Under the revised plan, the Ward 1 site will remain at 10th and V Streets NW, but the city will purchase the land rather than lease it. (Photo by UStreetShuffle)

A plan outlined today by Council Chairman Phil Mendelson would drastically reshape the contours of Mayor Muriel Bowser’s troubled plan to replace D.C. General with seven new family homeless shelters. Under the revision, the facilities proposed in Wards 3, 5, and 6 would be relocated to city-owned land, and D.C. would buy rather than lease the sites in Wards 1 and 4, Mendelson said this afternoon.

Much of the D.C. Council was on board with Bowser’s original plan when she released it in February, but a steady drumbeat of criticism and further analysis eroded that support.

Just yesterday, the Washington Post published a story about the “unholy match” of a homeless shelter abutting the Blind Whino event space in Ward 6 (that is apparently in the process of being acquired by one of Bowser’s top donors). Mendelson’s new plan would relocate it to a larger city-owned site at Second and K Streets NW.

Among the earliest criticisms came from Ward 5, where neighbors protested Bowser’s proposed site—it sits across the street from a bus depot in an industrial area filled with clubs, marijuana dispensaries, and autobody shops—as totally unfit for children (their rallying slogan was “closer to a strip club than a supermarket”). Two alternative sites in Ward 5 are now under consideration.

And in Ward 3, angry neighbors organized a walkout of the plan to turn a currently vacant grassy plot of land at 2619 Wisconsin Avenue (now zoned for three houses) into a 38-unit facility. Councilmember Mary Cheh requested that DGS analyze three additional sites, including part of the land where the Second District Police Department sits. DGS said they would need to move the police station, which Cheh called an “empty and erroneous” response and said there is an additional 48,000 square feet available. Under the Council’s plan, that is exactly where the new shelter site would go.

Meanwhile, in Ward 1, many raised eyebrows (and voices) about the eye-popping cost of leasing land in one of the city’s most expensive neighborhoods, which the city would then have to renegotiate in just three decades. The new plan would authorize Bowser to purchase that property (the site of an abandoned historic church at 10th and V Streets NW), as well as the proposed site in Ward 4 (5505 5th Street NW). If the administration can’t come to an agreement with the landowners, Bowser will be authorized to use eminent domain.

The plans for the shelters in Ward 7 and 8, already on city-owned land, will remain the same.

The mayor has strenuously defended her original plan, saying the entire proposal needs to go forward—together and unchanged—in order to replace the decaying shelter at the former hospital. But according to the Post, “a small group of council members had been working on parts of the plan for weeks, with some shuttling proposals back and forth to Bowser’s office over the last seven days in negotiation.” The mayor’s office did not yet respond to request for comment about the new proposal.

The new budget would shift funding for a renovation at Coolidge Senior High School back a year to help pay for the cost increase. Mendelson and education chair David Grosso said it was unlikely it could have been spent on the projected next year regardless (because work on the design hasn’t begun), the Post reported. A vote on the new plan could come tomorrow.