District officials said the team running The Aston completed the necessary upgrades to apply for a permanent building permit as the unhoused shelter prepares to increase its capacity from 50 to 100 tenants.

Interim co-chair to the Community Advisory Team Sakina Thompson said at a meeting Monday that the Department of General Services completed internal upgrades to The Aston — a bridge housing facility on New Hampshire Avenue that offers semi-private, apartment-style rooms to unhoused tenants — that had previously kept the facility from opening. The shelter has operated since November with a temporary Certificate of Occupancy, which the city initially didn’t grant due to a failed building inspection and issues receiving the certificate, causing the fifth delay to the shelter’s opening.

Thompson said at a November CAT meeting that The Aston received the conditional Certificate of Occupancy on Oct. 25. The certificate allows The Aston to operate for 90 days while contractors update fire exits and elevators and add “door closers,” Thompson said at the meeting.

“We do have a conditional Certificate of Occupancy in place, and all the work that has been needed to be done is completed and has passed inspections,” Thompson said.

Thompson said Monday that The Aston needs to reset a final electrical panel, which DGS-outsourced contractors should complete by the end of February. She said once they reset the electrical panel, District officials can apply for a permanent Certificate of Occupancy.

Officials needed to update fire exits and elevators and add “door closers” to adhere to District code, Thompson said. To obtain the permanent Certificate of Occupancy, DGS must address code issues and complete work, and the building inspectors must return to the shelter to reinspect and approve the changes. Thompson said the Department of Human Services must then apply for a Certificate of Occupancy.

DHS Deputy Administrator Anthony Newman said amid the upgrades, DHS is using the entry process to select clients to ramp up the bridge housing facility’s capacity to 100 people. The CAT voted to elevate The Aston’s maximum occupancy two weeks ago.

“We are about to ramp that process up for increasing the count and come up with a strategy to increase the client count, given the vote of the CAT,” Newman said.

Division Director of The Aston Jeremy Jones said as of Monday, 49 tenants are living in The Aston.

A member of the public again questioned residents’ exit from The Aston program, echoing public scrutiny at a January Advisory Neighborhood Commission meeting where Newman said 10 residents have exited The Aston in the first month, with one moving into Permanent Supportive Housing and the other nine “unexplained.”

Newman said Monday that two or three tenants left The Aston because of program requirements, while the rest abandoned their beds.

“That is not uncommon,” Newman said. “I’m probably less shocked knowing that’s what people sometimes do when they are trying, when you are encouraging people to come in from being unsheltered to shelter, you sometimes have to give people several opportunities to do so.”

Wesley Thomas, a member of the CAT who was formerly unhoused, said adjusting from living in an encampment to a shelter is difficult. He said people leaving in the middle of the night is not uncommon in shelter settings.

“A lot of the people who live in encampments don’t want to follow the rules and regulations. They want to have their free will to go back and forth,” Thomas said.

Newman said it is difficult to track departures from the program because there is no offboarding process, and officials sometimes find out where program participants went only after they appear on another case manager’s radar or in another part of the system.

Newman said DHS would not be making changes to The Aston program in the wake of these departures.

“Given the length of time The Aston has been open and the rationales we’ve been given for people’s leaving, we absolutely have not made any changes,” Newman said. “It would be very premature to do so. The fact that it sounds like a big number, it really isn’t from where we stand, so the data would be too insignificant to make a wholesale change.”