Residents in short-term family housing at the W.J. Rolark Building in Southeast D.C. say they are living without heat. WUSA9 was the first to report the news.

Rochelle Thomas moved into Rolark last week with her husband and five children. The unit did not have functioning heat from the start, she tells DCist. Other residents have told her that the building hasn’t had heat since November, when the city experienced a string of overnight temperatures below freezing.

“There are two comforters on the bed, but they’re thin,” Thomas tells DCist.

The W.J. Rolark Building is a temporary short-term housing site operated by the Hillcrest Center, a health advocacy and social services agency for underprivileged families within the Department of Human Services.

The shelter opened its doors to families in August 2019 as part of Mayor Muriel Bowser’s push to close the city’s former large dilapidated family homeless shelter, D.C. General, in favor of smaller, apartment-style shelters throughout the city.

“Our short-term family housing facilities represent community-based support networks that serve as a model for how we provide our neighbors with safe and dignified housing—a model we hope the federal government will emulate when housing families and children,” Mayor Bowser said at the July ribbon-cutting ceremony for The Sterling, a similar shelter to the Rolark.

Jewel Stroman, a D.C. homeless advocate in D.C., says residents of the Rolark have been calling her to tell her they’re living without heat.

“I’ve been receiving frantic calls from a few residents since January 14,” Stroman tells DCist. “I showed up at 11 p.m. that night and made calls outside until 5 in the morning.”

Families at the shelter were given small electric space heaters as a stopgap, but Thomas says it’s unsafe, and too small to heat the entire unit.

“When I plugged it in, it sparked,” she says.

Thomas and her husband live at the shelter with five children who sleep in the living room to keep warm. “What am I supposed to tell my 4- and 8-year-old when they wake up in the middle of the night freezing?” she says.

In a statement, the Department of General Services said they are addressing the matter.

“The Department of General Services (DGS) takes very seriously the safety of all residents of the Rolark Shelter, located at 4300 12th Street, SE,” DGS wrote in a statement to WUSA. “Our facilities maintenance teams are aware of reported heat concerns within the facility and are on-site working to remedy the heat concerns both for the short-term, as required, and for the long-term.”

But Thomas says she still doesn’t have heat. DGS reiterates that the heat is functioning, and the most recent temperature readings are within the District’s safe range of 72-75 degrees.

“Other families don’t have heat either, but they’re afraid to speak up,” Thomas says.

Meanwhile, the city has activated the hypothermia alert. Temperatures in D.C. will dip well below freezing in the evenings over the next week, with snow in the forecast for Saturday.