SMOC Sober

Housing

Massachusetts

Introduction

The Developer

The Member

The Residents

The Numbers

Tour the Houses

The Developer

Mary Shanahan and Darlene Assencoa Mazurek visit SMOC's sober house at 90 Irving Street in Framingham.

As told by James Cuddy, executive director of the South Middlesex Opportunity Council (SMOC) in Framingham, Massachusetts.

When I came to SMOC in 1985, the region was gripped by a real estate bubble. At the same time, there were suddenly more homeless people. There was also more family homelessness, which was unprecedented. To address the growing level of homelessness in the area, we opened both an adult shelter and a family shelter.

We also started looking around to see what kind of housing we could buy to address our mission of providing more affordable housing. The most distressed properties in the area were old rooming houses, which we gradually began to purchase. We decided to buy these lodging houses because we saw many of our clients being exploited by them.

We began to look for ways to connect people to our housing, especially the adults in our shelters; we began to experiment to find the most effective strategies to keep people housed so they wouldn't fall back into homelessness or begin using drugs or alcohol again.

Our housing continuum is a system with several front doors. One of the front doors was our detox program, which has been discontinued because of a lack of funding. Since the early 1970s, we have been working with folks who have substance-abuse problems.

A second front door has been our shelter program. We found that a lot of people wind up in the shelter because they lose their sobriety. When people come to our shelters we try to determine if they're healthy or if there's something else going on with them. We try to figure out what their needs are.

Within 30 days of their arrival, we encourage them to meet with our housing staff. There's a close working relationship between our housing staff and our shelter staff.

Mary Shanahan (right) visits a SMOC sober house at 9 Lexington Street in Framingham.

In addition to substance-abuse problems, some folks who enter our system are suffering from severe mental illness. We've got people with co-occurring disorders — people who are both mentally ill and substance abusers.

Most of our services are geared to populations that suffer from these conditions, but we also try to make sure that we have a broad enough approach so that someone who doesn't make much money and just wants an inexpensive place to live can also live in our housing.

In response to what we were seeing, we began to construct these sober environments in the late 1980s. The majority of our housing is single-room-occupancy units (SROs). Residents are required to pay their rent and remain sober. We noticed that the best way to keep folks sober was for their peers to reinforce their sobriety. Going to meetings, being responsible for their own sobriety, and being with a group of people who would reinforce their sobriety seemed to be the key.

We ask people who enter our housing to sign a program agreement that requires them to go to weekly house meetings and attend Alcoholics Anonymous meetings each week. If somebody can't maintain his or her sobriety, the house will intervene and try to get that person help.

There isn't a lot of money for staffing tied to our sober houses. Our approach to shelters and housing is really based on our own experience, and it has evolved over time.

Financing
With the exception of buildings financed by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, all of our buildings are financed with conventional first mortgages. Our deals carry a certain level of first mortgage debt. If we still need more funding, we'll apply for a grant from the Federal Home Loan Bank of Boston's Affordable Housing Program (AHP), or go to the state to get a deferred-payment mortgage.

When we look at a property, we try to determine whether it will work for single adults. We have also converted a lot of level-three nursing homes into sober housing. These nursing homes have gone out of business and usually have 12 to 20 bedrooms. They're ideal for single-room-occupancy housing.

We won't look at a building unless we think there's a need for more housing. We visit the building to see if it's in a good location. Then we look at what can be done in terms of community acceptance. After that, we think through the financing issue.

We usually go to one of the banks we've been working with over the years. Most of these banks are members of the Federal Home Loan Bank of Boston, including Middlesex Savings Bank, Bank of Western Massachusetts, Country Bank, Ware Cooperative Bank, Natick Federal Savings Bank, and Framingham Co-operative Bank.

By now, we pretty much know what they're going to be comfortable with. We know we can't carry debt that exceeds what can be covered by an affordable weekly rent.

If there's a gap in our funding, we know we'll need a subsidy to make it work. If you look at the 10 AHP awards we've received, it should become clear that these awards have been an essential part of what we do. We could not have created this housing — from Framingham to Easthampton — without these AHP grants.

We need these grants because we very rarely can carry the amount of debt that affordable rents will cover. The AHP makes our development model work.

The Future
Our goal is to stay in the housing business but eventually withdraw from the shelter business. Shelter is a compassionate but inadequate response to homelessness. We want to continue to focus on creating a housing network and begin to convert some of our existing shelters into housing programs. That is the goal and dream of our organization.