory Neighborhood Commission 3C, wrote in an email to The DC Line. “It would have held 62 people. That creates the potential for a lot of noise.”

Construction of the six-story, 50-unit shelter began in November on the same lot as the Metropolitan Police Department’s 2nd District Headquarters, which has gained a new parking deck as part of the project to offset lost surface parking. According to the mayor’s office, the building should be complete by early 2020.

Neighbors had previously criticized the height of the shelter as approved by the zoning board, which allowed the Department of General Services, DC’s construction and building management agency, to build above the three-story limit for that lot. While there is a six-story apartment building and a Giant supermarket less than a block from the shelter, its direct neighbors are the two-story police station and numerous single-family homes.

“Six stories was a real issue for us,” said local resident Patricia Wittie, treasurer of advocacy group Neighbors for Responsive Government, which filed one of two appeals challenging the revised plans. “It’s not consistent with the neighborhood.”

In 2016, Neighbors for Responsive Government filed a lawsuit against the city that claimed ANC 3C wasn’t given adequate opportunity to weigh in on the shelter’s construction plans. A DC Superior Court judge disagreed, however, and dismissed the lawsuit in February 2017.

Neighbors also challenged the zoning board’s decision, which the DC Court of Appeals upheld in October 2018. The city broke ground on the short-term housing facility soon after, although work on the parking structure — the project’s first phase — had begun the previous winter. The shelter, originally scheduled for a summer 2019 opening, should now be complete by early 2020, according to the mayor’s office.

“Had the city conformed to the height limit, I don’t think there would have been as much concern,” Bradbery said in an interview.

Mayor Muriel Bowser had initially selected a different site — a privately owned lot on Wisconsin Avenue NW across from the Russian Embassy — as the home for Ward 3’s homeless shelter. Amid concerns about the costs associated with building the new short-term family housing facilities on private land, the DC Council shifted building plans to the government property on Idaho Avenue.

Bradbery said ANC 3C has been supportive of these plans while objecting to the height of the proposed building, and that the goal of its negotiations was to ensure the facility meets the needs of residents of the shelter and its neighbors. The ANC at one point floated the idea of constructing a second shelter in Ward 3 to avoid building higher than three stories on Idaho Avenue, but the DC government dismissed that proposal as inconsistent with its broader strategy to replace DC General.

“The mayor’s vision was very clear — an all-eight-wards strategy,” said a spokesperson for the Office of the Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services. “One shelter per ward has more or less been the north star in this entire process.”

Bowser vowed to close and replace the dilapidated family homeless shelter at the former DC General Hospital, in Hill East, as part of her first campaign for mayor. She delivered on that promise in 2018, with plans to relocate more than 250 families who once lived there into new, smaller family homeless shelters spread throughout the city. DC General was officially shuttered this past November.

Ward 2 had a new women’s shelter already slated to open when Bowser outlined her homelessness strategy in February 2016; the new short-term family housing facilities in wards 4, 7 and 8 built as part of the council-approved plan opened last fall. The new shelters in wards 1, 3, 5 and 6 are scheduled to open in late 2019 and 2020, though homeless advocates describe the Ward 1 facility as a replacement for an apartment-style shelter on Spring Road NW.

Like the Ward 3 shelter, the Ward 5 facility has been a subject of contentious zoning and legal disputes, with some residents along the Rhode Island Avenue NE corridor saying the city is concentrating poverty in that neighborhood. Ward 3, on the other hand, is the most affluent in the city.

The new agreement regarding the Idaho Avenue shelter’s deck and playground was signed Wednesday by officials from the Department of General Services and Department of Human Services on behalf of the city and by Bradbery and Wittie on behalf of residents. The signatories drafted the agreement behind closed doors as a way to settle the neighbors’ BZA appeal that challenged the city’s administrative approval of the deck. The appeals filed by ANC 3C and Neighbors for Responsive Government — the subject of a zoning board hearing on Wednesday — claimed that the zoning administrator did not have the authority to agree to the change.

The zoning board has scheduled further consideration of the case for Jan. 30 — after ANC 3C’s next meeting. If ANC 3C votes on Jan. 23 to ratify the agreement, Bradbery told the BZA, neighbors will drop the appeal, signaling the end of the protracted negotiations over the Ward 3 shelter.

“We’ve accepted the fact that there is going to be a shelter there,” Wittie said, adding that residents aren’t interested in dragging out the process or causing further delays. “We don’t want to burden the city.”

This post has been updated to clarify the construction timeline and the nature of the DC Court of Appeals case, which challenged the Board of Zoning Adjustment decision, not the Superior Court ruling.