Mayor Muriel Bowser used a major platform—her annual State of the District address—to defend plans for the closure of D.C. General. Ward 5 residents, who don’t have a citywide megaphone to vent their frustration their plan, co-opted an even larger venue: Airbnb.
The listing doesn’t make the proposed site for a Ward 5 shelter sound too appealing. For $113 a night, you can get “Overpriced apartment stone’s throw from CSX train tracks, cement mixing facility, Metro bus barn and job opps at Stadium strip club. 45 min walk to Metro. Shared bath. No houses in sight. Start your new life on a dead-end street.”
Rhys Gerholdt, a Ward 5 resident who has come out against the plan, says that the listing “makes it more tangible to people to see what the living conditions would be.”
It’s the proposed facility’s lack of access to services and transportation that the residents take issue with, Gerholdt says, not the existence of a shelter in Ward 5. Councilmember Kenyan McDuffie has also raised concerns about the location. In early March, the Langdon Park Community Association and Woodridge South Community Association sent Bowser a letter proposing alternative sites.
However, Bowser said in last night’s address that she was not open to changing locations. “If we fail to act—or if we do not move forward with one of the sites—we will not be able to close D.C. General. Not now, not any time soon, and maybe never.”
Back in November, the D.C. Council voted to replace D.C. General with a number of smaller facilities. In early February, Bowser announced her plan to replace it with seven family shelters and one women’s shelter spread out across all eight wards.
Her plan drew criticism for lack of transparency and neighborhood input.
Gerholdt says that the mayor has unfairly lumped together people afraid of the shelters’ impact on property values with those who have valid concerns for the families who would live in these facilities.
“The mayor says we’re ‘living in fear,'” he says. “All that we fear is for the health and safety of the families. We want them to live among us.”
As for the Airbnb listing, Gerholdt says that there are no takers yet.
Rachel Kurzius