A day after President Donald Trump implied that he ended homelessness in D.C., city leaders broke ground on a new family shelter in Columbia Heights.

“I hear there’s somebody who lives on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue that’s taking credit for our progress,” Mayor Muriel Bowser told a gathered crowd. “Well let me tell you who’s responsible. Look around you.”

The new shelter will house 35 families, along with 15 units of permanent supportive housing for seniors. Construction work is expected to be completed by July of 2020, with families moving in starting in the fall of that year.

The project has been years in the making. Bowser first proposed replacing the dilapidated family shelter at D.C. General with a network of smaller facilities throughout most of the city’s wards in early 2016. Residents in dense, expensive Ward 1 expressed immediate concern with the original site, a lot at the corner of 10th and V streets. The D.C. Council reconfigured the plan and required the administration to buy the lot rather than lease it.

But the city was unable to reach a deal for the land and eventually decided to relocate the Ward 1 shelter to Columbia Heights. The site currently houses the Rita Bright Community Center (D.C. owns the property, but it is managed by the Latin American Youth Center and the Parents’ Association of the Boys & Girls Club of Greater Washington). As part of the work, the LAYC will also be renovated, while the new shelter will be located where a parking lot currently sits.

A small group of nearby residents came out to express their dissatisfaction with the project, carrying signs like “Bowser says build the wall!” and “DCRA doesn’t care, you could be next.” They interrupted the ceremony with shouts of “don’t block us in.”

The residents, who live in an adjacent building, say that the new shelter will wall in their courtyard and that the city is breaking its own zoning laws by building too close to a nearby property.

“We were really hoping that the city would work with us,” said Amity Kirby, a resident at 1420 Clifton Street. “We want them to follow the 15-foot zoning rule and give us space and not wall in our building.”

Councilmember Brianne Nadeau, who spoke to the frustrated residents after the ceremony, said that moving the new shelter any further back from the courtyard would have meant losing dozens of units for the homeless.

“There’s obviously a greater good here,” she told DCist. “It’s always difficult to do work on a site where the adjacent property is built to the property line.”

Other neighborhood residents didn’t have reservations.

“I’m proud to be a champion for this project and am grateful for the opportunity to represent our community,” said ANC Commissioner Jen Bristol, who will be working on a “good neighbor agreement” to outline relationships between the new neighbors. “I stand here before you proud to say ‘Yes in my Backyard.”

A number of the other shelter sites have also faced opposition, including lawsuits in Ward 3 and Ward 5.

Meanwhile, the first of the replacement shelters opened in September in Ward 4, followed over the course of the fall by the shelters in Ward 7 and Ward 8. The shelters in wards 5 and 6 are slated to open this autumn, while the Ward 3 shelter is slated to open in 2020. While Bowser fulfilled her pledge to shutter D.C. General in October, the city is still using motel rooms to fill in the gaps.