The rules at Joseph Scolari’s sober living home were clear: No drugs or alcohol, of course. Random searches. Drug tests. No sex.
Scolari had known little about the sober living home industry just a few years before, but it looked like a lucrative solution to his financial woes. And his business – Sober Network Properties, launched in 2014 – would come to manage more than a dozen sober houses in residential neighborhoods, some with up to 14 beds each.
It was the first of those houses – the five-bedroom, 4,200-square-foot Mediterranean on Via Lampara in San Clemente’s luxurious Talega development, where he had once lived with his wife, Rebecca, and their two children – that got Scolari sued.
Last year, in a deposition related to that lawsuit, attorney Richard McNeil showed Scolari an image of a man and a woman in the backyard of that house, entwined in an amorous embrace, in flagrant violation of one of the house rules.
“In the first photo,” McNeil said, “can you tell what they’re doing?”
“They’re showing affection to each other,” Scolari said.
“OK. And are part of their genitals exposed in that photograph?” McNeil asked.
“Well, they’re in their own backyard,” Scolari said….
“Well, look at the female,” McNeil said.
“I see her leg.”
“And above that?”
“I see her stomach. Oh, her – yeah, I can see that.”
“Yeah,” McNeil said.
And so it had come to this: Scolari and his erstwhile neighbor, David Hurwitz – who once amicably discussed barking dogs – were locked in a legal battle so bitter that Hurwitz stationed a video camera in an upstairs window to track events in Scolari’s backyard.
But the list of complaints that neighbors lodged about Scolari’s 14 tenants ran far beyond one couple violating the “no sex” rule. Neighbors complained about noise and loutish behavior. They complained about litter and cigarette smoke.
And the lawsuit didn’t touch on the one emotion voiced in other neighborhoods dealing with other sober homes throughout Southern California — fear. Neighbors fear that recovering addicts might cause them harm, and that their existence in the neighborhood might drag down property values.
These days, in Southern California, such fears are rampant.
In the world of addiction recovery, the Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino county area is known in the Rehab Riviera, a dense cluster of more than 1,100 licensed drug and alcohol treatment centers from Malibu and Lake Arrowhead to San Clemente. Regulation is lax and operator fraud – against patients and against insurance providers – is so rampant that the Orange County District Attorney formed a special task force to fight back.
What’s less well-understood is that licensed treatment centers often own or work with a broader network of unlicensed ancillary businesses – sober living homes – which are largely beyond government’s reach.
People who have completed addiction treatment, or who go to licensed centers during the day, live in these homes without medical supervision as they transition into their new, theoretically sober lives. Clients provide income for sober living homeowners in the form of rent, and for treatment providers in the form of insurance reimbursements for urine or blood tests meant to check their sobriety.
The proliferation of sober living homes in recent years – often in upscale residential neighborhoods – has led to bitter conflict, lawsuits and charges of persecution.
The camera pointed at Scolari’s yard was meant to capture what Hurwitz considered life-disrupting chaos that came to his Talega neighborhood when Scolari turned it into a business that charged monthly rent to as many as 14 people in the early stages of recovery.
Scolari, in the deposition, suggested Hurwitz’s camera was evidence of something more sinister.
“Well, the way I look at this is that the neighbor is videotaping people’s private parts. It sounds pretty obscene to me. I mean, it’s in the privacy of their own backyard. … You know what I mean? Why would somebody videotape somebody’s private parts, one of their neighbors?”
Voices grew shrill. Scolari said it was weird, called Hurwitz irrational, and later said his wife feared that Hurwitz was some sort of predator.
“Mr. Hurwitz is a part of that whole organized group to discriminate against addicts,” Scolari said.
The lawsuit filed by Hurwitz and several other Talega neighbors may be exceptional for the precision employed in documenting neighborhood disruption, and for the window it provides on an industry largely shielded from outside eyes, but it’s not unusual in the fierceness and vitriol aroused on all sides.
Discrimination?
Scolari was hardly the first sober living operator to accuse neighbors of discrimination.
The Fair Housing Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act wrap recovering addicts – and the people who rent homes to them – in a protective legal cloak. Sober living home residents are families in the eyes of the law, and cannot be subject to any more requirements than a traditional family would face.
Thus, sober homes are not tracked or regulated by government, so it’s unclear exactly how many of them there are. But experts say there are several for each licensed treatment center – putting the total in the thousands in Southern California.
Attempts to register or regulate sober living homes have been met with outrage – and legal action – from operators who argue that such rules represent persecution of a vulnerable class. The ADA, while well-intentioned, protects the bad as well as the good, critics say.
“The federal government forces us to fight this battle with one hand tied behind our back,” said Dave Aronberg, state attorney for Florida’s Palm Beach County, which is in the one region of the country to rival Southern California when it comes to the numbers of sober living homes and drug rehab centers.
Experts have been trying to warn policymakers for years that sober living homes are an impending train wreck.
Richard Rawson, retired co-director of UCLA’s Integrated Substance Abuse Programs and longtime consultant for California regulators, said there’s a difference between “the theory of sober living and the reality of sober living.”
“In theory, having a place to live in early recovery – first several months for many people – is useful, particularly for stimulant and alcohol users who do not have effective medication support,” Rawson said.
“When stimulant users begin recovery, their brain is very reactive to cues and triggers in the environment, and the very powerful Pavlovian conditioning makes it very difficult for them to maintain abstinence … A place to live, where there is no drug use, can be very helpful.”
But that’s the theory. The reality offered in many sober living homes, in Rawson’s view, is different: “(It’s) a scam of taking people’s money and jamming them into overcrowded, unsupervised flophouses, where drug use (is) the rule, not the exception.
“This group now is an embarrassment to the substance use disorder field, and further stigmatizes SUD treatment and recovery services.”
Rawson said there are exceptions, and some sober living operators are sincerely interested in helping patients, but he noted that there is no formal vetting process to distinguish good from bad. The state has no authority to set standards or regulate sober living homes, and good ones can become bad ones overnight.
“Well-managed, smaller sober living places can play a useful role in helping people in recovery,” Rawson said. “But in the current unregulated environment, lots of bad stuff is happening.”
The Scolaris would agree. Joseph Scolari argues that his company was among the good guys, interested only in their guests’ healing.
But proposed legislation would not automatically give him the benefit of the doubt.
In May, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Huntington Beach, introduced a bill to change the Fair Housing Act and Americans with Disabilities Act to allow local governments to regulate – and potentially ban – sober living homes.
“This infusion of drug addicts and alcoholics into residential communities has had a deleterious impact on the quality of life of local families who now suffer increases in police activity, transient residences next door and a decline of property values,” said Rohrabacher, upon introducing House Resolution 5724.
Federal law has shielded unscrupulous sober living homes from meaningful oversight, he said, adding,”This is a travesty. My bill will empower the communities and the states to prohibit such facilities in residential areas if that is the will of the local people.”
But many say that goes too far.
“To the recovery community, this is no different than saying ‘group homes for people with Down’s syndrome are bringing property value down’ ” wrote Joe Schrank, editor of TheFix.com – a website that chronicles addiction recovery issues – blasting Rohrabacher’s bill.
“The implication is, drug addicts aren’t fit to live among decent people. It’s as arcane as Jim Crow … treating addiction as crime,” Schrank wrote.
Several other bills pending in Congress and in Sacramento also would bring more oversight to sober living, though in less dramatic fashion.
Beneath the rage, the fundamental question may boil down to this: Are sober living homes 21st-century families? Or are they commercial businesses twisting a well-intentioned law to their advantage?
And, is there a better way?
The Hurwitz-Scolari conflict offers some insight into those questions.
Next: Sober living, a big business opportunity