Have questions about zoning and sober homes in your community? Contact Ann Sobolewski or any member of Prince Lobel’s Real Estate group to learn how this decision may affect your rights and responsibilities. In the first sober home Cleggett opened, Brady’s Place on Main Street in Weymouth, there were three overdoses — one of them fatal — in the first seven months of 2016, according to police and fire department reports. On July 9, 2016, a 19-year-old man overdosed on fentanyl in the bathroom of the home. Overregulation could push good people out of the sober home business altogether, Winant said, and some cities and towns already try to block sober housing.
When a health insurer paid for housing, hospitalizations plummeted among high-risk drug users
Please let us know if you’d like to be added to our mailing list. For those who have watched Cleggett’s operation for years, the news that a client missing for more than a year turned up in the backyard of the very sober home he vanished from is at once horrifying and utterly unsurprising. His family posted appeals on social media, seeking leads, seeking help. They called old friends and foreign embassies, hoping he had started a new life somewhere. Richardson was already convinced that Bates needed a higher level of care.
Massachusetts High Court Clarifies Zoning Rules for Sober Homes: What Property Owners and Municipalities Need to Know
Court users who need sober housing or transportation support must have an open case or have court involvement that is current or within the past year at a Project NORTH boston sober homes court. Individuals are required to meet with a Navigator for an in-person intake to ensure that they meet the sober housing and transportation eligibility requirements. Short-term transportation resources are available to help eligible individuals get from court to treatment, recovery support, and overdose prevention services. In late 2018, a new Brady’s Place sober house opened on Seaver Street in Boston, and, according to city inspectional reports, began packing clients into illegal basement bedrooms. The woman spoke on condition her name not be used to protect her privacy. Her parents, Joe and Kim of Mansfield, corroborated her story.
- Problems swirling around Cleggett and his sober homes were not secret.
- Researchers then compared hospital usage rates six months before and after people were enrolled — and the results were striking.
- Three-quarters of participants were able to maintain sobriety while in the sober home program — far exceeding the typical rate for people in addiction recovery.
- Three former clients said they wound up in psychiatric hospitals as a result.
- For more than a decade, prosecutors have been fighting abuse of Medicaid, the government’s health insurance program for the poor, by sober homes and drug-testing labs making a fortune off urine tests.
In a decision with statewide impact, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court (SJC) recently clarified how zoning laws apply to sober homes. In Bak Realty, LLC v. City of Fitchburg, the Court ruled that a sober home may not be excluded from a residential neighborhood if the residents are functionally the equivalent of a family. This standard focuses not on blood or marriage ties, but on whether the individuals live together in a stable, cohesive household. This means sharing meals, responsibilities, routines, and exhibiting a commitment to communal living, much like a traditional family. In this regulatory void, Cleggett and countless others have set up shop. The initiative mirrors a broader trend of deploying housing as a treatment strategy for people experiencing chronic homelessness and addiction.
- He had been locked up, homeless, and addicted before finding a retreat based on the 12-step Alcoholics Anonymous program that turned his life around and inspired him to open his own facilities.
- Fifteen years of taking crystal methamphetamine battered Rosario Malcolm-Testaverde’s mind.
- But the money that can be made in an industry full of vulnerable people whose very survival depends on their ability to find a safe and substance-free place to live can poison the best of intentions.
- Staff at Lakeshore could be cavalier with residents’ safety in other ways, too, clients said.
Business
Cleggett did not respond to repeated requests for comment. A Globe reporter sent him a list of questions and dropped off the list at two of his sober homes. At a home in Quincy, assistant director Nick Espinosa said Cleggett had received the questions and was consulting a lawyer. Daniel Cleggett Jr. visited his expanding empire of sober homes in a shiny black Mercedes and spoke of salvation. God had lifted him from the pit of addiction, and now, he believed, it was his life’s purpose to lift others.
A local sober housing program funded by health insurer helps people recover from addiction
Frequent relapses, overdoses, and joblessness often make it impossible to get into apartments of their own — making it impossible to rebuild their lives. Without a place to live, many fall deeper into addiction and cycle in and out of emergency departments dozens of times a year, at an enormous cost to health systems and insurers. Project NORTH is a Recovery Support Navigation program with limited resources for short-term assistance with rent in a certified and participating sober house for eligible individuals. Sober housing funds through Project NORTH are managed in collaboration with the Massachusetts Alliance for Sober Housing and the Massachusetts Probation Service. After that article ran, the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office said it was investigating addiction treatment scams and taking a broader look at sober home operators.
Unwatched, a sober home business boomed. Then they found the bones
He lay less than 100 feet from where he stood that day, behind a yellow shed and a white fence, an incomplete collection of bones tangled in denim. Problems swirling around Cleggett and his sober homes were not secret. But even agencies that wanted to address them found their hands were tied. But the money that can be made in an industry full of vulnerable people whose very survival depends on their ability to find a safe and substance-free place to live can poison the best of intentions. Operators who run one good house decide to open a second, then a third, and their standards can slip with each expansion. We publish Client Alerts regularly on a variety of business topics of interest to our clients.
Project NORTH
Some Wakefield town officials worried about the property but had no legal authority over what went on inside. The fire department didn’t even know it was a sober house until April 2018, according to Fire Chief Michael Sullivan, when they were summoned to tend to a client who said she’d been doing cocaine for five days. Firefighters found more than 20 people living in a home without what they believed were adequate fire detection systems.
Leonardo Hernandez, one of the landscapers who found the body, said it was covered only by a light layer of leaves. He shared pictures he took with the Globe, showing bare bones and jeans in a pile, a jaw bone on top, small fallen branches scattered nearby. There was a closed beach umbrella across the back of the body, he said, and an empty old trash bag nearby. By the time the two landscapers found him, it had been more than 14 months since Clifford Bates was last seen, smoking a cigarette outside Lakeshore Retreat in the gentle rain.
They documented a 54 percent reduction in emergency department visits and a nearly 60 percent reduction in inpatient admissions to hospitals. Three-quarters alcoholism of participants were able to maintain sobriety while in the sober home program — far exceeding the typical rate for people in addiction recovery. Most, if not all, who participated are no longer homeless, organizers of the pilot program say.
Globe Magazine
Main components of Project NORTH include voluntary court-based Recovery Support Navigation, short-term transportation assistance to relevant services, and short-term assistance with rent in a certified and participating sober house. As police continue to investigate Bates’s death, Cleggett’s sober homes remain open. In Boston in mid-July, a city Inspectional Services car pulled up in front of Cleggett’s Seaver Street home, a dilapidated Victorian with weeds sprouting on the porch and broken Venetian blinds in the windows.
