This article is part of The Hatchet’s 2024 contribution to the D.C. Homeless Crisis Reporting Project in collaboration with other local newsrooms. The collective works will be published throughout the day at bit.ly/DCHCRP.
Wesley Thomas said he opted to sleep on the streets of Foggy Bottom and West End for 29 years because he didn’t want to enter the District’s congregate shelter system, where he’d be required to share a room with strangers.
Thomas, who moved off the streets in 2017 and now helps people experiencing homelessness access temporary and permanent housing, said he avoided shelters because he was uncomfortable staying and storing his belongings in a room that lacked privacy. The Aston — a former GW residence hall on New Hampshire Avenue — is slated to open this year as the District’s first of its kind, a noncongregate shelter, which Thomas said will offer residents seclusion and security that he couldn’t access in shelters when he was experiencing homelessness.
District officials purchased The Aston from GW in August 2023 for $27.5 million with the intent of converting the space into a shelter that offers private living spaces to medically vulnerable people, mixed-gender couples, families with adult children and people waiting to move into permanent housing. D.C. kept the former residence hall’s roughly 100 single “studio-style” rooms with en-suite bathrooms, kitchens and air conditioning, and replaced its flooring, upgraded security and IT infrastructure, added administrative spaces and repaired the underground garage.
Thomas — who serves on the Community Advisory Team, a group of local Foggy Bottom and West End and District officials overseeing The Aston’s conversion — said the shelter will house people like him, who are experiencing homelessness and don’t seek entry into congregate shelters for safety or privacy concerns.
“This shelter is precedent,” Thomas said. “It’s very important, and I’ve spoken to a lot of other homeless people I’ve helped, and some of them will be moving in. It’s ahead of its time.”
Officials initially slated The Aston’s opening for November 2023, but a slew of complications — including challenges securing a provider, two lawsuits attempting to halt the shelter’s opening, months of repairs and building code violations — delayed the shelter’s opening five times. Officials most recently projected its opening for Oct. 1 and selected the shelter’s inaugural 50-person cohort but postponed the debut indefinitely late last month after the building failed an inspection due to insufficient fire exits and “door closers.”
A D.C. Department of Human Services spokesperson said officials expect The Aston to begin serving clients during hypothermia season, which is in effect from Nov. 1 to March 31. Two people experiencing homelessness died from hypothermia or cold exposure in the District last year, according to the fiscal year 2025 winter plan by the D.C. Interagency Council on Homelessness.
When the shelter opens, 50 tenants will gain entry into the shelter for up to five months, according to a March DHS presentation. Once The Aston’s provider, Friendship Place, evaluates the first cohort’s needs, officials may expand the shelter’s capacity to offer up to 100 specialty beds for men and 30 for women.
Officials select Aston tenants through D.C.’s Coordinated Assessment and Housing Placement process and must agree to work with case managers who will help them transfer into more affordable permanent housing through friends or family, rapid rehousing, federal or veteran resources or Project Reconnect, according to a DHS handout distributed at a September CAT meeting.
Before officials grant residents entry to the shelter, they also must agree to program rules, including a ban on substances or alcohol inside the shelter and an agreement to minimize yelling, profanities and loud music.
Hilary Silver, a GW professor of sociology, international affairs, public policy and public administration, said many unhoused people avoid congregate shelters because the facilities separate people by sex, including mixed-gender couples. She said The Aston’s opening may motivate more couples to consider living in a shelter who would otherwise have to separate in a congregate shelter.
Existing shelters in D.C. do not accept mixed-gender couples or siblings hoping to stay together because the city separates men and women into two sides of the congregate facilities. The Aston, comparatively, would house up to two people per bedroom and allows opposite-sex couples to stay together.
“There has always been this hiatus, this gap in the shelter structure, and now, this is a good way to fill it,” Silver said. “If they’re willing to allow people, couples, to sleep in the same unit, then that’s a good thing because, otherwise, people will not come to shelters.”
Claudia Solari, a senior research associate at the Urban Institute, said noncongregate shelters are ideal for medically vulnerable people because the private rooms reduce the risk of illnesses spreading across tenants.
She added that noncongregate shelters make it easier for patients to see their medical providers and receive medications and vaccinations in privacy. Individualized rooms add safety, privacy and “dignity” to the shelter’s model, she said.
“The homelessness population is as diverse as the broader population, and if we’re going to make a difference there, we have to acknowledge the diversity and obviously all kinds of needs,” Solari said.
The Aston’s opening is part of a DHS plan released in May to add more than 500 shelter beds across the D.C. region by 2028 to address growing demand for beds. Shelters neared capacity this summer, even after the District opened 80 additional shelter beds, according to shelter monitoring reports.
There are a total of 5,616 people experiencing homelessness in D.C., according to a May census of unhoused individuals — an increase from 4,922 estimated unhoused people in 2023. The data marks the second year in a row that homelessness has increased in D.C.
A Washington Post analysis found that D.C. is “lagging” in creating enough housing units to keep up with population growth. Housing affordability is also a growing issue in D.C. and nationally, with half of American renters putting more than 30 percent of their income into housing costs.
D.C. also halted their temporary housing program last February, which used hotels to house people experiencing homelessness during the COVID-19 pandemic to avoid spreading the virus among the unhoused population and the medically vulnerable. Communities from California to Maine also utilized hotels to house people experiencing homelessness during the pandemic.
The program’s closure left the District with 10 low-barrier shelters, which provide beds on a first-come, first-served basis, across D.C., offering about 840 beds to men, 340 beds for women and 40 beds for LGBTQ+ individuals. Ward 2 currently has one women’s shelter.
“It shows that the dignity of people experiencing homelessness matters, and that all the things that people with stable housing want in our lives, in terms of privacy, a little bit more control over our space,” CAT member Courtney Cooperman said. “Those are things people experiencing homelessness deserve as well, and I think it’s really important to have that in D.C. and Ward 2 as a model.”
