The former D.C. General hospital was used to house homeless families for more than a decade. Now that all the remaining families have been moved out, it will be demolished.

Martin Austermuhle / WAMU

Fulfilling a promise she made when she first ran for mayor four years ago, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser on Tuesday declared the D.C. General family homeless shelter closed.

“The last family has moved out of the facility,” she said. “It’s no longer being used as a family homeless shelter.”

The final closure of the long-troubled shelter, years in the making, was brief and without fanfare. A chain hung loosely across one set of doors and rooms inside the building had been emptied of possessions and cleaned. There was little evidence that the building — which served as a public hospital until it was shuttered in 2001, and as a shelter for a decade — had once housed 270 families at a time, amounting to more than a thousand men, women and children.

Though long a magnet for criticism from homeless advocates, the impetus to close it came after eight-year-old Relisha Rudd disappeared from the facility in 2014. She has not been found.

“We embarked four years ago on closing D.C. General,” said Bowser. “We all believed it was too big, too rundown, too isolated to serve families who need emergency shelter. We have worked over the course of the last four years to create short term family housing in all eight wards of the city.”

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Bowser is referring to her plan to replace D.C. General with six smaller family homeless shelters located across the city. Two have been completed so far — the first in Ward 4 — with a third expected to be ready next month. The remaining three shelters will be done between next summer and early 2020.

“It’s a big, big undertaking. It’s been complicated, it’s been fraught with a lot of political debate, some of it not so nice. We’ve endured lawsuits that we have won,” said Bowser, referencing a tense Council debate that led to changes to her plan and a pair of lawsuits to stop shelters from being built in wards 3 and 5. The Ward 3 lawsuit was dismissed last week.

“It has meant that we as a city have said we don’t want to lose another child. We want families who are experiencing emergencies to have a safe place to land so that they can take care of employment, take care of health and provide a better life for their families,” she said.

Since the city stopped putting families in D.C. General in May, more than 240 were moved out, a large number through rapid rehousing, a program that heavily subsidizes rent payments for a year — but sometimes more. D.C. officials say rapid rehousing allows families to stabilize after an emergency, but some homeless advocates say the city is overusing it and that families cannot afford market-rate rent after their subsidy expires.

Bowser said that over her time in office, her administration has managed to streamline the city’s homeless services system so that families are helped before needing shelter and then moved from shelters to more permanent options more quickly. The number of homeless families has decreased by almost 40 percent over the last two years, though homeless advocates say some families in crisis aren’t being properly counted and that some are being denied access to shelter due to stricter eligibility requirements.

“We will always have a need in a city like ours for emergency housing, for families and for single people, and so we still have a lot of work to do,” said Bowser.

City officials say D.C. General will be demolished in the months to come. Future plans for the large parcel of land are yet to be determined, though the site had been offered up to Amazon as part of D.C.’s bid for HQ2.

As city staffers congratulated each other on the accomplishment of closing D.C. General, Bowser looked at the building one last time.

“We’re moving on,” she said. “This is out past, and we’re focusing on our future.”

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