BY FREDA MIKLIN
GOVERNMENTAL REPORTER
Few Americans have not had some connection to a person who has struggled with addiction to some type of drug or alcohol. Most experts believe that at least one of the drivers of the swelling homeless population is the pervasiveness of substance abuse in our country. While drugs are appropriately the topic of many conversations about addiction, The National Institutes of Health recently reported that, “in 2019, 26 percent of people 18 and older reported that they engaged in binge drinking in the past month,” and 95,000 Americans die from alcohol-related deaths every year. Theories abound on the reasons for addiction, but the effects are irrefutable.
One element of the timeline between addiction and a return to responsible living is time spent in a sober living home. Facilities for sober living are usually houses ranging in size from very modest to upscale for those who can afford it. Regardless of how fancy they are, all sober living homes are intended to offer a structured, supportive environment designed to ease those in recovery from addiction gradually and safely back into their regular environment. To live in a sober house, one must have completed the process of detoxification from addictive substances, be willing to work and be able to live cooperatively, including doing chores in a home for multiple people in recovery mode.
According to a longitudinal evaluation of sober living houses published by the National Institutes of Health, people who used them were generally very successful in maintaining their sobriety, staying employed and avoiding arrests for the 18-month period included in the study after completing residential treatment at a sober living house. Estimates are that Colorado has as many as 369 individual sober living homes and there are just under 18,000 nationwide.
The subject of sober living homes got more complicated when it became clear that The Fair Housing Act of 1968 combined with the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 taken together meant that addiction is a disability and those suffering from it are entitled to the protections of the ADA with respect to fair housing. After you cut through all the red tape, that means that people who reside together in sober living homes, although unrelated, are treated as a family for purposes of local zoning codes.
Five years ago, residents of a toney neighborhood in Greenwood Village, where homes averaged around $1 million, began to notice that one of their neighbor families had quietly moved out and the home was occupied by a bunch of men who came and went, usually without interacting with neighbors. They soon found out that the rent at this home, now a sober living house, was just under $1,900/month per person and that its bedrooms had been converted to accommodate at least eight men.
In response to neighbors’ concerns about a group of unrelated men in a family home on their street, members of the GV city council turned to their city attorney for answers. They soon got the news that the home was exempt from the provisions of the GV Municipal Code that prohibit more than three unrelated people from living together in a single-family home because the tenants were considered a family under federal law as a result of their being in recovery from addiction, a disability.
Even though the operation looked to many like a business, it could not be prohibited on that basis because it was a sober living home. As GV City Attorney Tonya Haas Davidson said in a presentation to the Colorado Municipal League in 2017, “Studies have shown that returning immediately to the same atmosphere where the drug or alcohol abuse occurred is more likely to lead to a relapse than spending time in a sober living house first where steps to lasting recovery can be practiced for anywhere from 6 months minimum to 2 years or more.”
Before things settled down, the city council spent $10,000 to get a second opinion on the question that confirmed what their city attorney had told them. Finally, neighbors and the city gave up trying to get rid of the sober living house. It eventually failed on its own and the original residents of the neighborhood who owned it sold it in 2019 for just under $1.3 million
Not long afterward, a similar operation for women in recovery popped up, with proper notice to and permission from the city, at an even larger home in Greenwood Village about three miles away, owned by the same family. It was more secluded and went mostly unnoticed by neighbors. It was eventually converted into a men’s sober living facility that the owners sold in June 2021 for $1.4 million more than they paid for it a decade earlier.
In April 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic was getting into full swing, Greenwood Village granted a request for “a reasonable accommodation” for up to ten people to reside in seven bedrooms in a new sober living home for women. The home was owned by a limited liability corporation (LLC), the principal of which was a longtime GV resident who was also a principal of the LLC that planned to run the operation. As the home was getting ready to open, The Villager toured the home, which was newly furnished and in excellent condition. We interviewed its executive director, who confirmed that the aforementioned sober living home for men was still operating and both homes were intended to be “the type of place that Greenwood Village and Cherry Hills Village residents can go to for a higher-than-average quality of living” experience while they recover from addiction. She explained that the importance of the sober living step was to avoid the triggers of patients’ former environment that could lead to relapse as they adjust to life without substances. She also told us that the motivation for starting this operation, as with many, was to support a family member in recovery. By June 2021, the experiment was over at that location and the home was sold by the LLC for almost $400,000 more than it paid 14 months earlier. While it was there, those neighbors who knew about it said little and there is no indication it had any impact on them.
Sober living homes can be found in any residential neighborhood anywhere in Colorado and throughout the country. Many of those who live nearby don’t even know that they’re there.
fmiklin.villager@gmail.com