Benefits Of Sober Living Housing Near Outpatient Facilities

Different communities find different approaches to addiction recovery more useful than others. What works in an upscale community might not be appropriate in areas where patients are already living below the poverty line, or even in the street. When communities gather together to plan addiction treatment options for their immediate surroundings, they should carefully measure the type of recovery housing most likely to assist the residents it will serve. More communities are finding that some form of sober living housing is the best way to lessen the chance of relapses, and to offer a source of long term recovery assistance while using the minimum amount of resources.

Sober housing as a concept can work in almost any demographic, but the particular implementation can be quite different depending on the location. In low-income urban communities, recovery housing should be located in close proximity to a nearby shelter or inpatient treatment facility. Releasing patients from intensive addiction recovery treatment directly onto the streets is unlikely to extend the period of sobriety as reliably as sober housing and prolonged recovery can.

Recovery housing is superior to treatment in halfway houses in several ways. Residents are encouraged to stay for as long as necessary in sober living houses after completing their inpatient or outpatient treatment. As long as they continue to follow the rules of the recovery house and contribute to its daily operation, there is no reason to set an arbitrary limit on their stay. Halfway houses are usually funded by government programs, and so receive more money initially, but have strict time limits on stays that don’t always coincide with resident needs. Studies have shown that participants that undergo intensive treatment followed by a stay in a sober living setting maintained much lower percentages of alcohol and drug for at least a period of a year compared to inpatient treatment followed by a halfway house,

Sober living housing arrangements like those found at nuvusoberliving.com are much less expensive than traditional halfway houses. Halfway houses are funded as part of a total treatment program, so the pressure is always present to release people sooner and turn the resources of the program to the more acute phase of treatment for other patients. Because residents in sober living environments contribute the vast majority of the cost of their living arrangement, they can stay much longer without a drain on funds. Another benefit of having residents stay longer in recovery housing is the beneficial effect they have on new residents as they arrive. This avoids the constant churn that comes with rushing patients out of halfway house beds to make new for more residents.

In very low income areas, the cost of rent for sober living houses can be paid from housing allowances from Social Security disability funds or General Assistance programs. While the amount of supervision received by residents in recovery houses is somewhat lower than it would be in outpatient programs followed by stays in a halfway house, it is vastly more structured than simply turning people out to the street where they’re likely to associate with residents with ready access to unwanted substances.