A proposal to transform the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development headquarters in Southwest D.C. into a central site for homeless services and housing won’t move forward.
The plan called for about 1,000 housing units, along with other spaces for homeless and community services.
But Rooted Communities, which said it had raised $500 million and brought together 20 of D.C.’s top nonprofits, said its proposal to acquire the site will not advance.
“While we are disappointed that our proposal to acquire the Weaver Building through the McKinney-Vento Act will not move forward, we are immensely proud of what we accomplished,” Rooted Communities co-founders Rebecca Ballard and John Means said in a statement.
The Robert C. Weaver Federal Building, which housed HUD for decades, had appeared on the General Services Administration’s list of properties the agency wanted to sell quickly. The GSA removed the listing in late July.
WTOP has contacted GSA and the Department of Health and Human Services, the agency that reviews such proposed plans, for comment.
The proposal faced resistance from D.C. government officials, who said concentrating homeless housing in one location isn’t consistent with city policies.
“We had D.C. General, and that was a concentration of homeless housing, and it didn’t work,” Nina Albert, D.C.’s deputy mayor for planning and economic development, told WTOP in an interview in late June. “People do better when they’re in a community that has diversity and diversity of income within it.”
However, Albert said she believes “very strongly in this developer” and suspects Rooted Communities would be open to a different type of project.
The proposal called for the property to be acquired through the McKinney-Vento Act, which gives specific groups that provide services the first opportunity to obtain vacant federal properties before they’re sold or repurposed.
Ballard and Means said in the statement that the proposal called for a walkable, transit-oriented mixed-use neighborhood “with housing people can afford and meaningful community investment,” adding that the mission has “only become more urgent.”
President Donald Trump has directed GSA to sell vacant or underused federal properties, with the goal of saving taxpayer money on maintenance and operating costs.
Albert said Southwest could become a dynamic neighborhood because “the location is unparalleled.”
“Right now, what the opportunity is, is to reimagine Southwest D.C. from being what is currently a very large federal enclave, to being a new, and it’s probably not one mixed-use neighborhood, it’s probably two or three distinct neighborhoods with different characters and feels,” Albert said.
The city, Albert said, is working with the federal government to ensure that as the properties are sold, “they are being absorbed, just as we are working with other private owners who are also facing similar issues.”
Editor’s note: The Washington Business Journal was first to report on the canceled plans.
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